INNOVATORY FEATURES IN EGILL SKALLAGR Í MSSON’S POETRY

Egill Skallagrímsson is considered to be the greatest of Old Icelandic scalds. He lived in the 10 century, the story of his life is told in Egils saga Skallagrímssonar2, attributed by some to Snorri Sturluson, the famous Icelandic poet and historian of the 13 century. Egill is one of the most fascinating characters of Old Norse literature. The son of one of the most prominent settlers in Iceland, Egill was a chieftain in Borgarfjörðr, a district in the western part of Iceland. The saga portrays him as a dark, ugly, bald and troll-like figure, a brutal, avaricious, overbearing personality (ójafnaðarmaðr), nevertheless, endowed with great poetic talent. Poets are quite often depicted like that in Old Norse literature. According to M. Clunies Ross,


Vilniaus universiteto Skandinavistikos katedros docentë
Egill Skallagrímsson is considered to be the greatest of Old Icelandic scalds. He lived in the 10 th century 1 , the story of his life is told in Egils saga Skallagrímssonar 2 , attributed by some to Snorri Sturluson, the famous Icelandic poet and historian of the 13 th century 3 . Egill is one of the most fascinating characters of Old Norse literature. The son of one of the most prominent settlers in Iceland, Egill was a chieftain in Borgarfjörðr, a district in the western part of Iceland. The saga portrays him as a dark, ugly, bald and troll-like figure, a brutal, avaricious, overbearing personality (ójafnaðarmaðr), nevertheless, endowed with great poetic talent. Poets are quite often depicted like that in Old Norse literature. According to M. Clunies Ross, in early Scandinavian belief, the special gifts of the poet were associated with certain other psychic states -the ability to change one's shape, usually into that of an animal or bird, and to assume a berserk frenzy. These extraordinary psychic states were thought to give the individual access to knowledge and powers that were unattainable by ordinary men. Such powers included the art of poetry, the practice of that form of sorcery called seiðr and the use of runes for magical purposes. All these powers were closely associated with the god Óðinn and were referred to as his gifts to those he favoured. 4 Egill inherited his poetic talent from his ancestors. His father Skallagrímr was a scald and several of his lausavísur (individual stanzas) are quoted in the saga. Egill's grandmother's brother was Ölvir hnúfa, one of the scalds of king Haraldr Fairhaired. Egill composed his first stanza at the age of six, having killed his playmate with an axe. This first strophe is composed in irregular metre and tells about ships, sea voyages and viking raids. The saga contains sixty lausavísur, composed by Egill on various occasions. In them he describes battles, drunken brawls, laments the death of a friend or brother, expresses his greed for gold, gives vent to his bitter hatred, invoking the wrath of the gods 1 According to Sigurður Nordal's estimation, Egill was born ca 910 and died after 990. See Sigurður Nordal, "Formáli", Egils saga Skallagrímssonar, ÍF II, Reykjavík: Híð íslenzka fornritafélag, 1933, LII-LIII. 2 The Lithuanian translation of the saga: Egilio saga, transl. S. Steponavièienë, Vilnius: Vaga, 1975. 3 For a detailed discussion of the authorship of Egils saga see Nordal, 1933, LXX-XCV. 4 Margaret Clunies Ross, "The Art of Poetry and the Figure of the Poet in Egils saga", Sagas of the Icelanders: A Book of Essays, ed. J. Tucker, New York & London: Garland Publishing, 1989, 126-145. upon the king and queen of Norway, Eiríkr Bloodaxe and Gunnhildr. However, Egill's real talent is revealed in his three longer poems Höfuðlausn (Head-ransom), Arinbjarnarkviða (The Lay of Arinbjörn) and Sonatorrek (Sad Loss of Sons) 5 . The aim of this study is to discuss these three poems, reveal their innovatory features and the poet's originality, and show why Egill's poems still make a powerful appeal upon the modern reader while most of the traditional scaldic verse is considered "dead literature" 6 , nowadays attracting only scholars.
