Egil’s Saga (2 page)

Egil’s Saga
has not hitherto been available to English readers. A previous attempt to translate it was made, some thirty-five years ago, by the Rev. W. C. Green. It is to be feared that the translator little understood the qualities of his original or the difficulties of his task. His version (now out of print) in its flaccid paraphrasing, its lack of all sense of style, its latinized constructions, and (a comparatively venial offence) its foolish and unavowed expurgations, conveys no single note or touch of the masterpiece with which he was dealing.

I have based my translation on Dr Finnur Jónsson’s text in his latest edition published at Copenhagen, 1924.

I wish to place on record my obligations to the many people who have helped me in this work. First, to Mr Bogi Ólafsson, teacher of English in the Grammar School at Reykjavik, who has given me the inestimable assistance of his criticisms of my renderings after reading the whole of my manuscript through in its first draft. Thanks to his generous help, I can at least be sure that my text is free from the grosser mistakes which must otherwise have crept into it. Secondly, to Professor Sigurður Nordal, whose own new annotated edition of the original was unfortunately not available in time for me to make use of it in preparing my Notes. He has however kindly read in MS both the Introduction and the Terminal Essay, in both of which, and in the Notes, there is much that owes its existence to his inspiration and learning. Among others to whom I am indebted are Dame Bertha Phillpotts, for her constant interest and encouragement; Sir Henry Newbolt; Professor Haakon Shetelig; and Mr Gerald Hayes for the beautiful maps he has designed and given me. I also thank Dr Finnur Jónsson, for courteously authorizing me to make use of the valuable material embodied in his editions of
Egils Saga
; Messrs Bernard Quaritch, for giving me full authority to quote from their
Saga Library
, which, besides containing Morris’s magnificent (indeed, the only readable) translations of such important sagas as the
Ere-Dwellers (Eyrbyggja
) and the
Heimskringla
, affords in its concluding volume a mine of useful historical and critical information; Messrs Longmans Green and Co. and the Trustees of the late William Morris, for allowing me to quote from
Grettir the Strong
and
Three Northern Love Stories
; Professor E. V. Gordon and the Clarendon Press for permission to quote a passage from his
Introduction to Old Norse
; Messrs Longmans (again), the Syndics of the Cambridge University Press, and Count Hermann Keyserling together with his publisher, Mr Jonathan Cape, as regards quotations from R. L. Stevenson, the
Cambridge Medieval History
, and the
Travel Diary of a Philosopher
respectively. To Mr Cape I am also obliged for his agreement to my including in the Introduction my version of part of the
Völospá
, originally printed in my historical novel
Styrbiorn the Strong
. Finally, I am grateful to Mr Walter de la Mare for letting me use on a fly-leaf (see
here
) words of his which, though written in another context, sum up far better than could any words of mine the peculiar genius of the sagas.

Of Egil’s personal character the saga and the specimens of his own poetry which it preserves can speak more eloquently than any latter-day translator. I will only say that the school of criticism which questions the veracity of the saga on the ground that (for example) the gouger out of Armod’s eye could not in nature be also the tender and sublime poet of the
Sonatorrek
, is a school that knows little of humanity. In his pride, his reckless violence, his selfishness, as well as in his love of his art and in his simple faith that God is on his side and that those who disagree with him are therefore patently
hostes humani generis
, he stands side by side with Benvenuto Cellini. It is never to be said of Egil, whatever his faults, that he was a little man; or a liar; or a man without “kinship with the stars”.

E. R. E.

71, BEDFORD GARDENS
CAMPDEN HILL, W.
September
1930

Μ
υάσεσθαί τινά ϕαμι καὶ ὔστερον ἅμμεων
.

S
APPHO

“Not one overt word of horror or of warning or of admonishment, only the bare clear record; but beyond it the poising of scales so delicate and so sure that the secrets of every heart are revealed and the judgement never in doubt.”

