A Tale of Two Poets Egill Skallagrimsson and Einarr….pdfVIP

MARGARET CLUNIES ROSS A Tale of Two Poets: Egill Skallagrimsson and Einarr skálaglamm Egils saga Skallagrímssonar is renowned for the poetry it contains as well as for its narrative prose. By far the largest quantity of the verse transmit­ ted in redactions of the saga is attributed to its protagonist, Egill Skallagrimsson, himself, but a small num ber of verses are ascribed to other participants in the narrative, including two dróttkvætt lausavisur said to have been composed and recited by another, younger Icelandic skald, Einarr Helgason skálaglamm. Both verses appear in the Mçôru- vallabók (A-redaction) text of the saga. They are absent from the B- redaction, while the C-redaction, represented by two seventeenth- century copies of a medieval exemplar, written by Ketill Jörundsson (AM 453 and 462 4to), has only the second verse. Both verses also appear in manuscripts of Jómsvíkinga saga, 1 where Einarr figures as a poet of Earl Hákon Sigurðarson. It has generally been a epted (cf. Bjarni Einarsson 1975:106-14) that Egils saga has acquired the verses and the a ompanying prose text from Jómsmkinga saga, which is the earlier work, usually thought to have been written c. 1200 or a little before that (Bjarni Einarsson 1975:105; Ólafur Halldórsson 1993; Megaard 2000). Aside from the citation of some of Egill’s verses in manuscripts of Snorri Sturluson’s Edda and Óláfr Þórðarson’s Third Grammatical Treatise, where they appear as examples of various kinds of poetic diction, Einarr’s two verses are the only ones in Egils saga that also o ur in a sep­ arate textual tradition. It is the purpose of this article to suggest why the redactor of Egils saga in its A-version found it suitable to his literary pur­ poses to insert the Einarr episode and its a ompanying ver