Scaldic poetry is a unique phenomenon in the history of European literature. It flourished in the Nordic countries, mostly Iceland and Norway, in the 9 th -11 th centuries, and survived in Iceland until the end of the 13 th century, producing in this late phase a few famous poets. The scalds served as chroniclers and court poets, their principal task was to praise the ruler and his deeds. Therefore, the main genre of scaldic poetry was panegyric (drápa, or a simpler form flokkr), others being derisive verse níð and individual stanzas lausavísur. Scaldic poems have a very complicated form, both versification and poetic diction. Three quarters of all surviving scaldic verse are composed in a strict syllabic metre dróttkvaett, each stanza of which has eight lines, each line has six syllables, three of them stressed, three not, with variations in distribution, the cadence in each line always being tro-chaic. The lines form pairs bound together by alliteration and two syllables in each line have obligatory internal rhyme. The first line of the pair has half-rhyme (skothending), where the final consonants of stressed syllables match, while the second line of the pair has full-rhyme (aðalhending), where both the vowel and the consonants are the same. Dróttkvaett stanzas are notorious for their extremely complicated syntax that makes them almost incomprehensible to the modern reader: sentences are split apart into syntactically unrecognizable units, and these are intertwined with parts of another sentence or sentences so partitioned. It was attempted to explain this most unusual intertwining of sentences. One of the theories holds that dróttkvaett verse was originally intended for two or more reciters, each of them supposed to perform his own part, possibly using different modulations of the voice or differences in pitch 7 . Here is a typical example of Egill's dróttkvaett -the initial strophe of the drápa in honour of the Anglo-Saxon king Athelstan: Nú hefr foldgnárr fellda, fellr jörð und nið Elluhjaldrsnerrandi, harra höfuðbaðmr, þrjá jöfra; Aðalsteinn of vann annat, allt er laegra kynfraegjum hér sverjum þesshyrjar hrannbrjótr, konnungsmanni.
[Now the stirrer of battle, towering over the land, the descendant of princes, has slain three chieftains; the country falls to the descendant of Ella. Aðalsteinn has done more; everything is below the king of glorious birth; I swear this now, breaker of the fire of the wave 8 .] 5 The authenticity of these verses will not be discussed here. Although most of the stanzas are probably composed by Egill and were preserved in oral tradition, some could have been put together ad hoc in the process of the composition of the saga. For example, Jón Helgason doubts the authenticity of Höfuðlausn, suggesting that it is a work of a 12 th century poet. See Jón Helgason, "Höfuðlausnarhjal", Einarsbók: Afmaeliskveðja til Einars Ól. Sveinssonar, Bjarni Guðnason, Halldór Halldórsson, Jónas Kristjánsson ritstjórar, Reykjavík, 1969, 156-176. 6 So called by Sigurður Nordal, Íslenzk menning, Reykjavík: Mál og menning, 1942, 233. 7 Such an explanation is supported by the etymology of the word dróttkvaett, which means "recited by the drótt (the king's comitatus)". See Ìèõàèë Ñòåáëèí-Êàìåíñêèé, "Ñêàëüäè÷åñêàÿ ïîýçèÿ", Ïîýçèÿ ñêàëüäîâ, Ëåíèíãðàä: Íàóêà, 1979, 96-97. Scaldic diction is extremely wealthy and complicated; the main stylistic devices are poetic synonyms heiti and periphrastic expressions, called kenningar. Both heiti and kenningar name the main concepts of the mythopoetic world of ancient Scandinavians, such as "prince, warrior", "battle", "ship", "sword", "poetry", etc. Kennings range from very simple ones (made of two components), as, e. g.
hjaldrsnerrandi "promoter of battle, warrior", nið Ellu "descendant of Ella (an Anglo-Saxon king)", to more complicated ones, consisting of several components, e. g. hyrjar hrannbrjótr "the breaker of the flame of the wave (gold), i. e. generous man" or sára dynbáru svangreddir "the feeder of the swan of the resounding wave of wounds". In the latter, "the wave of wounds" is a battle, "the swan of the wave of wounds" is a raven (regarded as the bird of battle), and, finally, "the feeder of the raven" is a warrior.
