Eyvindr skáldaspillir

Eyvind, called Skáldaspillir — 'the Plagiarist', for echoing older poems — is the court poet of Hakon the Good, and the maker of the corpus's most beautiful reconciliation in verse. When the Christian Hakon falls at the battle of Fitjar, dying of an arrow-wound and asking to be buried as a heathen, it is Eyvind who composes the Hákonarmál — the great lay in which the valkyries are sent to fetch the fallen king, and the heathen gods themselves welcome the Christian Hakon into Valhalla, honouring him for having spared their temples. The poem ends with the famous lines that no king so good shall come again while the wolf's age endures. Eyvind is the saga's image of the poet as memory and reconciler — the skald whose verse takes a king the old gods might have rejected and gives him, lovingly, a place in their hall, the last great pagan poem composed for a king who half belonged to the new faith.