Egil’s Saga (46 page)
Authors: E. R. Eddison
3
T
HERE FELL
K
ING
O
LAF
. But see general note on ‘Winaheath’, p. 280.
CHAPTER LV
1
E
GIL CLASPED
A
GOLD RING
, etc. It may be doubted if either the noble stave that follows or the queer dumb antics in King Athelstane’s hall afford such convincing evidence of his grief as does this simple renunciation of solid treasure.
2
S
TAVE
. ‘Went forth’ (gekk snarla), lit. ‘walked swiftly, keenly’, sc. ‘forward in the battle’. ‘Earth greens’ (jǫrþ grœr), ‘the sod grows again over his howe’. ‘Brother’, the word used is a poetic one,
barmi
, connected with
barmr
(breast); a brother nourished at the same breast. The original stave is very fine.
3
S
TAVE
. Last couplet:
Helt, né hrafnar sulto,
Hringr á vápna þinge.
The ‘weapon-thing’ is, of course,
battle
.
4
P
ERSONAL DESCRIPTION
. F.J., in his introduction, well notes the masterly way in which the moment is selected for this vivid portrait: the moment when the sitter is torn with conflicting passions arising from victory and bereavement. If the picture is grotesque, it is also living and unforgettable.
5
E
YEBROWS JOINED IN THE MIDDLE
(skolbrunn). D. says the exact sense of
skolbrunn
is uncertain. F.J. says it usually means ‘with brown eyebrows’, but prefers the interpretation I have adopted.
6
S
TAVE
. ‘Byrny’s god’ (brynjoHǫþr)—
warrior
, i.e. King Athelstane. ‘Gleaming thong of paw-tongs’ (hrynvirgel hrammtangar)—
arm-ring.
‘Hawk-trod… Vingi
’—arm
or
hand.
‘Spear-storm fish’
—sword
; the ‘gallows’ of that—the
hand.
‘Snare of red gold’ (rauþmeldrs gelgja), lit. ‘snare of red meal’ (i.e. gold)—
gold ring.
Last couplet: the King, by his gift, encourages me to praise him again.
7
G
LAD OF HIMSELF
. The simplicity of his mind, with its violent contradictions of nobility and graspingness, is most disarming. There are many other instances.
8
S
TAVE
. ‘With pulling of an arm-string.’
Armsíma (síma
is used to-day of telephone wires) is the gold ring. The poet’s mind is playing with the figure of the cord of gold having power to lift the huge crags of his grief-bent brows. For the evident pleasure he derives from the thought of his dark and rugged features, cf.
Arinbiorn’s Lay
, p. 196, and staves on pp. 114, 145, 146, and 175.
9
D
RAPA
(drápa). Derived from
drepa
, either in the sense of ‘striking’ the chords of an instrument (
D
. s.v., but this seems very doubtful), or (better, F.J.) in its ordinary sense of ‘slay’: ‘a battle-song’. The drapa is a heroic laudatory poem with a burden or refrain. Egil’s great
Höfuðlausn
, given in full on pp. 141–5, is a drapa.
10
S
TAVE
. ‘He that rouseth Our Ladies of the Battle-din’ (faldgnáar hjaldrsnerrande).
Gná
is a Valkyrie; cf. ‘The Sword-God wakes Our Lady of Sakes’ in the
Höfuðlausn.
‘Ella’s scion’ (Ella, king of Northumberland: cf. note, p. 279, on ‘Ragna: Hairybreeks’)—
Athelstane.
‘Kings’ head-stem’ (harra hǫfoþbaþmr), i.e. main shoot of the family-tree of kings—
Athelstane.
‘Flinger of the billow-fire’ (hyrjar hrann-brjótr), lit. ‘breaker of’, etc.; lavisher of gold—again,
Athelstane
.
11
B
URDEN
. ‘Reindeer-way’ (hreinbraut)—
mountains.
Athelstane is king of all the land, even to the mountain-tops.
CHAPTER LVI
2
S
TAVE
. ‘Young hawk-cliff’s goddess’ (ung haukaklifs Hlín): ‘hawk-cliff’ = arm: Hlin of that—a
lady.
The playing upon words in the last four lines is like a Shakespeare sonnet, and quite untranslatable:
Verþk í feld, þás foldar
faldr kømr í hug skalde
bergóneres brúna
brátt miþstalle hváta.
