Tímarit Þjóðræknisfélags Íslendinga - 01.01.1967, Page 55

the poetry of egill skalla-grímsson
37
degree he was also endowed with
sensibility or sensitivity. These
characteristics revealed themselves
in Egill’s shy attitude towards the
Woman who finally became his wife
and was apparently his only love.
His astounding capacity for despair
is described in a memorable fashion
in the part of his Saga which tells
°f the death of his sons. This
sensitivity is one of the marks of
a poet at any time. And Egill did
have the gift of poetry, and his
poetry was such that its like was
not found in Iceland for centuries
i° come and perhaps not in other
Germanic countries of Europe ei-
ther until the Renaissance.
The story of Egill Skalla-Gríms-
s°n is told in Egils saga, one of the
naost original of the Icelandic fam-
% sagas, perhaps the work of
Snorri Sturluson, Egill’s most gifted
descendant. In the main the saga
cerroborates the same picture of
Egill which is reflected in his
poetry. It has heroic proportions,
f°r Egill was a hero, though strange-
blended with picaresque traits
l°ng before the rise of the picares-
^Ue novel. It was due to these
Picaresque traits of the hero that
an 18th century expert on sagas
docided that Egils saga was not fit
for printing.
As a young boy Egill soon gave
Promise of being a roughneck. He
not fully seven when he slew
an older boy who had treated him
r°ughly at a ball-play. His father
^as not very impressed with this
jncident, but his mother said that
ue was of Viking stuff and that he
should be given a ship for an ex-
pedition1 when old enough. This
pleased Egill so that he composed
what is now his earliest preserved
verse:
This did say my mother:
that for me should be bought
a ship and shapely oars,
to share the life of Vikings —
to stand up in the stem and
steer the goodly galley,
hold her to the harbor
and hew down those who meet us.
This stanza has all the marks of
genuineness upon it, it is obviously
the work of a beginner, a thing
which cannot be said about two
other stanzas in the same meter that
Egill is supposed to have composed
even at an earlier age. This at once
raises the question: how many of
the 50-60 occasional stanzas in the
saga might be genuine. Scholars
have disagreed but the last editor
of the saga, Sigurður Nordal, be-
lieves that most of them could have
been composed by Egill himself, if
not always at the occasion claimed,
then later in life when he was tell-
ing the stories of his mighty deeds
to younger friends or to his descend-
ants.
Egill did not wait long for an
opportunity to go abroad and to get
acquainted with Viking adventures.
As an uncouth youth of seventeen
he forced his company upon1 his
splendid older brother, Þórólfr, and
his betrothed when they went to
Norway to get married. The saga
does not explicitly state this, but it
is likely that already then Egill had
fallen in love with his foster sister,
Ásgerðr, the lady whom Þórólfr
intended to marry. That would ex-
plain well Egill’s feigned sickness
at Þórólfr and Ásgerðr’s wedding