Reading Egill Skallagrímsson’s : Hfuðlausn (Head-Ransom) as Parody

Abstract: Hfuðlausn opens with the image of the poet’s modest ship-load of explicit praise for King Eirík and a smuggled cargo of hidden scorn. The poem is under the aegis of Óðinn, master of deception and, in aquiline form, purveyor of the mead of poetry, the anal squirts of which are the inspirational elixir of second-rate poets and sycophants of poor kings. The combination of miniaturization and scurrility reveals Egill’s parodic intent, which informs the main mock-eulogistic part of the poem. In its present form the work may not be authentically Egill’s. If Snorri had a hand in the extant version of Egill’s poem and saga, the parody and pastiche of Hfuðlausn may be juxtaposed with his own normative, genre-true Skúladrápa . Hfuðlausn is to be put under the aegis of tvíræði and tvíkent , ambiguity and double-meaning. The pursuit of word associations and word-play is on a path mostly untaken in contemporary editorial and critical efforts directed to Old Norse-Icelandic literature. Not only do we miss the innuendo attending a figurative small ship’s stern and its questionable cargo, and their resonance in the larger myth of the nature of poetic inspiration and its source in transaction, violence, and theft, we are not even predisposed to look for them. At best we become engaged in focused centripetal philological puzzle-solving in preference to bedazzled centrifugal exploration of the linguistic and poetic diversity and richness that envelop our extant texts. This essay seeks to establish that both Egill’s and Snorri’s praise poems, so different in intent, resonate in unexpected ways in Icelandic literary history of the tenth and early thirteenth centuries.