Brúna miþstallr
, the thing standing up between (and below) the brows, is the
nose. Bergóneres foldar faldr
cannot be understood; but it conceals the name of Asgerd (query,
faldr
, ‘clothing’, part of which is
gerðr
, ‘girdle’, giving the second syllable of the name
Ás-gerðr
?); further
F.J. extracts a reference to the first syllable
(
Á
S
, ‘a God’) from
bergóneres
. With my ‘When-
As gird
le’ I have tried, clumsily enough, to give some indication of this obscure punning.
3
S
TAVE
. Suttung is a giant. The ‘beer’ (feast-fare) of the giant—
poetry
. ‘Sea-fire goddess’—
lady
: but some of the words here are corrupt. ‘Dighters… Valkyries’—
warriors.
‘Fount (lit. beverage—
veig
) of the Lord of Strife’, i.e. of Odin—
poetry.
Meaning, the poets will be able to unravel his obscure puns and find out his mistress’s name, because they know the tricks of the trade.
4
B
IORN THE
H
ITDALE
C
HAMPION
. He has a saga of his own, not (so far as I know) translated into English.
5
I
LLUGI THE
B
LACK.
Of Gilsbank; famous as the father of Gunnlaug the Worm-Tongue; see Gunnl., and also Eb. 17, and the
Heath
-
slayings Saga
(translated in same volume of the
Saga Library
as Eb.).
6
M
ANY WINTERS
. 927 to 932 (F.J.).
7
W
ITH
G
UNNHILD
. The Queen had, in her later years at any rate, a taste for personable young men: see the account of her scandalous proceedings with Hrut(Nj. 3, 6, and 7; Dasent has, perhaps pardonably, drawn a decent veil of paraphrase over one or two passages) and with Olaf the Peacock (Ld. 21); but there is nothing to suggest that her friendship now, in Eric’s lifetime, with Thorolf Skallagrimson (pp. 71, 94), and later with Bergonund, went to these lengths.
8
V
ERY LOUD AND SAUCILY
(snelt mjök). Cf. ‘the wind blows sharp and snell’. D. says (
ad loc.
), ‘harshly, in a high-pitched voice’.
9
T
HE
G
ULA-
T
HING.
Magnússon (Hkr.
IV
, p. 461) says it was “held on the shore of the bay of Gula, or rather of its off-shoot inlet Eyvind-wick, which cut into the southern side of the broad peninsula which bounds from the south the mouth of Sognfirth. It represented the folklands of South Mere, Firthfolk, Sognfolk, Valdres, Haddingdale, Hordfolk, Rogaland, and Agdir; and all these districts, when collectively spoken of, went under the territorial designation of Gula-Thing laws (parts)”.
10
B
ONDWOMAN
. The circumstances on which Bergonund based this charge were, of course, the runaway match related in chs.
XXXII–XXXV.
As to the substance of the charge, cf. the contentions on both sides, pp. 119–120.
11
A
STEEP THING
(örðigt). F.J. says the meaning is not (as commonly), ‘difficult’, but ‘hostile, contumacious’ (feindlich, widersetzlich): “it seems to me too strong, and almost as if you would treat me as an enemy”.
Örðigr
primarily means ‘erect, upright, rising on end’ (
D
.), and at the risk of being accused of slang, I have used an idiom that precisely corresponds.
12
O
DAL-BORN
(óðalborin). See note on
‘Odal’
.
13
N
OBLE-BORN
(tíginborin). I.e. descended from kings or earls (referring, no doubt, to Asgerd’s grandfather, Earl Hroald, see
ch. II
).
14
Bergonund’s speech is a flawless masterpiece, ending, as it were with a thunderclap, with the proposal that the lady shall not only lose her case (quite wrongfully, as it appears), but be herself adjudged the King’s bondwoman!
15
U
NSPOKEN
. Reading
ómœlt
: not, as F.J.,
ómœt
(without might).
16
S
TAVE
. First couplet:
Þýboma kveþr þoma
þorn reiþ áar horna.
‘Þorna þorn’, which might stand for a general kenning for a
man
is pointedly used of Bergonund, the son of Thorgeir
Thornfoot. Reiðr áar horna
is the ‘bearer of the river of horns’ (i.e. of ale)—a
lady
. ‘Spear-brandisher’ is addressed to Bergonund, as is also ‘rich man’. I have preserved as far as I could the rhymes and assonances of the original.
17
A
SHMAN
. Alf Ashman, her brother. See
note
.