Compared to exuberant poetic form, the content of encomiastic verse is rather poor, usually a simple statement, such as "the king won a battle", "the prince is famous for his glorious deeds", "the ruler is a generous man", etc. The content of individual stanzas in the sagas could be even more trivial. The controversy between the overadorned poetic form and the simplicity of content could be explained by the fact that the scalds perceived themselves first of all as creators of form, but not so much of content, i. e. they would have never dared to speak about events that never happened in reality. Remarkable in this respect is Snorri Sturluson's observation in his Prologue to Heimskringla, that no scald would dare praise the ruler for exploits and merits which both he and others among the audience knew were pure lies: "That would be scorn and not praise" 9 .
As the form of scaldic verse was imposed by tradition, most of the poems were quite stereotypical; the rulers praised in them lacking individual features. Kings and heroes are referred to as "oaks of battle", "Njords of swords", "feeders of ravens", the battles they fought as "rattles of spears", "feasts of ravens", "games of valkyries", etc. The only thing we get to know about the person praised is his name usually mentioned in the refrain, and that he is a brave warrior and a generous man. Snorri Sturluson in Háttatal, the third part of the Prose Edda, has unintentionally demonstrated the level of depersonalization in scaldic poems. To illustrate variety of scaldic metres, he quotes one hundred and two stanzas by various scalds in which different rulers are praised. But Snorri also has another purpose -to compose encomium to King Hákon Hákonarson of Norway and his foster-father, earl Skúli Bárðarson, both of whom he visited while staying in Norway. Snorri compiles this huge panegyric in a very simple way, by replacing the original names in the stanzas with the names of Hákon and Skúli 10 . Now let us discuss Egill Skallagrímsson's poetry and see what innovations he has brought to the scaldic tradition. His lausavísur are predominantly composed in traditional dróttkvaett, although we can observe that he willingly and skilfully experiments with versification and poetic diction. In one of the stanzas he enriches dróttkvaett with occasional end-rhyme and creates a resounding effect by repeating the last syllable of the first line at the beginning of the next line: Ölvar mik þvíat Ölvi / öl gervir nú fölvan; / atgeira laet ek ýrar / ýring of grön skýra. "Ale is borne to me, for ale / Aulvir now maketh pale. / From ox-horn I let pour / 'Twixt my lips the shower" (10). Egill's diction is quite different from that of other scalds. Instead of using traditional kennings, he employs novel imagery, which Snorri called nýgervingar ("new creations"): "It is nýgervingar to call the sword a snake, using a correct kenning, and the scabbard its paths, and the straps and covering its skin" 11 . In case of a nýgerving, the original comparison between a referent and a base-word is expanded along congruent lines, the sword is paralleled by a snake, the sheath is then represented by its path and so forth, and "the image, then takes off, so to speak, the now animated sword may be represented as going to look for blood in men's breasts, just as a snake, by its very nature, sheds its skin and slithers off towards water" 12 .
Egill's first surviving panegyric Höfuðlausn "Head-ransom" was composed in very unusual circumstances 13 . Egill fell out with King Eiríkr Bloodaxe and before leaving Norway set up a pole of hatred (níðstöng) with runes carved on it, invoking the vengeance of the gods on Eiríkr and his wife Gunnhildr. Soon afterwards Eiríkr was driven out of the country and ruled in York. Egill's old friend Arinbjörn hersir was in exile with the king. Because of a storm raised by Gunnhildr's witchcraft, Egill's ship was driven to the coast of Yorkshire and wrecked there. Egill went to Arinbjörn who advised him to go straight to the king and appeal for mercy. Gunnhildr wanted Egill killed immediately, but Arinbjörn persuaded the king to postpone the execution until morning. He suggested that Egill should make a poem in praise of Eíríkr, and through the night Egill composed a panegyric. In the morning he recited the poem before the king and the queen and in thus ransomed his head.
The drápa of twenty stanzas was composed in a novel runhenda metre, and the tradition holds it that Egill was the first to introduce it into Norse poetry. Runhenda is a syllabic metre with regular end-rhyme that was not used in traditional Germanic poetry. It is assumed that the end-rhyme in Old Norse poetry appeared due to foreign influences, either came directly from Latin, or through English, German or Irish 14 . The lines of runhenda consist of four syllables of which two are stressed. The odd lines often have two alliterating syllables. The end-rhyme may be monosyllabic (ver / ber, mjöð / bjöð, fet / get, hlut / skut) or of two syllables (segja / þegja, brandar / randar, freki / breki).