INTRODUCTION

THE HEROIC AGE AND THE SAGAS

O
F the five major
Íslendinga Sögur (Njála, Egla, Laxdæla, Eyrbyggja
, and
Grettla
) Egil’s is at once the most aristocratic in spirit, the most pagan, and (with the single exception of
Njála
) the most perfect as a work of art. That is as much as to say that it is, of all five, the most typically Icelandic. For Iceland means three things: first, on the political field—aristocratic individualism of an uncompromising kind; secondly, in its broad outlook on human life and destiny—paganism; and thirdly, in art—a peculiar and in itself highly perfected form of prose narrative. When we consider that the growing time, the flowering and the decay of this Iceland were comprised within a period beginning in the ninth century in the reign of Alfred the Great, and ending in the thirteenth, it is clear that the whole thing was only made possible by the accident of the physical isolation of Iceland from the rest of Europe. For there was no room in mediaeval Europe for an aristocracy not feudal but anarchical, or for a paganism so deep and so tolerant that it lived on, essentially unchanged, for generations after it had adopted as its own the formulas and practices of Christianity. These things could not have developed in a society exposed at close quarters to the huge impersonal ideals of Empire and Papacy and to the all-embracing system of dogma and ethic of the mediaeval church; while the dead weight of Latin culture made it impossible for an original literature, owing nothing to Greece or Rome, to spring up and attain to classic perfection in the vulgar tongue.

It is as a background to
Egil’s Saga
, which is the main figure in our picture, that I propose now to sketch roughly what seem to me the essential features of this profoundly interesting piece of landscape which, in the country of the mind, we may call Iceland. The sketch must be meagre and inadequate; it contains, I am afraid, nothing that is new; but I shall do my best to see that it contains nothing that is not true.

THE REPUBLIC

Politically, we may say that it was King Harald Hairfair who created the Icelandic commonwealth; not by his will, indeed, but by his act. He broke down by conquest the old order in Norway, and raised up in its place a central and autocratic power wielded by himself as sole King through subordinates, his own creatures and instruments. To the old nobility this change was the greatest of evils: in every folkland instead of their old folk-king, not much beyond themselves in power and honour, to whom they owed a loose allegiance and upholding in war, they were now faced with Harald’s earl and tax-gatherer. Most hateful of all was the King’s claiming of the odal rights, the freehold land-rights by which the land followed the family from generation to generation. He took away these odal rights, and gave them back only in return for taxes and other services. The great men (including small kings, earls, hersirs, and landowners of lesser rank) had therefore the choice of three things: to withstand the King in battle, to renounce their freedom and become his men, or to flee the land. The first was shown by repeated experience, extending over some twelve years and ending with the great sea-fight at Hafrsfirth, to be impossible. The second was accepted by many. But there were large numbers who preferred the third choice, to leave the country. “Because of that unpeace many noble men fled from their lands out of Norway; some east over the Keel, some West-over-the-sea. Some there were withal who in winter kept themselves in the South-isles
*
or the Orkneys, but in summer harried in Norway and wrought much scathe in the kingdom of Harald the King” (Eb. 1)
†
. But after Hafrsfirth, Harald cleared out the vikings in their western lairs and set his own earls in the Orkneys. Men had then to turn their eyes to more distant lands, and it was at this time, about 874, that Iceland was discovered. To that hard and lonely island in the high Atlantic there was for the next two generations an almost continuous stream of settlement from Norway, both direct and by way of the western lands. By the end of that time the country was stocked with a population of perhaps 50,000. A small population: but so was Athens small, and the Greek cities of Ionia. Eugenically, it may be doubted whether any country in history has possessed a population of a higher quality. For the men who settled Iceland were precisely the pick and flower of the Norse race; precisely those whose fierce spirit of independence and freedom could not abide the new ‘enslavement’ in Norway, and who chose loss of lands and goods, and banishment in an unknown country, rather than go under King Harald’s hand. To match the circumstances we must picture the sailing of a
Mayflower
not in Stuart but in Elizabethan times, and give her for passengers not William Penn and his Pilgrim Fathers, but, driven from England by some strange tyranny till then unheard of, men of the mind and temper of Raleigh and Drake, Sidney and Marlowe.

