Egill Skallagrimsson was the most original, imaginative and technically brilliant of the Old Norse skalds, poets whose orally composed and performed verses were as much revered in ninth- to thirteenth-century Scandinavia as heroism in battle. Egill's saga details his life-story as well as those of his immediate predecessors, from whom he inherited his massive build, his early baldness (Skalla in his name means 'bald') and his exceptional ugliness. An arch enemy of Erikr Bloo?ax, he was a notoriously difficult man and, as many of the poems demonstrate, was lethal when crossed. But he also made poems which show he was capable of concern for others, as well as romantic love. Physical, direct, inventive, even transformative, Egill's poetry conjures up a territory far beyond the normal scope of language, something that only the finest poets achieve.
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978-1-910345-92-4 (9781910345924)
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Schweitzer Klassifikation
Ian Crockatt is a prize-winnning poet and translator, and has published six collections of his own poetry. His poem sequence Original Myths, with etchings by the Scottish artist Paul Fleming, was nominated for the Saltire Society's Scottish Book of the Year Award in 2000. As a translator, he won the prestigious Schlegel-Tiek Prize for translation from German in 2014 for Pure Contracdiction: Selected Poems of Rainer Maria Rilke (Arc, 2012), and in the same year, his Crimsoning the Eagle's Claw: Viking Poems of Rognvaldr Kali Kolsson, Earl of Orkney (Arc, 2014) was a Poetry Book Society Recommended Translation.
