Annotated Saga: Egils saga (Excerpt)

Egils saga Skallagrímssonar — the life of Egill, the brawling, gold-grasping, profoundly gifted poet-farmer — is the saga that puts prose and poetry in the same frame more often than any other, because its hero is a skáld and the saga keeps stopping the narrative to let him (and his forebears) speak verse. That makes it the ideal text for one specific lesson: how far the language of skaldic verse departs from the language of saga prose. This page takes two passages from a single family line — the prose opening that introduces Egill's grandfather Úlfur (the man who becomes "Kveld-Úlfur"), and a stanza that same Kveld-Úlfur speaks later, grieving his son Þórólfur. We read the prose for its quiet grammar, then watch the verse tear that grammar apart. If you have not yet, read the orientation first (texts/saga-overview); the Njáls saga page drills the prose features in isolation, so here we can move faster on prose and spend our attention on the prose-to-verse shift. Skaldic metre and the kenning system as a system live on texts/skaldic-verse — we only point at them here.

Part 1 — The prose: the opening of the saga

This is classic saga prose — and most of its machinery you already know. Three features carry it.

The naming formula and the genitive of descent

The saga opens, as so many do, with Úlfur hét maður — "there was a man called Úlfur" (fronted name as topic + hét "was called" + maður the subject after the verb). This is the same predicate-first formula dissected on the Njáls saga page; do not read it as "Úlfur was called a man."

What is denser here is the genitive of descent that immediately follows. A saga places a new person by who their people are, and kinship runs entirely on the genitive case. Look at the chain: sonur *Bjálfa og Hallberu, dóttur Úlfs hins óarga* — "son of Bjálfi and of Hallbera, the daughter of Úlfur the Fearless." Every relationship word pulls the next name into the genitive: Bjálfi → Bjálfa, Hallbera → Hallberu, Úlfur → Úlfs. And dóttur ("daughter," genitive in apposition to Hallberu) keeps the chain going one generation further back, to Úlfs hins óarga — the genitive of the by-name Úlfur hinn óargi "Úlfur the Fearless," with the free-standing article hinn (genitive hins) before the weak adjective. (The full genitive system: nouns/genitive-uses.)

The relative/temporal er, again

The third sentence hangs a temporal clause on er: dag hvern, *er að kveldi leið — "every day, *when it drew towards evening." This is the relative/temporal particle er (= modern þegar "when"), not the verb "is." The disambiguation rule holds: the clause already has its own finite verb (leið, "drew/passed"), so er cannot be the copula. (More: texts/saga-overview.)

The reported-speech subjunctive — and a famous etymology

The last sentence is the payoff of the whole opening, and it shows the reported-speech subjunctive. Það var mál manna, að hann *væri mjög hamrammur — "it was the talk of men that he *was much of a shape-shifter." The verb is væri, the past subjunctive of vera, not the indicative var. The subjunctive flags this as what people said, a claim the narrator reports rather than vouches for — exactly the perspective-marking English cannot do with mood (English just keeps the indicative "that he was"). And from that reputation comes his name: hann var kallaður Kveld-Úlfur — "Evening-Wolf," the man who turns wolfish at dusk. The saga has built a character, a reputation, and a nickname in four flat clauses. (Reported-speech mood in full: register/literary-archaic.)

Part 2 — The verse: Kveld-Úlfur's lament

Now jump to chapter 24. Kveld-Úlfur has just learned that his son Þórólfur has been killed in the north by King Haraldur's men. Old and broken with grief, he speaks a lausavísa — a free-standing stanza in dróttkvætt, the court metre of the skalds. Here is the prose that introduces it and the stanza itself, exactly as printed:

Read the prose line first: Kveld-Úlfur kvað vísu — "Kveld-Úlfur spoke a verse" — is the saga's standard cue (kvað, preterite of kveða "to recite/compose," + vísu, accusative of vísa "a stanza"). It is plain prose, V2, subject-first: nothing strange. Then the world changes.

The transition: from prose order to verse order

The single most important thing to notice is that the verse is in a different word-order universe from the prose around it. Saga prose is verb-second and broadly subject–verb–object, readable left to right. Dróttkvætt verse is bound by strict rules of syllable count, internal rhyme (hending), and alliteration, and to satisfy them the skald shatters the natural order of words: the two clauses of the first half-stanza (helmingr) are interlaced — one sentence is split open and a second sentence is threaded through the gap. An English reader who expects prose order in the verse will read pure noise.

