What Can the Icelandic Sagas Teach Us about Prince?

Part two: the aesthetics of “rewilding”

My mother said
I would be bought
a boat with fine oars,
set off with Vikings,
stand up on the prow,
command the precious craft,
then enter port,
kill a man and another.

—attributed to Egil Skallagrimson at the age of 7, trans. Bernard Scudder

Let’s go crazy, let’s get nuts,
look for the purple banana
‘til they put us in the truck, let’s go.

—Prince

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Photo by Steinar Engeland on Unsplash

Egil’s Saga can be disconcerting for the modern reader, largely because of the protagonist’s utter selfishness and his apparently endless capacity for violence paired with his remarkable subtlety and brilliance as a poet. There is a certain wildness to him that does not easily find accommodation within our world of social values—which can lead to a tendency to try to “civilize” him by focusing on his poetry as a way to frame his behavior within some kind of ethical system.

I would like to invert that tendency: instead of civilizing him, I would like to “rewild” him. Egil’s poetry is his attempt to understand and express in a human way (i.e., with language, with art) his animal nature, his essential wildness, as well as his human understanding of his mortality. This wildness and this mortality are inextricably tied together, as animal instincts have evolved to preserve and perpetuate life in a world filled with violence and death. The saga itself, in its characteristic “saga style,” does not attempt such an understanding in its prose passages, as it simply describes Egil’s outward behavior with no interiority. Unlike, say, a modern novel, which will show the inner life through free indirect discourse or internal monologue, Egil’s Saga gives us a protagonist who speaks his interiority aloud, in verse. In reading his poetry, therefore, we should look for the wildness. Doing so changes the nature of the reading experience and helps us to contemplate our own animal natures. Instead of casting moral or ethical judgments of Egil’s actions, let’s embrace an “aesthetics of rewilding” and try to understand him for what he is—a human animal.

Why do “animals strike curious poses” in “When Doves Cry”? Because they sense the animal in the human. They sense our wildness. (“They feel the heat, / the heat between me and you.”)

The saga makes Egil’s animal nature apparent through his genealogy. His Norwegian grandfather is named Ulf (“wolf”) and is nicknamed Kveldulf (“nightwolf”) because he “went to sleep early in the evening and woke up early in the morning. People claimed he was a shape-shifter and they called him Kveldulf” (page 3).¹

While the saga does not actually show him changing into a wolf, there is at least one moment in the text that features a literal shape-shifter, and we do see Kveldulf, as well as his son Skallagrim, overcome by a berserker rage, a state associated with werewolves and werebears. Egil inherits these tendencies from his father and grandfather, but he is also a great poet, which allows us to peer behind the mask and into his human/animal ambivalence.

In an exemplary episode, Egil is the captive of his great enemy, King Eirik Bloodaxe, who has been usurped from the throne of Norway and has taken residence in York in his exile. Egil is shipwrecked there and finds himself at Eirik’s mercy. Here his animal instinct for self-preservation blends with the expressive capacity of his poetry. His friend Arinbjorn negotiates for him an opportunity to save his head by composing a poem of praise for Eirik. The result is “Head Ransom,” a poem of remarkable ambivalence and irony, which manages to convey praise for Eirik in a way that also expresses Egil’s contempt for him. While the verses name Eirik, the bellicose actions of animalistic wildness that they describe can be more accurately be attributed to Egil himself rather than to the King. The final two verses, however, carry devastating irony:

King, bear in mind
how my ode is wrought,
I take delight
in the hearing I gained.
Through my lips I stirred
from the depths of my heart
Odin’s sea of verse
about the craftsman of war.

I bore the king’s praise
into the silent void,
my words I tailor
to the company.
From the seat of my laughter
I lauded the warrior
and it came to pass
that most understood. (Page 132)

Egil has learned to tame his wildness in certain contexts, to use his human capacity for complex poetic language in order to fulfill his animalistic instinct for self-preservation. The final stanza here suggests that his poem is the only possible instance of praise for Eirik, delivered under compulsion, since he bears it “into the silent void.” His “delight” derives not only from the effectiveness of the poem but also from his ability to express two opposite meanings at once, one of which preserves his life while the other conveys his actual feelings. He praises Eirik from “the seat of my laughter,” which is a kenning for mind, but the particular choice of kenning implies that he laughs at the king as he lauds him.

