Yershova, Yelena Sesselja Helgadóttir. Egill Skalla-grímsson: A Viking Poet as a Child and an Old Man

• Author: Yershova, Yelena Sesselja Helgadóttir
• Title: Egill Skalla-grímsson: A Viking Poet as a Child and an Old Man
• Published in: Youth and Age in the Medieval North
• Editor: Shannon Lewis-Simpson
• Place, Publisher: Leiden: Brill
• Year: 2008
• Pages: 285-304
• E-text:
• Reference: Yershova, Yelena Sesselja Helgadóttir. "Egill Skalla-grímsson: A Viking Poet as a Child and an Old Man." Youth and Age in the Medieval North, pp. 285-304. Ed. Shannon Lewis-Simpson. Leiden: Brill, 2008.

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• Key words: poetry, characterization (kveðskapur, persónulýsingar)

Annotation

Egill Skallagrímsson is unique among the skalds depicted in the Icelandic family sagas in that he begins his poetic career at age three and continues to compose throughout his life. Yershova examines the syntactic and semantic structure of three stanzas attributed to Egill as a child and five composed as an old man, comparing the two groups of verses. She concludes that neither represents a holistic group - the third and eigth stand out "as if they closed, respectively, Egill's youthful and old-age creative periods" (p. 303). A number of features can be identified within these stanzas that suggest that they were all composed by a single skald, and while the stanzas attributed to Egill may have been the product of later life, it is not inconceivable that a child could have made them. Despite the fact that there are clear parallels between the stanzas of the young and old Egill, the themes and the subtext of the imagery in his old-age stanzas present a striking contrast to his youthful ones. The young skald looks towards the sea and poetry as his future; the old skald looks towards the grave.

Links

• Written by: Katelin Parsons
• Icelandic/English translation: