Gripla - 2020, Page 200

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KLAUS JOHAN MYRVOLL
GíSLI SúRSSON AS EGðA AnDsPILLIR

An Obscure Kenning and its Implications
for tribal Identities in tenth-Century Iceland
Introduction
gísLa saga súrssonar (thirteenth century) is famous for the tragic
destiny of its main character, the Norwegian settler and outlaw Gísli
Súrsson, a destiny that to some extent is predicted by the many dream stan-
zas Gísli utters in the saga. In one of these stanzas, Gísli refers to himself
as Egða andspillir ‘confidant of the Egðir’, i.e. the people of the Norwegian
region of Agder.1 This kenning has puzzled skaldic scholars and editors
of Gísla saga, and no satisfactory explanation has so far been proposed. In
the present article, this kenning will be explained as a við(r)kenning, that
is, a description in terms of a person’s attributes, which is based on factual
knowledge about the person involved. I will evaluate the stanza as authen-
tic, which implies that Gísli actually was the friend of people in Iceland in
the tenth century who could be called Egðir. I will show who these Egðir
most likely were, and the reasons why they could be regarded as such in
Iceland in the tenth century – far away from their ancestors’ homeland
Agder in Norway. This involves close reading of Landnámabók, which
implies that these Egðir were related to people involved in the battle of
Hafrsfjord (ca. 900).
There is a total of twenty stanzas that relate Gísli’s dreams, arranged
in six sequences of three to four stanzas each, spread throughout his saga,
coming at shorter intervals towards the end of the saga. The main function
of the dreams is to presage the death of Gísli and to relate his expectations
1 Den norsk-islandske skjaldedigtning (= skj.), ed. by Finnur Jónsson, 2 vols, A: tekst efter
håndskrifterne, B: Rettet tekst (København – Kristiania: Gyldendalske Boghandel / Nordisk
Forlag, 1912–1915), vol. A 1, p. 104; B 1, p. 98; Vestfirðinga sǫgur, ed. by Björn K. Þórólfsson
and Guðni Jónsson, íslenzk fornrit VI (Reykjavík: Hið íslenzka fornritafélag, 1943), 71.
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