Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 5, 1894.djvu/111

Rh for Iceland, and thirty men on each. Queld-Ulf steered the one that was there taken. Grim the Halogalander, son of Thore, son of Gunnlaug, son of Hrolf, son of Ketil Keelfarer, was captain with Queld-Ulf on the ship he steered. They kept ever in sight of each other at sea, and when they had been long at sea Queld-Ulf fell ill. Then he bade them make a coffin for his body if he died, and bade them tell Grim, his son, to take up his abode in Iceland, not far off where his coffin came to land, if this should happen Scald Grim raised a homestead hard by the burgh where the coffin of Queld-Ulf had come to land, and called it at Burgh  [at Borg], and he called the firth also Burghfirth." This, with the entries concerning the settlements and grants of Scald-Grim and his companions, furnish matter for much of §I. But there are also the bits out of the Kings' Lives; e.g., chapters viii and ix have bits of a paraphrase of the Raven Lay, chapters i, ii, iii, iv, v, viii, ix, xiii, xvi, xxii, have notices of Aulwer hnuf, Harold Fairhair's poet; chapters x, xiv, xvii, have references to the fur-trade and the Quens; and chapter xxii gives Thorolfs death words, good enough to be genuine. There was probably a short tale of Aulwer hnuf, now lost, that once contained a brief narrative of Thorolf's fate.

§II, the Egil's Saga proper, opens with a local anecdote of Scald-Grim, showing true tradition combined with false verses; chapter xxxviii has an anecdote of Scald-Grim and his axe; chapter xl a local nomenclative tale of Scald-Grim and Egil's nurse Brae; and lxi has a traditional account of Scald-Grim's death: all that remains of what has never grown into a separate Scald-Grim's Saga.

That a number of verses, such as those in chapters xl, xlvii, and xlviii, were in old metre, and were traditional, but probably not originally connected with Egil, Dr. Vigfusson noticed years ago.

The whole story of Winheath (by which Brunanburh is clearly intended) is false. There were no earls in