19
P
ICK AND CHOOSE
. Aimed, not obscurely, at the King. Cf. p. 123, where the spear that slew Ketil was clearly meant for his master.
20
This ‘banning’ of Egil’s amounts to a serious
níð
or ‘Scorn’ against the King himself; cf. special note, p. 249 on ‘Scorn-pole’ Cf. also the
Waterdale Saga
, ch. 33: “But if any come not [to holm, when challenged], then shall be raised a Scorn (níð) against them, with this formular: That he shall be every man’s dastard (níðingr), and be never in the fellowship of good men, and have the anger of the Gods and the name of truce-dastard”.
21
S
TAVE
. The first two couplets are stuffed with consonances and playings on the word
arfi
(heir):
Erfinge ræþr arfe
arfljúgr fyr mér svarfa,
mœtek hans ok heitom
hóton, þymefótar.
The last two couplets are corrupt and of doubtful meaning.
I
have been driven to a somewhat free rendering. ‘Stock’s sorrows syth’d of earth’ makes no sense: neither does the original (though Ernst A. Kock,
op. cit.
in note on p. 304, has amended the text and got some meaning from it). ‘Earth-dweller’s bed’, i.e. the worm’s bed (the Worm Fafnir)—
gold
.
22
H
OUSE-THING
(hùsþing). Cf. Engl, ‘husting’. A council summoned from the immediate followers of a king or earl, usually to deal with some matter of immediate urgency.
23
S
TEERED HER HIMSELF
. The whole sentence reads,
hann sagði leið fyrir honungs skipinu
,
en hann stýrði sjálfr.
F.J. is probably right in saying, “
en hann
, i.e. King Eric”. In the sequel (same page) Ketil was steering, and Egil mistook him for the King, probably both because of the likeness and because it was known that the King usually steered himself.
24
R
UDDER
…
LOOPS
.
Stýristöng
, which I have translated ‘rudder’, is properly ‘rudder-pole
or
rudder-stave’. We say ‘starboard’ (Icel. stjórnbor
ð
i) of the right-hand side of a ship because that was where the rudder was in the viking time. See Hkr.
IV
, 445 for a full and interesting note on rudders.
Loops
(hamla) are used for rowlocks in Norway and Iceland (and elsewhere) to-day.
25
S
TAVE
(1). ‘Thunder-lord … heart’ (þrymrǫgner vígelds) þróttharþr)—
Eric.
‘Wound-salmon’ (sárlax)—a
sword:
the
‘
Sýr’ (a byname of Freyja) of that—a
Valkyrie
: the ‘quivering thorn’ (bitþorn) of the V.—
a spear
.
26
S
TAVE
(2). Lit. ‘So should the Gods pay him for robbing of my fee: Let the Binders sweep the king from the land: wroth be the Rulers, and Odin. Let the oppressor (lit. mower) of the folk flee from the lands, O Land’s-God. Frey and Niord, loathe Ye the people’s plague who hurteth the holy places’. This curse was no doubt held to have had its due effect next year, when Eric had to flee from Norway (p. 134).
CHAPTER LVII
1
B
ARE
G
UNNHILD A SON.
Harald Greycloak, King of Norway, 961–970. He was fostered by Arinbiorn, who followed him into exile about 955 (
ch.
LXIX
) and was his right-hand man till their death together at the Neck in the Limfirth.
2
R
OGNVALD
. Elsewhere only mentioned in the list of the sons of Eric Bloodaxe in
Flateyjarbók.
F.J. thinks this is because he died so young. Some reject the whole story about Rognvald.
3
T
HE
B
EACONS
(Vitar). F.J. says they are an unidentified group of skerries.
Aldi
he identifies with the mod. island of Alden in the Firdafylke.
4
S
TAVE.
‘When young.’ He is now about 32 or 33.
5
C
ARAVEL
(karfi). See note on
‘Long-ship’
.
6
A
BEAR
. Common enough in Norway in ancient times, and fairly common in certain parts (e.g. in Jostedal) comparatively recently, but now rare. See the stories about bears in Mr Cecil Slingsby’s
Norway
,
the Northern Playground
,
ch. xx
.
7
N
EBS OF WOOD
(skógarnef). I.e. straggling ‘noses’ of wood and undergrowth jutting out from the main forest.
8
B
USINESS
. They asked
hvat hann hefði syslat. Sysla
is the regular word for a job or piece of business. Its use here has the characteristic grim humour of
meiosis.
