Böðvarr Egilsson

Bödvar is Egil Skallagrímsson's beloved son, whose drowning breaks the old poet's heart and gives the corpus one of its greatest poems. A promising youth, he is lost when his boat founders in Borgarfjörð, and his body washes ashore; Egil, finding it, buries his son and then shuts himself into his bed-closet, refusing food, determined to die of grief. It is Bödvar's death that drives Egil to the edge — and out of which, coaxed by his clever daughter Thorgerd, the old man composes the Sonatorrek, the 'Loss of Sons', the most piercing lament in the North, turning unbearable grief into the one thing that lets him survive it. Bödvar himself is barely glimpsed — the bright son lost young — but his drowning is the wound at the heart of the saga's most human moment, the death that wrings the greatest poetry from the hardest of men.