Why did Egill choose to compose his laudatory poem in this most unusual of metres, not in dróttkvaett that he knew so well? It is conceivable that the poem was intended as a kind of challenge to Eiríkr. Although finding himself in a humiliating and life-threatening situation, Egill was bold enough to defy Eiríkr and show his superiority as a poet and a human being by demonstrating his superb talent. The stylistic canvas of the poem shows that it can be interpreted this way. The tone is cold and detached due to the abrupt rhythm created by prevailing short sentences and catalectic lines (i. e. lines ending in monosyllables), as e. g. Óx hjörva glöm / við hlífar þröm. / Guðr óx of gram. / Gramr sótti fram. / Þar heyrðisk þá, / þaut maekis á, / malmhríðar spá. / Sú var mest of lá. "Was lifted sword / 'gainst linden-board / around the lord / as rushed he for'rd. / Was heard the roar / of raging war / as flowed wound-gore / on far-off shore" (Hfl. 4) 15 .
The poem has a traditional structure of the drápa. In the beginning (upphaf), the poet addresses the king and his comitatus, asking for silence since he came "bearing Óðinn's lore / to England's shore". Then comes the main part of the poem, stefjabálkr, broken (drepinn) into parts by two refrains (stef), in which Eiríkr's name is mentioned: Orðstír of gat / Eiríkr of þat "Great honor him gat / Eiríkr by that" and Bauð ulfum hrae / Eiríkr of sae "When them corpses gave / Eiríkr by the wave". Throughout the poem the king's victorious battles and fame are glorified, but his image is depersonalized and the events unspecified (no localities mentioned). In fact, the content of the stanzas is the same: "Eiríkr won glorious battles overseas". This simple content is wrapped up in numerous ornamental kennings. Eiríkr's battles are described as follows: óx hjörva glöm "the rattle of swords was growing", þaut maekis á "the river of swords flowed", þar heyrist þá / málmhríðar spá "the prophecy of the metal-storm was heard", beit bengrefill, / það vas blóðrefill "the hiller of wounds (sword) was biting, it wove the cloth of blood", jöfur sveigði ý, / flugu unda bý "his yewbow he bent, / the bees of wounds (spears) he sent", etc. This juggling with kennings helps Egill disguise his real attitude towards Eiríkr and enables him to keep a distance between himself and the king he is forced to praise. The lack of concretness, emptiness of the content shows a wellconsidered secret irony directed at Eiríkr.
In the last part of the poem, called sloemr, Egill, as it was customary to the scalds, praises the king's generosity and asks for a reward. Egill doesn't spare nice words to the king, calling him hringbrjótr "the breaker of rings", baugskati "a generous man", one who glaðar flotna fjöl / við Fróða mjöl "with Fródi's flour (gold) / his friends doth shower". But his words do not sound sincere, and the last stanza reveals Egill's real intention: Bark þengils lof / á þagnar rof. / Kann mála mjöt / of manna sjöt. / Ór hlátra ham / hróðr bark fyr gram. / Svá fór þat fram, at flestr of nam. "My praise I outpoured / to the prince, my lord, / from laughter's chest-hoard, / nor was I ignored. / Had I words at my call, / and craft, to enthral: / was I heard by all / the heroes in hall" (Hfl. 20). The kenning ór hlátra ham "from laughter's home" does not seem accidental here. Although risking his head, Egill shows his courage and human superiority hinting to the audience that the encomium was a big joke.
Another laudatory poem Arinbjarnarkviða is dedicated to Egill's life-long friend hersir Arinbjörn Þórrisson who stood by the poet in difficult situations and saved his life during the incident in York. The poem was composed on the occasion that Arinbjörn got a high position at King Haraldr Eiriksson's court. This poem is much more personal than the previous one, and Egill has chosen the simplest of scaldic metres, kviðuháttr, which allows him to express himself freely, to voice his thoughts and emotions. Kviðuháttr is based on Eddic metres, however, it is syllabic, with three syllables in the odd lines, and four in the even lines. The lines are bound by alliteration, but have no internal rhyme.
