Arinbjörn

Arinbjörn is Egil Skallagrímsson's lifelong noble friend — the one steadfast loyalty in the poet's turbulent, quarrelsome life. A Norwegian chieftain of high standing, he twice risks his own life and favour at court to stand by the difficult, dangerous Egil when no one else will: most famously at York, when Egil is in the power of his deadliest enemy Eiríkr Bloodaxe, it is Arinbjörn who shelters him, counsels him to compose the Head-Ransom poem overnight, and stands surety for him before the wrathful king. Egil repays him with one of the warmest poems in the corpus, the Arinbjarnarkviða, a praise of friendship itself. Arinbjörn is the saga's image of the true friend — the honourable man whose loyalty to a hard, ungrateful, magnificent companion never wavers, who keeps faith at real cost to himself, and who earns, in return, the one thing Egil can give that outlasts gold: a great poem in his honour.