The Selfish Skald: The Problematic Case of the Self of the Poet of Sonatorrek

Abstract

The poem Sonatorrek, a poem on the loss of kin, attributed to the tenthcentury skáld Egill Skalla-Grímsson, is the object of this study. Themain objective of the first part of the article is to discuss the methodological problems related to discerning the context where the poem was composed. The attributions of the poem to the tenth century poet Egill, as well as to the thirteenth-century context of the composition of his saga, are difficult to sustain from the extant seventeenthcentury manuscript material. We must therefore consider at least three possible contexts for the composition of the poem. From this reasoning it is clear that we cannot establish with any certainty whether the representation of self in the extant text witnesses should be regarded as part of a tenth-, a thirteenth-, or even a seventeenth- century context. The second part of the article treats Sonatorrek as a representation of self, set in the various contexts that can be discerned from the sourcecritical discussion.