From Eystein Glumra to Robert the Bruce, the Lords of the Isles, and a 20th-Century Grandmother
Prologue: The Roar on the Wind
The year is 775.
A big, barrel-chested jarl stands on a windswept hillside in the Norwegian Uplands. Pine forests stretch behind him; far below, the fjord glitters like hammered steel. He throws back his head and bellows an order that carries on the cold north wind — a voice so loud, so full of raw life, that men say the very trees shook. His name is Eystein Glumra — Eystein the Noisy — and that roar is the first sound in a saga that will roll across eleven centuries and two oceans before it finally reaches my ears.
I am Jerry England, and that roar is in my blood.
Thirty-six generations stand between Eystein and me. Thirty-six fathers and mothers, warriors and farmers, kings and Covenanters, sea-lords and pioneers who refused to stay quiet. Some sailed dragon-prowed longships through storm-lashed seas. One hammered an English army into the mud at Bannockburn with a battle-axe. Two half-brothers ruled a Hebridean empire from a crannog palace on Islay. Another preached defiance to royal dragoons on a rain-soaked Scottish moor. Still others crossed the gray Atlantic in crowded immigrant ships and later rode hard across the American West — one of them with a fifty-gold-piece bounty on his head.
And then there was my maternal grandmother, Lydia Corinna Brown.
She was born in 1891, lived through horse-and-buggy days and into the jet age, and rocked on her front porch in the American heartland telling quiet stories of “the old country.” She never knew she carried the blood of Orkney earls, a Scottish king who won a nation’s freedom, Lords of the Isles who answered to no crown but their own, and Highland chiefs whose galleys once ruled the Western Ocean. But I know. And every time I feel that stubborn refusal to quit, every time I laugh too loud or chase one more impossible dream, I hear Eystein Glumra’s roar on the wind.
This is not a dusty genealogy. This is a living saga.
It begins in the smoke of peat fires and the crash of North Atlantic waves. It rides with Robert the Bruce when he split an English knight’s helmet in single combat. It sails with Donald of Harlaw and his ten thousand clansmen at the bloodiest battle the Highlands ever saw. It whispers through secret conventicles where my Covenanter ancestor defied kings, and it thunders across the Atlantic with an immigrant Urquhart who carried nothing but faith and a name.
It ends — or rather, it continues — with me, a drifting cowboy from the American West, staring at the same wide horizon my ancestors once scanned from the prow of a longship.
In 2020, a simple DNA test cracked the door wider. Suddenly my Scottish roots, already deep, plunged even deeper. I learned I carried the blood of both paternal Macdonald lords and maternal Bruce-Stewart lines — two royal Highland streams meeting in one man. I read the old sagas, walked the battlefields in my mind, and felt the same restless fire that once sent longboats west. That same fire once made my great-grandfather an outlaw with a bounty on his head. It still makes me laugh too loud and dream too big.
Some men inherit money. Some inherit land. I inherited a roar.
This book is the story of that roar — how it crossed from Viking Norway to the Orkney Isles, from Scottish battlefields to Hebridean galleys, from Highland glens to New England farms, and finally to the American frontier where it found a new voice in the wind across the plains.
It is the story of thirty-six generations who refused to be silent.
And it is my promise to every one of them — and to my own children and grandchildren — that the saga is not over.
The longboat is still sailing.
Listen.
You can still hear it.
Chapter 1: Eystein the Noisy and the Birth of the Orkney Earls
The roar that still echoes in my blood began on a pine-covered hillside in the Norwegian Uplands sometime around the year 775.
His name was Eystein Glumra — Eystein the Noisy — and the nickname was no joke. Men said his voice could carry across a fjord like thunder rolling off the mountains. Whether he was shouting battle orders, laughing at a feast, or simply calling his hounds, the sound rolled out of him like a war-horn. In an age when a strong voice could rally a ship’s crew or intimidate a rival jarl, Eystein was born loud.
He ruled the districts of Oppland and Hedmark — rich farmland and deep forests far from the sea. He was a land-based lord in the days before Norway had a single king, a man of the old Norse ways, descended from Halfdan the Old and the ancient kings of the Uplands. His wife (the sagas call her Aseda or something close) gave him sons who would change the map of the North Atlantic forever.
Two of those sons matter most to our story.
The first was Sigurd, later called “the Mighty,” who would become the first Earl of Orkney. The second — my direct ancestor — was Rognvald Eysteinsson. The Heimskringla tells us Rognvald was a man of wisdom and courage, the kind of jarl other men trusted in council. He would become one of the most powerful supporters of the man who would soon unite all Norway under one crown: Harald Fairhair.
In the 860s and 870s, Harald Fairhair was fighting his way to the throne. The final battle came at Hafrsfjord around 872. Rognvald fought at Harald’s side. When the victory was won and Harald declared himself King of all Norway, he rewarded his loyal jarl with the rich districts of Møre and Romsdal on the western coast. But the sea kept calling.
