Egill Skallagrímsson

Egil Skallagrímsson is the saga world's great contradiction made flesh — the ugliest and most violent of men, and the finest poet in it. Grandson of a shape-strong berserk and son of the dour smith Skallagrím, he was monstrous as a child: black-haired, broad-browed, and murderous, he killed his first man at seven over a ball-game. He grew into a towering, grasping, ungovernable warrior who feuded with kings, dug up his silver rather than let his heirs have it, and once vomited on a host who had slighted him. Yet the same man composed the Höfuðlausn — the 'Head-Ransom' — overnight to buy his life back from his deadliest enemy, King Eiríkr Bloodaxe, at York; and when the sea and fever took his sons, he shut himself away to starve until his daughter coaxed out of him the Sonatorrek, the 'Loss of Sons', the most piercing lament in the North. He is greed and grief, the axe and the harp, in one enormous, unforgettable body — the proof that the Norse prized the word as highly as the sword, and that the two could live in one man.