Watch it happen. The plain sense of the first helmingr, in prose order, is roughly:

Nú frák [að] Þórólf fóru und lok norðr í eyju; norn erum grimm; Þundr kaus skyndi þremja til snimma. "Now I have heard that Þórólfur passed to his end north on an island; the Norn is cruel to me; Óðinn chose the warrior too soon."

But the stanza as composed reads, line by line: Nú frák norðr í eyju / norn erum grimm, til snimma / Þundr kaus þremja skyndi / Þórólf und lok fóru. The verb frák ("I have heard," frá + enclitic -k "I") is stranded in line 1, while its object clause's own verb fóru and subject Þórólf fall all the way down in line 4. Sandwiched between them, in line 2, sits a whole other clause — norn erum grimm, "the Norn is cruel to me" (the Norn = fate; erum here is an archaic poetic 1st-person form, er + -um). This splitting of one clause and stuffing of a second clause into the wound is called tmesis / interlacing, and it is the hallmark of the metre.

What the verse asks of the reader: kennings

Beyond word order, the verse is opaque because of kennings — fixed riddle-like noun substitutions. The prose says Þórólfur died; the verse never names death plainly. Instead Þundr (a name of Óðinn) kaus ("chose") the skyndi þremja — "the hastener of blades," a kenning for a warrior, i.e. Þórólfur himself — meaning Óðinn took him in death. In the second helmingr, Kveld-Úlfur says he is too old to take revenge, but he says it through two kennings: Þórs fangvina — "the wrestling-friend of Þórr" — is Old Age (in myth, Þórr once wrestled the old crone Elli, "Old Age," and lost), and at þingi malm-Gnáar — "at the assembly of the metal-goddess" — is a kenning for battle. So the literal "old age keeps me from battle" is dressed as "the wrestling-friend of Þórr makes me fail to go to the assembly of the metal-goddess." (The kenning system is treated as a system on texts/skaldic-verse; here the point is only that the verse register requires this decoding and the prose never does.)

The grammar that survives into the verse

Not everything is alien. Notice that the verse still uses the same cases as the prose: Þórólf is accusative (the subject of an infinitival "passed-to-his-end" construction governed by frák), norðr and til snimma are adverbs, þremja and Þórs are genitives feeding kennings, malm-Gnáar is a genitive. The verse is not a different language — it is the same Old Icelandic morphology, with the word order deformed and the vocabulary enriched by kennings to meet the metre. That is the precise lesson of putting prose and verse side by side: Egils saga shows you that case-marking is what makes the violent verse order possible. Because every noun wears its grammatical role on its ending, the skald can scatter the words anywhere and the listener can still reassemble the sentence. English, having shed its case endings, cannot do this — which is why English poetry never developed anything like dróttkvætt interlace.

Common Mistakes

The first verse-reading error is to apply prose word order. Lines 1 and 4 belong to one sentence; line 2 (norn erum grimm) is a separate interlaced clause. Gather, do not read straight.

A kenning is a fixed substitution, not a literal phrase. Learn to suspect any odd genitive compound in verse (Þórs fangvina, malm-Gnáar) of being a kenning, and look up its referent.

Key Takeaways

• Egils saga alternates plain prose and intricate skaldic verse, which makes it the model text for seeing the two registers of Old Icelandic side by side.
• The prose opening (ch. 1) shows the naming formula (Úlfur hét maður), a dense genitive descent chain (sonur Bjálfa og Hallberu, dóttur Úlfs hins óarga), the relative/temporal er (er að kveldi leið "when evening drew on"), and the reported-speech subjunctive (að hann *væri hamrammur "that he was a shape-shifter"), from which the nickname *Kveld-Úlfur comes.
• The cue kvað vísu ("spoke a verse") marks the switch into dróttkvætt metre, where word order is deliberately shattered — two clauses interlaced (Nú frák … / norn erum grimm … / … Þórólf und lok fóru) — and nouns are encoded as kennings (Þórs fangvina = "Old Age").
• The verse keeps the same case morphology as the prose; it is the case system that licenses the scrambled order — every ending shows the word's role, so it can stand anywhere. English, lacking case, cannot do this.
• Sources: Egils saga Skallagrímssonar ch. 1 and ch. 24, normalised text from the Icelandic Saga Database; verse reading after the Skaldic Poetry of the Scandinavian Middle Ages edition.