Egils Saga

320 Pages·2003·1.861 MB·English

by  Bjarni Einarsson

EGILS SAGA

EGILS SAGA
EDITED BY
BJARNI EINARSSON
VIKING SOCIETY FOR NORTHERN RESEARCH
UNIVERSITY COLLEGE LONDON
2003
© Sigrún Hermannsdóttir 2003
Published in cooperation with Stofnun Árna Magnússonar á Íslandi
The maps are based on those in Íslenzk fornrit II (1933)
ISBN: 978 0 903521 54 3
Reprinted by Short Run Press Limited, Exeter, in 2013
PREFACE
When he died in the autumn of the year 2000, Bjarni Einarsson had for a
number of years been working on an edition of Egils saga for English-
speaking students. He had completed the text of the saga, the Foreword,
Afterword and explanatory notes in English. A beginning had been made of
a glossary. At the same time he had been preparing a textual edition of the
Mö›ruvallabók version of the saga which was published in the year 2001
by Det Arnamagnæanske institut in Copenhagen (Editiones Arnamagnæanæ.
Series A. Vol. 19).
It has been decided by Stofnun Árna Magnússonar á Íslandi, where Bjarni
worked on the students’ edition, and the Viking Society for Northern
Research, with the agreement of Bjarni’s widow Sigrún Hermannsdóttir,
that this should be published by the Viking Society. Anthony Faulkes has
completed Bjarni’s work, adjusting the English parts where necessary and
revising the notes with the needs of the intended readership in mind, and
has compiled a glossary, incorporating many of Bjarni’s explanations of
difficult words and phrases, and also others from Halldór Halldórsson,
Eglusk‡ringar (1950), and Egils saga, ed. Bergljót S. Kristjánsdóttir and
Svanhildur Óskarsdóttir (1999). The remainder of the vocabulary has been
glossed using the standard dictionaries, though occasionally le mot juste
has been found either in the translation by Christine Fell (1975) or in that of
Hermann Pálsson and Paul Edwards (1976). In consultation with me Dr
Faulkes has introduced various changes to the orthography of the Icelandic
text in order to reflect the characteristic word-forms of the manuscripts.
This had also been the general policy of Bjarni, but we have now taken it
somewhat further than he had done. Karl Óskar Ólafsson has read proofs of
the entire text and checked it against Bjarni’s 2001 edition, and also compiled
the Index of Names. Before Bjarni’s death Keneva Kunz went through the
English parts of the book, and Bjarni also received valuable advice on
language and style from Theodore Andersson and Robert Cook, for which
he was most grateful.
Stofnun Árna Magnússonar is very pleased that it has been possible to
publish this book so soon after agreement was reached with the Viking
Society, and wishes to express its thanks to Anthony Faulkes for his co-
operation and significant contribution to its preparation.
Vésteinn Ólason
Reykjavík, July 2002

CONTENTS
FOREWORD....................................................................... ix
SELECT BIBLIOGRAPHY..............................................xiii
MANUSCRIPTS AND FRAGMENTS CONSULTED..... xv
EGILS SAGA....................................................................... 1
AFTERWORD ................................................................. 183
GLOSSARY ..................................................................... 190
INDEX OF NAMES......................................................... 292
MAPS
The Surroundings of Borg.................................................viii
Southern Norway.............................................................. 303
Northern Norway.............................................................. 304
Borgarfjƒr›r................................................ inside back cover

