BookTube channel with my awesome brother, Ed - The Brothers Gwynne
My personal BookTube channel - William Gwynne

Another saga on my module reading list. Papa Gwynne said this is one of his favourites, so of course I could not wait to dive in.

Egil's Saga is just fantastic. It transports us into a Norse family saga, with the main character being the titular character of Egil, who is an incredibly complex anti-hero. I love the pragmatic style to the storytelling and also in the mindsets of our characters, as we see their versions of justice and vengeance, how they deal with love and loss, loyalty and betrayal, tragedy and heroism.

Possibly my favourite text I've read for university so far!

5/5 STARS

The translation is very engaging, and honestly, Egil is such a raging dick that it becomes truly hilarious at times. (The scene with Armod o___o). This is probably my favorite saga that I've read so far.

Egil is one of the most stubborn, arrogant, and unlikable saga characters I have ever met, and yet I still love his antics and his ferocious take on life in this saga. Between all the characters and their refreshing differences and unique characteristics, to the way the saga never dips in its interesting moments of intensity, this is truly a joy to read and a great story of Icelandic saga lovers. It also has a lot of offer in the way of History (especially with the addition of ruling lineages) and an example of pretty well sourced vikings customs and culture, at least in Iceland.

3.5

Egil's Saga is my introduction to the Icelandic Sagas, and as such it was an experience much different than what I am used to. It depicts the world of the Viking Age, which I have read a fair amount about recently, but from a wildly different perspective than modern history or historical fiction books. Instead the adventures and struggles of the Myrar clan's founding generations is an event of recent, and deeply personal, history. The obsession with genealogies as understood markers of time and status can blow right past a modern reader (my eyes generally glazed past them), but they were essential to the initial audiences for this work when it was a spoken tradition. The plethora of names and family trees is how the Icelanders held onto and understood their history. When a member of the Myrar clan (or any other Icelander) heard about Skallagrim or Egil they understood those men's adventures to be the genesis of their own existence on the edge of the European world. In their forebears warring with Norwegian kings and Viking raiding there was a foundational spirit of independence and self-reliance that became part and parcel of the meaning of being an Icelander. So even when Egil's Saga gets repetitive or overloaded with names it remains a lively, living document of a people and place that could easily have been forgotten. The pleasure of reading such a work for me was akin to something like Beowulf in its ancient, but strangely familiar, rhythms and images of power and strife.