Viking raiders — mostly Danes and restless Norwegians — had turned the islands north of Scotland into pirate bases. They raided the Norwegian coast, burned farms, and carried off cattle and thralls. Harald Fairhair had enough. He ordered the family to clean house.
Rognvald first sent his brother Sigurd to take the Orkney and Shetland islands. Sigurd succeeded, but the job was not finished. When Sigurd died, the islands fell back into chaos. Rognvald then turned to a son he had by a concubine — a tough, sharp-eyed young man named Einarr.
The sagas say Rognvald was not especially fond of the boy at first. Einarr had been born to a slave woman, and the legitimate sons looked down on him. But Einarr was made of different stuff. He gathered a crew of hard men, sailed west in a dragon-ship, and fell on the islands like a storm. He slaughtered the raiders, drove the rest out, and then did something brilliantly practical: the islands had almost no trees for firewood. Einarr ordered his men to cut peat from the bogs and burn it instead. The locals were impressed. From that day forward he was called Torf-Einarr — Turf-Einar.
Torf-Einarr became the true founder of the Orkney earldom. When one of King Harald’s own sons, Halfdan Long-Leg, murdered Rognvald back in Norway and fled to the islands, Einarr hunted him down on North Ronaldsay. In single combat he killed Halfdan and — in the old Viking fashion — carved a blood-eagle on his back. Harald Fairhair was furious at first, but eventually made peace and confirmed Einarr as Earl of Orkney. The line was now anchored in the islands.
Torf-Einarr ruled long and died in his bed — a rare fate for a Viking. He left three sons. The youngest and fiercest was Thorfinn, who earned the nickname “Skull-Splitter” (or Skullcleaver) in the brutal fighting of the tenth century. Thorfinn expanded the earldom, fought Scots and Irish, and married a woman named Grelad. Their son Hlodvir took the title around 945 and held it quietly, consolidating power while Christianity began to whisper across the North Sea.
Hlodvir’s son Sigurd Hlodvirsson took the title. Men would remember him as Sigurd the Stout. His story is told in the next chapter.
The longships were about to turn south.
Chapter 2: The Raven Banner Falls — Sigurd the Stout and Malcolm II
Sigurd Hlodvirsson ruled the Northern Isles from the 990s onward. The Orkney earldom had grown from a handful of pirate islands into a strategic power sitting astride the sea lanes between Norway, Scotland, and Ireland. Sigurd was ambitious enough to look beyond the gray waves. He understood that survival in the North Atlantic now required more than just longships and swords; it required alliances.
The most important alliance came through marriage. Sigurd took as his wife a daughter of Malcolm II, King of the Scots — my own 29th great-grandfather. The marriage was a political masterstroke. Malcolm II was busy forging a single Scottish kingdom out of warring Pictish and Gaelic tribes while fending off Norse raiders from the north. By giving his daughter to the Earl of Orkney, he gained a powerful buffer and a northern ally. For Sigurd, the union brought royal Scottish blood into the family for the first time — blood that would one day help his descendants claim thrones and titles far to the south.
That same royal Scottish blood still runs in my veins today.
But Sigurd’s story was not destined to end in quiet diplomacy. In 1014 a desperate call for help came from Ireland. High King Brian Boru was locked in a final, ferocious struggle against a coalition of Viking settlers and rebellious Irish lords. Sigurd answered. He gathered his best warriors, loaded the longships, and sailed south across the Irish Sea.
With him went a banner his mother had woven — a raven banner, black as midnight, its wings spread wide. The sagas say the banner carried a grim prophecy: it would guarantee victory to the army that carried it, but death to the man who bore it in battle. Sigurd knew the risk. He took the banner anyway.
On April 23, 1014 — Good Friday — the two armies clashed at Clontarf, just north of Dublin. It was one of the largest and bloodiest battles of the entire Viking Age. Sigurd and his Orkney men fought in the thick of it. The raven banner flew above the carnage all day. As the sun began to set, the prophecy proved true. Sigurd the Stout fell in the thick of the fighting. Brian Boru himself was killed late in the day, but his forces carried the field. The power of the Norse in Ireland was broken forever.
Back in Orkney the news of their father’s death reached Sigurd’s four young sons. The earldom was divided among them — the traditional Norse way, and almost always a recipe for trouble. The middle son was Brusi Sigurdsson — my 30th great-grandfather. While his brothers schemed and fought for larger shares of the islands, Brusi kept his head down and his honor intact. The sagas describe him as “the most agreeable” of the four — steady, wise, and less warlike than the rest. He married (her name has not survived the centuries) and fathered a son named Rögnvald — later known in Norman records as Ragnarvald II de Brusse.
That son would carry the bloodline out of the storm-lashed islands and into the new world rising in the south.
The raven banner had fallen at Clontarf. But the blood it protected was only beginning its long journey south.
By A Drifting Cowboy aka Jerry England
(with narrative collaboration from Grok xAI)
Next: PART II -- The Noisy Jarl’s Bloodline: A 36-Generation Saga from Viking Longships to American Frontiers
https://a-drifting-cowboy.blogspot.com/2026/04/part-ii-noisy-jarls-bloodline-36.html
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