Borg a Myrum

By A. Smith

Kveldulf, Egil Skallagrimsson's grandfather, dies before his ship reaches Iceland; in Chapters 27 and 28 of Egilssaga we learn of his death and burial at sea, and that Kveldulf's coffin drifts to shore near the future site of Borg, and thus marks what will become the site of his son Skallagrim's settlement.

The View from Borg

In the story of Kveldulf's coffin we have a more macabre retelling of the classic land-taking of Thorolf Mostur-Beard and others like him, who used more prosaic high-seat pillars and the like to act as the instruments of the gods in marking out settlement sites. Thus Skallagrim's settlement at Borg, like Thorulf's at Thorsnes, seems cosmically ordained.

Kveldulf's legacy to Egil comprises more than just the site of the family farm, however: Egil's saga is in some sense about multivalence, ambiguity, and the struggle between light and dark forces in individual characters, within families, in marriage and political relationships, etc.: the ugly brother balances the handsome one (although ugly seems too bad to die in Egilssaga, and only the good seem consistently to die young!), light attibutes counter-balance dark ones, the warrior spirit grapples with the poetic soul, etc.; this multivalence is made very clear right in Chapter 1 when we learn that Egil's grandfather the ruthless viking was named "Kveldulf" or "evening-wolf" and that "there was talk of his being a shape-shifter"; these types are usually said to go to bed early in the sagas, for the obvious reason that they are lycanthropes: in this case, a werewolf. Moreover, Egil's grandmother was the daughter of Kveldulf's good friend and fellow viking Berle-Kari, who was himself a Berserkr; ""Berserkr" means "bear-shirt", and these battle-frenzied warriors were themselves associated with shape-shifting: in their case into bears, of course. Indeed, this balance between human and bestial identity is to be associated with the god Odin, he who himself takes lives but gives poetry, he who was the god of Egil himself, and he to whom both ulfhednar and berserkir were votaries. Egil himself alludes to the duality of his chosen deity in his "Sonatorrek" ("Lament for my Sons") in Chapter 78.

An additional point of importance about this site and its relationship to Egilssaga is that Snorri Sturluson, who is widely credited as the author of of the saga, has a compelling connection to Borg, Egil's ancestral farm: Snorri lived at Borg for a time, and spent most of his adult life in the vicinity of Borgarfjord.

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