It is noteworthy, that in this poem Egill speaks much about himself, describing, as it was mentioned above, his straightforward manner and appearance which he presents with a great deal of self-irony. He says that his poetry helped him to ransom "his ugly lump of the hat (head), wolfgrey all" (þás ulfgrátt / við Yggjar miði / hattar staup / at hilmi þák; Arkv. 7). Further on, he jokes that his head is more precious to him than gold: Við því tók, / en tvau fylgðu / sökk sámleit / síðra brúna. "With it came, / of kindred hue, / both my eyes / 'neath brows shaggy" (Arkv. 8).
The diction of Arinbjarnarkviða is extremely rich and expressive. The poet often discards traditional kennings and gives way to imagination, creating quite a few original images. One of the most fascinating nýgervingar in the poem is the image of King Eiríkr Bloodaxe sitting on the throne in his palace in York: Vasa þat tunglskin / tryggt at líta / né ógnlaust / Eiríks bráa, / þás ormfránn / ennimáni / skein allvalds / oegigeislum. "That moonlight was not / safe to gaze at / nor without dread / from Eirik's brows, / when 16 A kenning for "gold". 17 Óðinn's ring Draupnir every ninth night lets fall eight other rings of equal weight.
18 Son is one of the three kettles in which the mead of poetry was kept. It was stolen by Óðinn and his accomplice, the giant Baugi. But baugi also signifies "ring". Hence, by an interchange of words, "he who routs the robber-of-Son" is equivalent to "the router (squanderer) of rings, i. e. the generous lord". Thus interpreted the whole stanza consists of a fourfold variation of the same theme -the praise of Arinbjörn's liberality. See Hollander, 1975, 84. 19 The "forest's fish" is the snake, the form which Óðinn took when he bored through the rock to claim the mead of poetry; his mate is the giant's daughter Gunnlöð, with whom he slept to gain the mead. 20 Peter Hallberg, Old Icelandic Poetry: Eddic Lay and Scaldic Verse, transl. P. Schach and S. Lindgrenson, Lincoln & London: University of Nebraska Press, 1975, 133-34. 21 Cf. ibid., 135.
serpent-glittering / a forehead-moon / shone with a ruler's / terror-beams" (Arkv. 5). Here we have a metaphor spreading throughout the entire stanza. The raging king's ennimáni "forehead-moon (eye)" radiates oegigeislar "terror-rays", the epithet ormfránn "serpent-gleaming" intensifies his awe-inspiring gaze. Another interesting nýgerving is the kenning of Arinbjörn, by which he is called bjóða björn birkis ótta "edge-bear of the birches'fear", where "birches'-fear" (birkis ótta) means "fire", "the edge of the fire" (bjóða) is the hearth (arin), "the bear (björn) of the hearth" is Arinbjörn. The poem Sonatorrek (Sad Loss of Sons) 22 is, no doubt, the most powerful of Egill's verses. The saga tells us that Egill tragically lost two of his sons. Gunnarr died of fever, while Böðvarr, his eldest and the favourite one, drowned in the sea. Egill found the body of his son, carried it to the family burial-mound, and laid him beside his grandfather, Skallagrímr. He returned home very gloomy and reticent, locked himself in his bed-closet, and decided to starve himself to death. Soon afterwards his daughter Þorgerðr came to the house, declared that she had no wish to live after her brother and joined Egill in the bed-closet. Egill noticed that she was chewing something; she said that it was dried seaweed, and that it would hasten her death. Egill chewed some too and became very thirsty. He asked for some water to drink and was give a horn. He gulped greedily from the horn, and understood that he had been tricked, because the horn contained milk, not water. Egill was very angry, but Þorgerðr persuaded him before dying to compose a lay in memory of his sons and she would carve it on a rune-stick. Egill started composing and regained his spirits as the poem went on 23 .
