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kittiwakeIt is told of Gunnlaug that he was quick of growth in his early youth, big, and strong; his hair was light red, and very goodly of fashion; he was dark-eyed, somewhat ugly-nosed, yet of lovesome countenance; thin of flank he was, and broad of shoulder, and the best-wrought of men; his whole mind was very masterful; eager was he from his youth up, and in all wise unsparing and hardy; he was a great skald, but somewhat bitter in his rhyming, and therefore was he called Gunnlaug Worm-tongue.
The story begins with a guest of Thorstein Egilsson having a prophetic dream about his host's unborn daughter Helga the Fair. In his dream she appears as a swan fought over by an eagle and another fowl, and the remainder of the saga tells how her life unfolds as foretold, as the skalds Gunnlaug and Raven fighting over her.
Having read various Icelandic sagas before, I am now finding that the same characters pop up in more than one saga. Helga's father Thorstein Egillsson is the son of Egill Skallagrímsson and appears in Egil's Saga, and Helga spends her early life in the household of her uncle by marriage, Olaf Peacock, who has a much larger role in the Laxdaela Saga.
"Gunnlaugs saga ormstungu" was translated into archaic English by Eirikr Magnusson and William Morris in 1875, and I am not impressed by their translation of the poetry in this saga. Most of the skalds' songs are incomprehensible and I had to re-read them a few times before they started to make any sort of sense, which is not something I found when reading Egil's saga, for example.
The story begins with a guest of Thorstein Egilsson having a prophetic dream about his host's unborn daughter Helga the Fair. In his dream she appears as a swan fought over by an eagle and another fowl, and the remainder of the saga tells how her life unfolds as foretold, as the skalds Gunnlaug and Raven fighting over her.
Having read various Icelandic sagas before, I am now finding that the same characters pop up in more than one saga. Helga's father Thorstein Egillsson is the son of Egill Skallagrímsson and appears in Egil's Saga, and Helga spends her early life in the household of her uncle by marriage, Olaf Peacock, who has a much larger role in the Laxdaela Saga.
"Gunnlaugs saga ormstungu" was translated into archaic English by Eirikr Magnusson and William Morris in 1875, and I am not impressed by their translation of the poetry in this saga. Most of the skalds' songs are incomprehensible and I had to re-read them a few times before they started to make any sort of sense, which is not something I found when reading Egil's saga, for example.
