Egil Skallagrimsson

Egil Skallagrimsson was born around 910 CE at Borg in western Iceland, the second son of the settler Skallagrim Kveldulfsson and his wife Bera Yngvarsdottir ^[1]. His family had left Norway a generation earlier after a violent breach with King Harald Fairhair, who had killed Egil's uncle Thorolf. Skallagrim claimed land around Borgarfjord and built the farm at Borg, which remained the family seat throughout Egil's life ^[2].

The saga that records his life, Egils saga Skallagrimssonar, describes the boy as dark, big boned and ugly, in sharp contrast to his handsome elder brother Thorolf. It also credits him with startling precocity. According to the saga he composed his first verse at the age of three and committed his first killing at six or seven, striking down an older boy named Grim with an axe after losing a ball game ^[1]. Whatever the literal truth of these episodes, they establish the twin themes of his story: poetic gift and uncontrollable violence.

Modern readers should treat the saga with care. It was written in Iceland around 1220 to 1240, roughly two and a half centuries after the events it relates, and many scholars attribute it to the historian Snorri Sturluson, himself a descendant of Egil's family ^[3]. The verses embedded in the saga may preserve genuinely old material, but the prose narrative blends family memory, oral tradition and thirteenth century authorship ^[4].

As a young man Egil left Iceland with his brother Thorolf and entered the wider Norse world of trading, raiding and royal service. The brothers fought as mercenaries in England for King Aethelstan, and the saga places them at a great battle at a site it calls Vin heath, an engagement many scholars have linked to the battle of Brunanburh in 937, where Aethelstan defeated a coalition of Scots, Britons and Norsemen ^[5]. Thorolf fell in the fighting, and Aethelstan is said to have compensated Egil with silver and two chests of English coin, gifts Egil answered with praise poetry ^[1].

Egil's relations with the Norwegian crown were far worse. He quarrelled bitterly with Eirik Bloodaxe, son of Harald Fairhair, and with Eirik's queen Gunnhild over an inheritance claimed by his wife Asgerd. The dispute escalated into open violence: Egil killed Eirik's son Rognvald and several of the king's men, and before leaving Norway he raised a nidstang, a scorn pole topped with a horse's head, cursing the king and queen and calling on the land spirits to drive them from Norway ^[2].

The feud shaped the rest of his public life. Outlawed in Norway, Egil raided in the Baltic, campaigned in Frisia and Denmark, and moved between Iceland, Norway and the British Isles as circumstances allowed ^[1]. The saga presents him in these years as a classic Viking Age figure: an explorer and fighter of berserk fury abroad, and a shrewd defender of family property at law and at home.

Egil Skallagrimsson's achievements rest above all on his poetry. He is widely regarded as one of the greatest skalds of the Viking Age, and three long poems attributed to him survive in whole or in part: Hofudlausn, Sonatorrek and Arinbjarnarkvida ^[6]. Skaldic verse of this kind used intricate metres and dense kennings, and Egil's work is prized for combining technical mastery with unusual personal feeling ^[4].

The most famous episode of the Egil Skallagrimsson biography is the making of Hofudlausn, the Head Ransom. Around 948, sailing to England, Egil was shipwrecked in the Humber and fell into the hands of his enemy Eirik Bloodaxe, then ruling in York after losing Norway ^[5]. Facing execution, and counselled by his friend Arinbjorn, Egil is said to have composed overnight a twenty stanza praise poem for the king, the earliest known Norse poem to use end rhyme. Eirik granted him his head in payment for the verse, and the poem's name commemorates the bargain ^[6].

Greater still, in the judgement of many critics, is Sonatorrek, the Hard Loss of Sons, composed after his son Bodvar drowned in Borgarfjord. The saga tells that Egil shut himself in his bed closet intending to starve, until his daughter Thorgerd tricked him into living long enough to make a memorial poem ^[1]. The result is a meditation on grief, the sea that took his son, and the god Odin who gave him the gift of poetry as compensation for his losses. Scholars have called it one of the most personal and moving works in Old Norse literature ^[4]. Arinbjarnarkvida, his poem of thanks to Arinbjorn, completes the trio and shows the other side of a violent man: loyalty and gratitude to a steadfast friend ^[6].