FOREWORD
The purpose of the present edition of Egils saga is both to provide an
annotated text of the saga for English-reading students who wish to read the
saga in its original language, and to offer a revised text of the saga based on
a fresh reading of the chief manuscript, Mö›ruvallabók (AM 132 fol.,
Reykjavík), a fourteenth-century collection of Sagas of Icelanders.
In addition to the text preserved in Mö›ruvallabók (M), there are two
other extant redactions of the saga, W and K, both inferior to M. The main
manuscript for W is a defective fourteenth-century codex preserved in Die
Herzog August Bibliothek in Wolfenbüttel (9. 10. Aug. 4to). K is preserved
in two almost identical copies, AM 453 and 462 4to, made by Ketill
Jörundsson (d. 1670). In addition, parts of the saga are preserved in some
parchment fragments and in whole, partially conflated, texts in later paper
manuscripts. Among the first is the oldest fragment of a Saga of Icelanders
in existence, the fragment called q, from about the middle of the thirteenth
century. This fragment seems to present an early, verbose, text of the M-
class. Several seventeenth-century paper manuscripts are of special interest
as they contain copies of the Egils saga text derived from Mö›ruvallabók
before two folios of it were lost. In the present edition these two lacunas are
filled with a text based on these manuscripts. Of great interest also are two
eighteenth-century paper manuscripts and one from the early nineteenth
century, which although they contain a conflated text of the saga, have
preserved apparently old passages of the M-class, partially in close agreement
with the text of the q-fragment. The three last-mentioned manuscripts belong
to Landsbókasafn in Reykjavík (Lbs.), and when collectively quoted here,
they have the designation Eyf3 (alluding to their place of origin in Eyja-
fjör›ur, northern Iceland).
The M-text contains some important episodes lacking in W and K, and it
is the only one of the manuscripts to contain the poem Arinbjarnarkvi›a,
though defective and written on a page following the text of the saga. On
the other hand, M has only the first stanza of the poem Sonatorrek and
nothing at all of the poem Hƒfu›lausn. Only M has the first stanza and the
refrain of a poem of praise about A›alsteinn konungr (King Athelstan) and
the first stanzas of two so-called ‘shield-poems’, while nothing is preserved
of these in W and K, except that the refrain is preserved in W. But K and
W, though generally inferior to M, also have their merits. Most important,
x EGILS SAGA
K contains the only complete text of Sonatorrek, and both K and the
Wolfenbüttel-codex have Hƒfu›lausn. In this, as in most editions, all three
poems have been put into the saga at the appropriate places.
Compared with the oldest fragment of the M-class manuscripts, q, and
also in comparison with some passages in K and W, the prose of Egils saga
in M is clearly the result of a determined effort to abbreviate the text (the
omission of the three long poems shows the same intention). On the whole
this effort has succeeded very well, so that the M-text of Egils saga is a
prime example of the much admired concise saga style. But the scribe was
careless in too many places, leaving out essential words or even lines. The
present edition, though based on M, supplies indispensable words and letters
which the scribe of that manuscript omitted.
This edition does not at all attempt to present the total evidence of the
manuscripts; in a few instances, however, q and the three late Lbs. manuscripts
(Eyf3), have been cited. In rare instances short passages from the other two
redactions have been added to the saga text in angle brackets (e.g. the ending
of the saga). Selected readings from the two other redactions, and from later
manuscripts which fill lacunas in W, and also from a few manuscript frag-
ments of the same class, are occasionally cited in the footnotes if they seem
to preserve a more original reading or offer additional information. It should
be noted that the three Lbs. manuscripts (Eyf3), and AM 463 4to and AM
560 d 4to, as well as the W-fragments, partially represent collateral branches
of the W-tradition. AM 560 d 4to also contains a passage belonging to the
M-class. Words inserted in the main text are distinguished by angle brackets,
and when they are borrowed from the other redactions, the source is given
in a footnote, though emendations in the verses are not always noted. In
passages supplied from paper manuscripts where the text of Mö›ruvallabók
is defective, too, some obvious errors are corrected and apparent omissions
supplied without detailed textual notes, and late word-forms are replaced.
The saga is printed here with the normalised orthography used in the Íslenzk
fornrit editions of the sagas; the variant readings in the footnotes have also
been normalised. In the poems archaic forms are as a rule not supplied except
where the metre requires them.
In all redactions the saga is divided into chapters, though the division is
not always the same. In Mö›ruvallabók, as a rule, a heading in red ink gives
the content of the following chapter. In a few instances the heading is only
capitulum and in two cases the space has remained empty. The headings
were written by another hand than that of the chief scribe, and still another
hand copied some of the stanzas, filling blank spaces left for that purpose;
in three cases the space left is still blank (and with no stanzas in the