Egil’s Saga

by E R Eddison

  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.

  When these conditions were broken, the whole polity went to wreck. In the thirteenth century powerful men began to collect priesthoods, to stretch out grasping hands beyond their own confines, and aspire, like the brilliant young Sturla Sighvatson, to political supremacy and dominion. The house of the Sturlungs shadowed half the country with their power; then split and quarrelled among themselves: marched with armies to pitched battles on a scale that was not dreamed of in the old days. Those battles were ruinous out of all proportion to their casualty lists, for it was the great men who fought to the death while their followers were given peace. The life-blood of the land was thus let out in the bitterness of civil war. Norway, that had long in these later years watched and intrigued and waited, stepped in at last. If a moment should be fixed for the passing away of the Icelandic republic, it might fitly be the night of the 22nd September, 1241, when Snorri Sturlason, historian and politician, youngest and most famous of the three Sturlung brothers, was stabbed to death in his house at Reykholt by murderers hired by his own son-in-law at the setting on of the King of Norway.

  * I.e. the Hebrides.

  † For List of Abbreviations.

  * A ceremony to show that henceforth the land belonged to him.

  THE GODS

  The reader who wishes to inform himself more closely of the character of the old Northern religion, the faith brought by the settlers to Iceland, cannot do better than turn to the ancient mythical and didactic poems of the Elder Edda such as the Völospá, the Hávamál, Grimnismál, etc., in Vigfusson and York Powell’s translations, C.P.B. vol. 1, and to the chapter by Dame Bertha Phillpotts on ‘Germanic Heathenism’ in vol. 11 of the Cambridge Medieval History, and Professor Chadwick’s chapter on the old religion in his Heroic Age (Cambridge University Press). I would also refer him, were it available in English, to the brilliant monograph lately published by Professor Nordal on The faith of Egil Skallagrimson based on the evidence of the Sonatorrek.

  Explicitly, there is very little about religion in the sagas. What there is, seems to show that in Iceland Thor was more widely worshipped than any other God, and after Him, Frey. Out of every five settlers, one has a name beginning with ‘Þór’. It is recorded that when the Northmen came to Iceland they found there some Irish hermits who “afterwards went away because they would not be here with heathen men”.*

  There was among the settlers a small leaven of Christianity: e.g. Queen Aud, who settled Laxriverdale, was a Christian. But this quickly died out. Taking all the evidence into account, it is fair to conclude that even among its avowed adherents Christianity had as yet struck no deep roots. Of such adherents the famous settler Helgi the Lean is probably a fair example: “He was much mixed in his faith: he trowed on Christ and named his homestead after Him; and yet called he upon Thor o
n sea voyages and in hard occasions, and in all things whereso he thought most rested on it” (Landn). This independence of attitude is, indeed, characteristic. We see it in Egil himself, in the Sonatorrek, where he not only expresses a desire to be given a chance of punishing Aegir, the God of the sea, for the destruction of his son, but says he has a mind to give over worshipping Odin Himself because He has broken faith with him and cast him off. The same mind is shown in Hrafnkel Frey’s-priest, a mighty lord in the east country, who let build a great temple and loved no other God more than Frey, and gave “his friend Frey” a half share in his horse Freyfaxi, that he thought better than any other treasure he had; but, fallen on evil days and reft of horse and honour, said: “I account that foolery, to trow in Gods”; and kept his word, and made no more blood-offerings, but in due time had vengeance on his foes and won back all his lordship (Hrafnkel’s Saga). Also, in Sigmund Brestison of the Faereys, who, when the great Earl Hakon asked him in what God did he most trust, answered and said, “I put my trust in my own might and main” (Færeyinga Saga, ch. 23). In the same way Thorolf Mostbeard, in a passage already quoted (Eb. 4), is “a great friend” of Thor.

