An excavation of a Viking-age estate is ongoing in the Shetlands. The article is enjoyable on its own, but begins with a particularly memorable couple of paragraphs:
Jarlshof, Britain's best-known Viking farmstead, owes its romantic name to Sir Walter Scott, who visited the Sumburgh promontory on Shetland in 1814 and later set there the opening scene of his novel, The Pirate.
All that was visible then were the ruins of the 17th century laird's house, and it was this that Sir Walter named Jarlshof, or 'Earl's Mansion', suggesting that 'an ancient Earl of the Orkneys had selected this neck of land for establishing a mansion house'. He would have been gratified to know that excavations more than a century later proved that there had indeed been Viking Age settlement here, long before the laird's house was built.
This is doubly amazing when it is taken with a second set of facts: in Sir Walter Scott's _Ivanhoe_, he placed King Richard the Lionheart at a siege of a castle held by partisans of the usurper Prince John. Scott's Richard was fighting incognito. Decades after _Ivanhoe_ was published, new sources came to light that proved that in fact, though no one had suspected it, Richard had fought incognito at a siege of a partisan castle in England after his return. Here is another occasion in which that great author, Sir Walter Scott, got there ahead of us by force of true imagination.
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