Elsewhere in the saga, Egil’s poetry conveys his erotic desire, another aspect of his animal, bodily nature, which he is unable to voice openly, and so he reveals it through a kind of code. When his brother Thorolf marries Asgerd, their foster-sister, Egil does not attend the wedding because he claims to be ill. The subsequent episodes make it clear that Egil is in good health, but the saga does not explain why he prevaricates. Again, the saga does not express interiority in prose, but shows us only exterior actions. For feelings, we have to wait for Egil’s verses, and in this case we have to wait for a long time, until after Thorolf’s death, at which point we discover that Egil has always loved Asgerd. When his friend Arinbjorn notices his melancholy, he assumes that is because of the death of his brother, but then Egil speaks this verse:

The goddess of the arm where hawks perch,
woman, must suffer my rudeness;
when young I would easily dare
to lift the sheer cliffs of my brow.
Now I must conceal in my cloak
the outcrop between my brows
when she enters the poet’s mind,
head-dress of the rock giant’s earth. (Page 103)

Again, the poetry becomes the means through which Egil both expresses and conceals his essential desire. In this case, Asgerd’s name is concealed in the final line. Her name means “god-fence,” and the line cites a story in which a rock giant is commissioned to build a fence around the mountain home of the gods; a “head-dress” forms a kind of fence around the crown of the head. (A colleague of mine once remarked that it is surprising that anyone ever actually got married in medieval Iceland, because the love poetry is so obscure.) Once again, Egil’s poetry does not “civilize” him. Rather, it expresses his animal desires through human art.

There are, however, limits to such expression. What happens when animal desires fade and self-preservation, therefore, no longer seems important? Most of the warrior-poets in the sagas (and there are others—Hallfred “Troublesome-poet” and Gunnlaug “Serpent-tongue,” for example) live fast and die young. Egil is the exception and lives to old age in Iceland after retiring from his life of piracy, and the saga documents his infirmities as he ages and his body fails. When two of his sons die, one in a shipwreck and the other of a fever, he determines to starve himself to death but fails to do so after his daughter, Thorgerd, tricks him into drinking milk and convinces him to compose a poem instead. The result is one of the masterpieces of skaldic verse, Sonnetorek, “On the Death of Sons.”

The poem expresses his inconsolable grief and his loss of faith in Odin, the god he has followed all his life, as he resolves simply to wait for his own death:

Now my course is tough:
Death, close sister
of Odin’s enemy,
stands on the ness:
with resolution
and without remorse
I will gladly
await my own. (Page 176)

There are, however, a couple of ironic points to make here. First, Egil’s despair finds its eloquent expression through poetry, which is the primary gift that Odin, the god of poetry, has given him. Also, the poem apparently consoles him: “Egil began to recover his spirits as he proceeded to compose his poem, and when it was finished, he delivered it to Asgerd and Thorgerd and his farmhands, left his bed and sat down in the high seat” (pages 176-177). It turns out that the same gift of poetry that has allowed him to express his desires so eloquently also comforts him after these desires have drained away, and it provides the means through which he may face that other animalistic, bodily reality: death.

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That bodily reality of death and that animalistic desire are also the primary focus of Prince’s music—and he is an artist who embraces an aesthetics of rewilding. Next week, in the final installment, we will place Purple Rain next to Egil’s Saga and consider how they speak to each other. While they both confront wildness, Prince will offer some different conclusions.

Thanks for reading, from my fancy internet Odinic shrine to yours.

Photo by Kristijan Arsov on Unsplash

1. Quotations are from Egil’s Saga. Trans. Bernard Scudder. London: Penguin, 2002.