Egil married Asgerd Bjornsdottir, the widow of his brother Thorolf, after Thorolf's death in England. The match tied him more deeply into Norwegian property disputes, since much of the feud with Eirik and Gunnhild turned on Asgerd's inheritance ^[2]. The couple settled at Borg, the farm Egil inherited from his father, and raised several children, among them the sons Bodvar and Gunnar, who died young, and Thorstein, who survived him, along with the daughter Thorgerd, who married Olaf the Peacock of Laxardal ^[1].

The saga draws Egil's character in strong contradictions. He was greedy for silver and ruthless in a quarrel, yet capable of deep attachment, as his poems for his friend Arinbjorn and his dead sons show. He drank hard, and one notorious scene has him vomiting over a stingy host named Armod before cutting out the man's eye ^[1]. He was also a farmer and lawyer who pursued his claims at Norwegian assemblies and at the Althing in Iceland with as much energy as he showed on the battlefield.

Some modern researchers have looked past literary convention to Egil's physical description. The saga stresses his massive skull, coarse features and headaches, and it reports that when his bones were dug up generations later the skull was abnormally thick and could not be broken by an axe blow. On this basis physicians and saga scholars have suggested he may have suffered from Paget's disease of bone, a hypothesis published in Scandinavian studies scholarship, though it remains unprovable ^[7].

After his fighting years Egil settled into the life of an Icelandic chieftain farmer at Borg. He backed his son Thorstein in a lawsuit over land against a neighbour named Steinar, intervening at the assembly with the authority of an old and feared man ^[1]. When Thorstein took over the farm, Egil moved to Mosfell, the home of his stepdaughter Thordis and her husband Grim, in the district now known as Mosfellsbaer near modern Reykjavik ^[2].

Old age treated him harshly, and he answered it with poetry. Verses attributed to his last years complain of blindness, deafness, cold feet and the indignity of stumbling about the hearth while women mocked him. The saga also records a final flash of the old malice: the blind old man proposed to ride to the Althing and scatter his English silver over the crowd to set the assembled chieftains brawling. His household refused to take him ^[1].

Egil died at Mosfell around 990 CE, in his eighties, shortly before Iceland adopted Christianity ^[1]. The saga says he first hid his chests of silver with the help of slaves he then killed, and the whereabouts of the hoard became a local legend. He was buried in a mound with his weapons, and after the conversion his bones were moved to a church at Mosfell, where the famous examination of his oversized skull is said to have taken place ^[7].

Egil's afterlife belongs to literature. Egils saga, preserved most fully in the medieval manuscript Modruvallabok, is counted among the finest of the Islendingasogur, the sagas of Icelanders, and its likely author Snorri Sturluson gave it a psychological depth unusual even in that remarkable corpus ^[3]. Through the saga, Egil became the archetype of the warrior poet: brutal, greedy, loyal and grief stricken by turns, a figure far more complicated than the stock Viking of popular imagination ^[4].

His verse has had a long reach. Hofudlausn's end rhymed metre marks a technical turning point in Norse poetry, and Sonatorrek is still read and translated as an early masterpiece of personal elegy ^[6]. Poets and novelists have returned to him repeatedly; the Nobel laureate Halldor Laxness drew on the saga world Egil dominates, and translations of Egils saga by scholars such as Bernard Scudder and Christine Fell keep the story before English readers ^[8].

Archaeology has added a modern chapter. Excavations at Mosfell led by the archaeologist Jesse Byock uncovered a Viking Age church and burials at Hrisbru, the site tradition links with Egil's reburial, giving physical context to the saga's account even if the man's own bones have never been identified ^[7]. Among Egil Skallagrimsson facts, one stands out: alone among the great Viking Age skalds, he left both a body of deeply personal poetry and a full saga of his life, and that pairing of achievements keeps him central to the study of medieval Scandinavia more than a thousand years after his death ^[4].