As the previous poem, Sonatorrek is composed in kviðuháttr, the simplest of scaldic forms, which is used somewhat freely, and this gives the poet freedom of expression. Here we can discern some important innovatory features of genre which Egill introduced into scaldic poetry. Traditionally, this poem is regarded as erfidrápa "a commemorative lay". We have several examples of this genre among the surviving scaldic poems, such as Ynglingatal or Háleygjatal 24 , in which dead ancestors of some rulers are enumerated and their deeds mentioned. However, Sonatorrek is unique, because there is no other poem in the scaldic tradition that is so personal and lyrical, permeated with human sorrow and wisdom stemming from personal experience. The poem has many features of elegy, the genre totally strange to the native Old Norse tradition. It is held that Egill familiarized himself with new poetic forms and genres in England, while serving at the court of King Athelstan. But there is an essential difference between Sonatorrek and Old English elegies. In the latter, human suffering and wisdom is described by gnomic maxims, condensed general truths, while in Egill's poem personal and lyrical elements prevail.
Contrary to Arinbjarnarkviða, where Egill prides himself on his skill as a poet, boasting that he is quick to compose praise, Sonatorrek starts on a very gloomy note. Egill complains that it is very difficult for him to start moving the tongue (Mjök erum tregt / tungu at hroera), that his tongue is like a "steel-yard of the song-weighter" (loftvaei ljóðpundara), that he does not hope because of deep sorrow to extract so easily Óðinn's theft (poetry) from the hiding-place of thought (era nú vaenlegt / um Viðris þýfi, / né hógdroegt / logical insight into the spiritual world of the most outstanding of Icelandic scalds. The diction is very simple and sincere, revealing the poet's unfeigned suffering and reflection on human destiny. Stylistic devices are used sparingly, the kennings denoting mostly Óðinn and his gift, the mead of poetry. The choice of kennings is well motivated. Throughout the poem Óðinn is referred to as her-Gautr "war-Gautr", Gauta spjalli "friend of Gauts", geira dróttinn "lord of spears", sigrhöfundr "giver of victory", bróðir Vílis "Vilji's brother", goðjaðar "guardian of gods", but in the final stanzas, when Egill's resignation and premonition of death grow stronger, some eschatological kennings appear. Óðinn is called Míms vinr "the friend of Mímr" and ulfs bági "the enemy of the wolf", an implication that Óðinn himself will be doomed at ragnarök, the events of the end of the world. All the time Egill remains conscious of his poetic talent, referring to poetry as Viðurs þýfi "the theft of Óðinn", fagnafundr Friggjar niðja "the joyful find of the kinsmen of Frigg", bölva boetr "recompense for harms", íþrótt vammi firða "the skill devoid of faults". But the most impressive is the image of poetry as a reviving power, bringing catharsis, forcing the dying family tree (kynvið) to burst into leaf again through the power of words 27 : Þat berk út / ór orðhófi / maerðar timbr / máli laufgat. "I bear these / timbers of praise, / adorned with the foliage of speech, / from the temple of words" (Snt. 5).
To conclude, Egill Skallagrímsson, the first and the greatest of Icelandic scalds, should be regarded as innovator of scaldic poetry. In his lausavísur, Egill more or less adheres to the tradition, although we can see him experimenting with metres and introducing new stylistic features into scaldic diction. Egill's unique poetic talent is revealed in his longer poems. In Höfuðlausn, he was the first to use a novel metre with end-rhyme, and is thought to be its inventor. His poems Arinbjarnarkviða and Sonatorrek are very personal, opening to us the scald's inner world and the depth of his feelings and reflections. While the scaldic tradition concentrates mainly on poetic form, most of the poems being lavish descriptions of battles and praise of rulers, Egill turns to personal and individual, introducing lyrical and elegiac motifs into his verse, discarding strict formal rules and traditional imagery of scaldic poetry, creating his own original poetic style. Together with the saga, Egill's poetry has preserved to us a complex and vivid portrait of the most talented poet of the Viking Age. The saga portrays Egill as a cruel and overbearing viking, while his poems show him as a vulnerable and emotional person, praising true friendship, grieving over the loss of his kinsmen, pondering on inevitability of ageing and death.