Thus Harald Hairfair, intent on consolidating his kingdom in Norway, had laid the foundations, far across the seas, of the Ionia of the North. The process is described, not in general terms but vividly in the actions and clashes of individual persons, in the first twenty-seven chapters of our saga. In the tragedy of Thorolf Kveldulfson (Egil’s father’s brother) and in the events leading to the decision of old Kveldulf and his family to leave Norway and start again in Iceland, is gathered up the whole history of the quarrel between the King and the great houses. The new land was apt by nature for the strange republic it was destined to nurture. Habitable enough and generally of a temperate climate in the dales and open country towards the coast, it rose inland to a high central region of dreadful wolds of lava and black sand and stone and fog and snow, where sometimes a traveller must carry every handful of fodder for his horses; for that desert of many days’ journey supports neither man nor beast. There were thus great distances within the land, and great physical barriers, so that each man might in a manner be king in his own countryside: and so, in a manner, he was.

The first settlers (landnámamenn) took land far and wide in the districts where they put in with their ships, if they liked the look of it; afterwards they portioned it out in estates among their friends and dependents, as Skallagrim did with his great land-takings in Burgfirth, chs.
XXVIII–XXX
. The settler himself was by general acceptance lord of the countryside, and temple-priest.
Goði
, which is commonly and properly translated ‘priest’, had under the old faith no sacerdotal connotation: the ‘priest’ was squire and parson in one. The position is well illustrated by the account of the settlement of the Thorsness country in Snaefellsness by Thorolf Mostbeard, the greatgrandfather of Snorri the Priest. Thorolf was lord of the island of Most in the west of Norway, and “had the ward of Thor’s temple there in the island, and was a great friend of Thor”. He gave aid to Biorn, an outlaw of King Harald’s, and so came under the wrath of the King. He “made a great sacrifice, and asked of Thor his well-beloved friend whether he should make peace with the King or get him gone from out the land and seek other fortunes. But the Word showed Thorolf to Iceland.” He followed that Word: and when he came in his ship off Iceland, he “cast overboard the pillars of his high-seat, which had been in the temple, and on one of them was Thor carven; withal he spake over them, that there he would abide in Iceland, whereas Thor should let those pillars come aland”. The wooden pillars came aland on the outermost point of a ness in Broadfirth, that has ever since been called Thorsness. “Thereafter Thorolf fared with fire through his land
*
out from Staff-river in the west, and east to that river which is now called Thors-river, and settled his shipmates there. But he set up for himself a great house at Templewick which he called Templestead. There he let build a temple, and a mighty house it was…. To that temple must all men pay toll, and be bound to follow the temple-priest in all farings, even as are now the thingmen of chiefs. But the chief must uphold the temple at his own charges, so that it should not go to waste, and hold therein feasts of sacrifice” (Eb. 4).

The priest’s neighbours and dependants were called his ‘thingmen’, because they followed him to the Thing or parliament, where laws were made and suits tried. The Thorsness Thing was the first of these assemblies. Later, in 930, the Althing was established in the south-west beyond Mossfellsheath, as the annual meeting-place for all Iceland. It is said that a man named Grim Goatshoe travelled all over Iceland to find the best place for the Althing, “and every man in the land here brought him a penny for it; but he gave that fee afterward to the tempie”. The place was chosen, no doubt, for its accessibility, but it was fitted too by its grandeur to be the seat of the hallowed Thing: the quiet lake, the three-mile black lava rampart of the Almannagjà, or Great Rift, over which the little river Axewater falls and thunders, the level water-meadows and green slopes where the chiefs had their booths, set about with lava-fields torn with profound rifts and chasms, the circling mountains. It is a remarkable evidence of the political and legal instinct which co-existed in the Icelandic mind along with its intense individualism, that for hundreds of years every man of any account in Iceland rode to this place yearly; a journey, from some parts of the country, not of days but of weeks.

This, then, was the Icelandic commonwealth: scattered communities, each owing a loose allegiance to its chief or temple-priest, held together by the bond of race and the yearly meetings of the Althing. The Icelanders had come from Norway because they were minded to be their own masters, and in no other civilized community has there been greater freedom of the individual. There was no executive government: the enforcement of the law rested, in the last resort, on private vengeance. Nor (in theory, at any rate) was the bond of priest and thingman more than a matter of honourable contract between free men, which could be terminated at will by either party. The safety of the republic lay in its physical conditions: in the absence of external aggression, and the great distances within the land. This anarchy succeeded, it is to be noted, only so long as it was not put to the strain; only so long as great men were content to be great each in his own countryside, so long as the ties of kinship remained sacred, and so long as there was wide room for all.