York (Jórvík)

York — Jórvík — is the great Norse city of England, seat of the viking kings of Northumbria, and the stage of one of the corpus's most famous scenes. It is here that Eiríkr Bloodaxe, driven from Norway, ruled as a viking king in exile; and here that his great enemy Egil Skallagrímsson, shipwrecked on the English coast and brought before the king who has every reason to kill him, saves his own head by composing overnight a praise-poem so masterful — the Höfuðlausn, the 'Head-Ransom' — that Eiríkr cannot bring himself to carry out the death-sentence. York stands for the wide reach of the Norse world into England, and for the saga truth that the word can outface the sword: a poet ransoming his life from a king's wrath with nothing but verse, in a viking hall on English ground.