Poetry
Sonatorrek
Egill Skallagrímsson · 960
Synopsis
A father has lost two sons: one carried off by fever, the other, the youngest, drowned in a storm. Twenty-five stanzas first tell of the grief that prevents speech and the line that is dying out, then the anger against the powers of the sea, Ægir and Rán, held responsible for the drowning, before the poet turns to Odin himself. The saga places its composition in the days following the burial of the youngest.
Context
The poem has survived only with the saga of its author, written between 1220 and 1240. The saga relates that, after burying his drowned son in the mound of Skalla-Grímr, the poet shut himself away to starve to death, and that his daughter Þorgerður turned him from it by persuading him to compose a song for the dead man, to be carved on a runic staff. The first stanza appears in the main medieval manuscripts, but the whole text rests on only two almost identical copies by Ketill Jörundsson, made from a lost manuscript; Snorri's Edda quotes one and a half stanzas. It is composed in kviðuháttr, a variant of fornyrðislag, and some read in it an echo of Odin's mourning for Baldr.
Who it is for
Twenty-five stanzas, in Old Norse, dense in kennings that require notes. The text is read alongside the saga, translated into French by Régis Boyer.
Prizes and reception
Margaret Clunies Ross observes that it is the skaldic poem that has received the highest esteem from critics since the end of the nineteenth century.