Reykjavík Grapevine - 10.03.2017, Side 59

SAGA RECAP
Saga of Egill
Skalla-Grímsson
Words Grayson Del Faro Illustration Inga Mæja

This saga starts out with some big,
hairy asshole named Kveld-Úlfur
(“evening-wolf”), who may or may
not be a werewolf. He is suspected
of such based on his frequent bouts
of rage in the evenings, but these
could just as easily be attributed
to alcoholism or garden-variety
domestic abuse. Werewolf seems
like too easy an excuse. “I’m sorry,
baby! I didn’t mean it! It was the
wolf, I swear!” Wolf or not-wolf,
he pisses off some super douchey
kings of Norway, resulting in the
death of one of his sons, so he and
his other son set sail for Iceland,
the land founded on the sole prin-
ciple of freedom from Norwegian
douchery. Unfortunately he dies
on the way so they throw his cof-
fin overboard and his son Skalla-
Grímur decides to start a farm
where his dad’s corpse washes up.

The good, the bad,
and the fugly
He has two sons, Þórólfur and
Egill. Þórólfur goes to Norway and
gets cozy with the Norwegian roy-
alty and Egill stays at home being
a genius and a dick. In addition
to the lycanthropy and/or general
propensity toward abuse, he has
inherited another key feature from
his father and grandfather: fuck-
ugliness. Þórólfur is the pretty
one. Egill is one motherfugging
fugly motherfugler. But he learns
to ride horses and compose lit-
erary masterpieces by the age of
three, so maybe he’s not totally
hopeless in the love game. Ladies
love horses and poems, right?
Having already killed a man at
seven, he challenges his father,
who manifests his
wolf-strength and
splatters Egill’s BFF
on the ground like
a blood balloon, so
Egill kills one of his
dad’s employees and
then they’re totally
in a fight. Like, of-
ficially. So Egill bul-
lies his way onto his
brother’s next trip
to Norway, which
he turns into a lit-
erally royal clus-
terfuck by reciting
some salty poems
to taunt them, then
stabbing the king’s
steward so violent-
ly that the nearest
man promptly vom-
its into the blood-
bath. The only good
thing to come from
this trip is that Egill
begins a bromance
with Arinbjörn, the only person
he ever seems to truly love except
maybe the wife Egill later steals
from his dead brother. Spoiler
alert, btw. It’s fine, his brother was
boring anyway. The pretty ones
always are.

Hindsight is 00/00
So he marries his sister-in-law
and gets chummy with the kings
of England. One day he is visiting
King Aðalsteinn of England and he
bumps into his arch-nemesis, King
Eiríkur “Bloodaxe” who wants to
start some shit. But his bro con-
vinces Bloodaxe to spare his life
in exchange for the dopest of po-
ems, which Egill busts out to save
his own ass. Soon after, both the
kings die and the rest of the saga
is drowned in mercilessly boring
shit like inheritance feuds, legal
struggles, and poems that even I
find uninteresting as both a poet
and a scholar. So take my word for
it. My word for it is “nope.” Hell
nope.
Egill grows older, meaner,
and eventually blind. He spends
his final days try-
ing to keep warm
by the fire, being
shooed away from
the fire, (possibly)
starting Iceland’s
still-going-strong
monopolistic bev-
erage corporation,
and composing po-
ems about his dead
sons and the mean
ladies who won’t let
him sit by the fire.
He also hides his
fortune in the hills
outside Reykjavík,
so feel free to go
fucking crazy dig-
ging shit up. I re-
ally wish there was
literally anything
else funny or vio-
lent that happens
in the bajillion fi-
nal pages of one of
Iceland’s oldest and
most magnificent literary trea-
sures but there pretty much isn’t.
I guess there’s a couple stabbings
and some Jesusy stuff but trust
me, it’s not even noteworthy. One
noteworthy note, however, some of
the beers from Borg (a subsidiary
brewery of his apocryphal corpo-
rate legacy, named after his farm)
actually taste like beer. That can
be harder to find in Iceland than
Egill’s treasure. So lycanthropy,
boredom, and literary heritage
aside, let’s all be thankful for beer.
SHARE:
gpv.is/sag03
Morals of the story:

1. I was kidding
about digging up
treasure. Don’t do
that. The landscape is
already increasingly
pockmarked by
tourists lighting their
literal shit on fire and
greedy Icelanders’
aluminum poison
fortresses.

2. There is no excuse
for abuse. Not even
werewolfishness. Kick
that douche to the
curb.
59The Reykjavík Grapevine
Issue 03 — 2017
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