Máel Brigte of Moray: the Scotsman who killed a Viking with his own severed head
It’s no secret by now that those born and raised north of Hadrian’s Wall are made of sterner stuff than most. There’s a reason that the Glasgow kiss is a headbutt, and looking into the history of the northernmost part of the United Kingdom, you’ll find that this is no accident.
After all, any society that can thrive in conditions that… I’ll be kind here and say adverse are always going to be tough cookies. At the time of writing, my soft southern brethren are freaking out, as it has rained every day of 2026. In Scotland, this is called winter, and it’s just how it goes. However, the weather is only part of the reason that the Scots are built different. One of the many other aspects, other than a passionate (and entirely justified) loathing of the English, is something in their very DNA.
By the 8th century, the native tribes in what we’d now call Scotland were the Picts, so when the Vikings finally showed up in that neck of the woods, the next three centuries were pretty much defined by pitched battles between the two tribes. Pitched battles that the Vikings would eventually win, colonising the very tip of the Scottish Highlands, but the Picts did not go down without a fight. A fight that, in true Scottish fashion, didn’t even end with the death of those involved.
Which leads us to the story of Máel Brigte of Moray, a Pictish nobleman who claimed the life of Earl Sigurd the Mighty of Orkney in the 9th century AD. Now, this would be one hell of a scalp to claim in any context. Sigurd well and truly earned his nickname, and considering the people giving him it were literal vikings, they would be a (quite literal) tough crowd in every way they could be. Yet, according to accounts of the time, Máel did this in one of the most absurd manners ever recorded.
He did so shortly after Sigurd beheaded him.
How do you kill a Viking after they’ve killed you?
Now, if this story sounds too good to be true, it probably is.
It’s worth bearing in mind that we’re going on texts written at the time that were probably not entirely reliable, even before you take into account that we’re translating them. Probably not even all that well. At this point, though, what else can you do but print the legend, and this legend is so brilliant that it would be churlish to lose it to time just because we don’t believe it. After all, truth is often stranger than fiction.
According to the Orkneyinga saga, the story goes that Sigurd was one of the Viking leaders of their conquest of the Highlands. He had his eyes set on Moray after conquering Orkney and the Shetland Islands. Máel was the mormaer (basically the Earl) of Moray and thus was challenged by Sigurd for control of his land. Sigurd set the terms. Two teams of 40, one fight for all the marbles. Máel agreed to these terms and showed up with 40 of his finest fighting men. Sigurd turned up with 80. Bollocks.
Máel and his men gave it beans, but Sigurd’s traitorous mob had them comfortably beaten. Máel himself was personally killed by Sigurd, then decapitated, so as one last humiliation, Sigurd could keep his head as a trophy. One that he then strapped to his horse’s saddle and rode home with. Now, what he hadn’t realised was that while his nickname was ‘The Mighty’, Máel’s was ‘The Bucktoothed’. Scottish people and banter, some things never change.
On the ride home, one of Máel’s buck teeth scratched Sigurd on the thigh, a wound that Sigurd ignored in all the celebrations and feasting, until it became infected and, eventually, septic. Sigurd died shortly after, showing that Scottish people are so handy in a fight that you can’t even count them out when they’re not only dead, but literally decapitated.