  Of a future life the conceptions do not appear to have been settled. The trend of opinion is in favour of the view that the Eddie religion of Odin and Valhalla was by no means universally entertained in the North: it may have been as ancient, probably more ancient, than the cult of Thor, but it was pre-eminently a religion of kings and vikings. That Egil himself worshipped Odin is clear from the Sonatorrek: but there are reasons for thinking that it may have been an acquired religion in his case, not the religion to which he was brought up from birth. That Bodvar had, as Egil believed, gone to Valhalla, seems clear from the references to “the way of bliss” and “the bee’s path” in the 10th and 18th staves of the Sonatorrek. Odin and His Hall of the Slain, where the lordly dead carouse after fight, having for cup-maids the Valkyries of the Lord of Hosts: these things are far off, away from “middle-earth” (Miðgarðr). But Thorolf Mostbeard believed that when he died he should fare into Holyfell, the little steep basaltic hill that stands abruptly up in the midst of the Thorsness peninsula, “and all his kindred from the ness” (Eb. 4); and the night that his son, Thorstein Codbiter, was drowned in Broadfirth fishing, his shepherd saw how Holyfell “was opened in the north side, and in the fell he saw mighty fires, and heard huge clamour therein, and the clank of drinking-horns; and when he hearkened if perchance he might hear any words clear of others, he heard that there was welcomed Thorstein Codbiter and his crew, and he was bidden to sit in the high-seat over against his father” (ibid. 11). In the same way, Gunnar of Lithend was thought to have ‘died into’ his howe. The neat-herd and the serving maid were driving cattle, and “they thought that he (Gunnar) was merry, and that he was singing inside the cairn”. Another night, Skarphedinn and Hogni “were out of doors one evening by Gunnar’s cairn on the south side. The moon and stars were shining clear and bright, but every now and then the clouds drove over them. Then all at once they thought they saw the cairn standing open, and lo, Gunnar had turned himself in the cairn and looked at the moon. They thought they saw four lights burning in the cairn, and none of them threw a shadow. They saw that Gunnar was merry, and he wore a joyful face. He sang a song…After that the cairn was shut up again” (Nj. 77). There are many other instances of this belief of ‘dying into howes’. There are also cases, throughout the old literature, of ‘howe-dwellers’: ghosts, but of no thin astral substance: rather, solid, strong and violent ghosts, ‘undead’ like the mediaeval vampire, who walk abroad, ride the roofs, and slay men and cattle. A locus classicus is the dead shepherd Glam, in Grettla. It was against such walkings that precautions were taken such as those described in ch. LVIII of our saga (see note ad loc.), and in Eb. 33, 34.

  Christianity was ‘brought into the law’ in the year A.D. 1000 It is clear from the accounts given in the sagas (and this is confirmed by more general considerations referred to below) that the change of faith was primarily and in substance a political proceeding based on considerations of expediency rather than on any religious movement among the people. As soon as it became plain, at the famous meeting of the Althing in the year 1000, that religious controversy was about to split the commonwealth from top to bottom, men turned to seek an expedient that should avoid the evil of two laws in the land. Snorri the Priest was the main actor here, and by his persuasion both sides were brought to lay the matter in the hands of Thorgeir the Priest of Lightwater, who was then Speaker of the Law. Thorgeir’s award made Christianity the law, and forbade (on pain of outlawry) heathen rites and the exposure of children: but the old worship, though forbidden in public, was to be allowed in private. It is characteristic that this statesmanlike compromise, which brought Christianity into the law and preserved the cohesion of the state, was dictated by a heathen. Henceforth, though the letter of the law was Christian, the pagan spirit lived on. Its persistence, many generations after the ‘change of faith’, is seen in the persistence of the old ways of life. Christian bishops practised polygamy and rode on raiding expeditions in the Sturlung days as freely as the great men of old. Hallfred the Troublous-skald wore his new faith so lightly that his readiest threat was to cast it off and be a heathen again if the King would not listen to his poem. But perhaps the most striking evidence of the abiding life of the pagan spirit is the impartiality and lack of Christian colouring in the sagas themselves; for in no country has Christianity been a tolerant religion. In Egla, which was probably written down in final form about the middle of the thirteenth century, it is hard to find a phrase or turn of speech which betrays the point of view of a Christian telling a story of old heathen times, or which is out of tune with the mind and temper of Egil’s own generation and the heroic age.

  The two essential facts about the old faith which stand out clearly amid much that is doubtful and obscure are, first, its fatalism, and secondly, the relation of fellowship between men and the Gods.

  Fatalism is in the deep foundations of the old Northern mythology. Beyond death, beyond the joys of Valhalla, looms the shadow of Ragnarok—of that Dies Iræ, when the Wolf shall be loosed and Midgard’s Worm shall come, and heaven and earth and the blessed Gods themselves shall pass away in catastrophic ruin. The terrors of that Day are foretold in one of the grandest of the Eddic poems, the Völospá, from which, to show the spirit of doom and desolation that informs the ultimate things in this creed, I will quote some verses, beginning with the crowing of the cocks in the three worlds to usher in the “One fight more—the best and the last”:

  Sate on the howe there and strake harp-string

  The Grim Wife’s herdsman, glad Eggthér.

  Crow’d mid the cocks in Cackle-spinney

  A fair-red cock who Fialàr hight.

  Crowéd in Asgarth Comb-o’-Gold,

  Fighters to wake for the Father of Hosts.

  But another croweth to Earth from under:

  A soot-red cock from the courts of Hell.—

  Garm bayeth ghastful at Gnipa’s cave:

  The fast must be loos’d and the Wolf fare free.

  Things forgot know I, yea, and far things to come:

  The Twilight of the Gods; the grave of Them that conquer’d.

  Brother shall fight with brother, and to bane be turnéd: