Egil Skallagrimsson was one of the greatest Viking heroes. A poet at three and a killer at seven, he was a man who drank prodigiously and wielded his battleaxe with fearful force. Egil was big and brave, an adventurous traveller who must have seemed immortal. For despite his enemies’ efforts, he lived to be 80. We know this because an Old Norse saga is devoted to his exploits. Egil’s Saga also describes a man with outsized bones, a huge misshapen skull and a motley collection of health problems that suggest something was seriously amiss. A thousand years on, Egil’s Saga is more than a tale of high adventure: it’s also a medical mystery.
NO ONE who met Egil Skallagrimsson could forget him – if they survived the encounter. Born in Iceland in AD 910, Egil’s life was so long and full of adventures that he was guaranteed a place in the Old Norse sagas. According to the stories, Egil made voyages to England, Germany and the Baltic as well as Scandinavia, took part in Viking raids and fought great battles. To his enemies, he was a dangerous man intent on bashing in their brains with his battleaxe. To his friends, he was a farmer and a poet who fought only to stamp out injustice.
As befits a warrior, Egil was “far above normal height” and heavily built. But he was also ugly – with Hallbjorn Half-troll and Grim Hairy-Cheeks as relatives, that’s perhaps not surprising. His forehead was wide, his nose huge, his chin massive. And he had an extraordinary repertoire of facial expressions. Egil’s Saga relates how at dinner with the English King Athelstan in AD 937, Egil sat upright, his head hanging forward, while he “jerked one eyebrow down to his chin and lifted the other up to his hairline”. He was, says the saga, “a man who caught the eye”.
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Even after his death in AD 990 Egil continued to amaze. Some 160 years later his family decided to move his remains to the graveyard of their new church. When they retrieved his bones, they found “they were much larger than normal human bones. The skull was astonishingly large and even more incredible for its weight. It was all ridged on the outside like a scallop shell.” Curious to know how thick the skull was, the priest struck it with the back of an axe. The blow left nothing worse than a small white mark. If Egil’s head wouldn’t break when he was dead, how had his enemies hoped to crack it when he was alive?
To those living in today’s less heroic age, Egil’s bones are not so much impressive as abnormal. Scattered throughout the saga are other references to Egil’s health. He had headaches. His face was odd, perhaps disfigured. Later in life he began to grow deaf, lose his balance and suffer bouts of lethargy. Eventually he was blind, impotent and complained bitterly about his cold feet.
In the mid-1980s, Thordudur Hardarson and Elisabet Snorradottir of the University Hospital in Reykjavik diagnosed Paget’s disease, a metabolic disorder that causes massive growth and remodelling of the bones and could also explain some of Egil’s other symptoms. In the US, Jesse Byock, an Old Norse expert at the University of California, Los Angeles, was also on the case: after a study spanning archaeology, medicine and literary analysis he reached the same conclusion.
Philip Weinstein, an environmental health expert at the University of Western Australia in Perth, now argues that although Paget’s disease is a possibility, it’s not the only one.
“His skull was all ridged on the outside like a scallop shell”
Weinstein grew up in Sweden, where he had “sagas for breakfast” and he and his brother played “Norsemen and Indians” based on The Vinland Sagas. In the late 1990s he was in New Zealand, investigating the health risks following the eruption of Mount Ruapehu. Volcanic ash is a source of highly toxic fluoride, excessive intake of which can lead to fluorosis – a disease that can cause abnormal growth of bone. New Zealanders were at little risk because they avoided drinking contaminated surface water. But the project set Weinstein thinking about Egil, a man from a volcanic country whose water would have come from streams and melting glaciers.
Weinstein dug out his copy of the saga and his dictionary of Old Norse and began to double-check Egil’s symptoms. The most compelling descriptions are those of Egil’s bones. While they suggest Paget’s disease, they are equally diagnostic of fluorosis. Either disease could have been responsible for his headaches and deafness. But impotence, blindness and lethargy, even his chronically cold feet could be the result of nothing more than old age, says Weinstein. “In the end, some of the most convincing evidence wasn’t so much what the saga said as what it didn’t say.” If Egil had Paget’s disease, he would have had severe pain in his bones and probably a few fractures. The saga mentions neither.
But is there any evidence Icelanders ever suffered from fluorosis? Livestock certainly did. When Hekla erupted in 1845, a local farmer described a massive thickening of his sheep’s bones. Later analysis revealed concentrations of fluoride 20 times the normal. There is circumstantial evidence that people developed the disease too: after the Laki eruption in 1783, eyewitness Jón Steingrímsson described how people who didn’t die immediately “suffered great pain. Ridges, growths and bristle appeared on their rib joins, ribs, the backs of their hands, their feet, legs and joints.”
However, Egil’s farm was on Iceland’s west coast, away from the more central volcanoes. The saga doesn’t mention any eruptions, and during the six-year-long eruption of the Eldgjá fissure which began in AD 943, Egil was allegedly in England. Weinstein argues that if Egil suffered from fluorosis, it was the result of chronic exposure rather than acute poisoning after an eruption. And the location of his farm was no protection. “It’s the smallest ash particles that carry the most fluoride and they travel furthest,” he says. And although fluoride falling into open waters would soon be diluted, there is one source of water that could pose a serious risk: meltwater from glaciers. Ash from past eruptions trapped in the ice would form a reservoir of fluoride. When the ice melted, the water could be a hazard for years.
Diagnosing disease from the words of a thousand-year-old story is fraught with difficulty. Some details fit both diagnoses, some neither. For instance, at 80, Egil is said to have leapt onto his horse carrying two chests of silver. But if his face had been disfigured by disease at the age of 27, by old age he should hardly have been able to walk. Perhaps his odd features were nothing to do with his illness. Or perhaps medieval storytellers didn’t stick strictly to the facts.
Egil’s saga is the story of a real man, but it wasn’t written down until 250 years after his death. For the sake of a good yarn, storytellers often placed their heroes at events their audience had heard of – even when they weren’t contemporary. Egil’s travels are likely to have been exaggerated. He might have spent more time in Iceland and might even have been at home during the Eldgjá eruption. Perhaps his facial disfigurement only became obvious much later in life, or perhaps his deeds as an old man were not quite so heroic. So how can scholars hope to make any sort of diagnosis? “There’s always a core of truth in the sagas, wrapped about by stories,” says Weinstein. “But Norse heroes are measured by their deeds not their looks, so Egil’s heroic doings, his travels and his killings are likely to have been exaggerated. But the descriptions of his physical appearance and of his bones are likely to be reliable.”
Weinstein is convinced that Iceland’s volcanoes are at least partly responsible for Egil’s condition. “I don’t think they provide the whole answer, and many of his symptoms sound like common problems of old age.” Until someone finds Egil’s bones, the mystery will remain just that. But, as Weinstein points out, the saga provides what might be the crucial clue: “Egil’s bones were buried by the edge of the churchyard at Mosfell…”
