Life-Cycles of Men and Trees in Sonatorrek

Abstract

According to Snorri Sturluson’s Egils saga Skalla-Grimssonar, the warrior poet Egill Skallagrimsson composed Sonatorrek (‘On the Loss of Sons’) in response to the death by drowning of his son Boðvarr (c.960), who was shipwrecked off the coast of Iceland during a sudden storm. Egill found Boðvarr’s lifeless body washed up on the shores of Iceland, and bore it to be buried within the mound where his own father Skallagrimr lay at rest.1 Two strophes of the poem are devoted to another of Egill’s sons, Gunnarr, who had fallen victim to a sottar brimi (‘burning sea-fever’, Sonatorrek 20; Nordal 1933, 246-56) a little while before. In Sonatorrek, Egill appears to make a subtle allusion to an enigmatic tradition also preserved in the Old Norse Voluspa, in which wooden figures are found upon the seashore and brought to life through the endowment of human gifts.