Demon, killer and drunkard, poet, lawyer and farmer: Egil is the most individual and paradoxical character to emerge from the Icelandic Sagas.From the time when Egil performs his first murder at the age of six to the more peaceful years of his dotage, he dominates this panoramic Viking history. Ugly, brutal and ruthless on the one hand, intelligent and capable of great sensitivity on the other, he remains an ambivalent figure in the reader's imagination.Egil's Saga is thought to have been written by Snorri Sturluson in about 1230. Embracing five generations, commencing with Egil's grandfathers and ending with Egil's grandson, it chronicles the wars, rivalries and tensions of the ruling clans of Iceland and Norway. Adding flesh to the bare bones of historical fact and blending invention with legend, the Saga gives a wide-ranging view of life in the Viking world of the ninth and tenth centuries.
