Skalla-Grimr

Skalla-Grímr Kveldulfsson (9. and 10. centuries) was a Norwegian, who was forced to emigrate to Iceland in the days of Haraldr hárfagri. His main claim to fame is that he was the father of Egill, but he also deserves a footnote in the history of Nordic literature for having composed the following stanza:

Nú's hersis hefnd

við hilmi efnd;

gengr ulfr ok ǫrn

of ynglings bǫrn.

Flugu hǫggvin hræ

Hallvarðs á sæ.

Grár slítr undir

ari Snarfara.

"Now the nobleman (Kveldulfr) has exacted revenge upon the king (Haraldr hárfagri); now wolf and eagle tread on the king's children. The hewn corpses of Hallvarðr (Hallvarðr harðfari and his people, that is the enemies) flew into the sea; the grey eagle tears the wounds of Snarfari (Sigtryggr snarfari was the brother of Hallvarðr harðfari)."

If the saga is to be believed, this is the first attested instance in the Nordic canon of a stanza with end rhymes. Of course, there are serious doubts about that. End rhymes didn't occur in Norse poetry until his son Egill composed the poem Hǫfuðlausn. It is mostly agreed that Hǫfuðlausn is correctly attributed to Egill, and he might have got impulses from England, where end rhymes did occur in Latin poetry. It is not impossible that his father invented the metre. Skalla-Grímr surely knew how to put a stanza together, there are others more likely attributed to him, and Egill, of course, inherited his genius from someone, but the consensus now is, that Egill most likely put the words in his father's mouth, when he regaled later generations with stories of his beginning.

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