Egill Skúlason

Egil Skúlason is one of the eight confederate chieftains of Bandamanna saga — and the first whom the cunning old Ófeig works on in his campaign to break their greedy alliance. When the banded men gang together to despoil the self-made trader Odd, it is to Egil that Ófeig first comes at the Thing, sounding out his vanity and his appetite, planting the first seed of mistrust that will turn the confederates against one another. He is one of the gallery of grasping great men the saga's satire exposes — powerful, self-important, and ultimately outwitted by an old man's reading of his character. Egil Skúlason is the saga's image of the first domino — the confederate chieftain whom the trickster Ófeig approaches first, the opening move in the unravelling of the whole greedy alliance, a great man's avarice turned by a poor old man's cunning into the lever of his own faction's collapse.