Egil came from a line the sagas mark as not entirely safe to house. His grandfather Kveld-Úlfr, 'Evening-Wolf,' turned savage and heavy after dusk in the way Icelanders meant when they said a man was shape-strong. His father Skalla-Grímr, bald and black-humoured, once killed a man in a ball-game temper within sight of his own young son, and would have killed the son too had a servant woman not carried the boy off. Egil kept the pattern. He put together his first verse at three. At seven, beaten at a game and cheating, he fetched an axe and drove it into the skull of an older boy, and his mother's judgement on the killing was that he had the makings of a Viking.
His quarrel with kings ran for decades. He killed a son of Eiríkr Bloodaxe and Queen Gunnhildr, then raised a níðstöng against the pair, a hazel pole topped with a horse's head and a rune-curse cutting them off from their land and their luck. Years later a storm wrecked him in Northumbria and dropped him into Eiríkr's hall at York, condemned to hang at daybreak. Egil sat up through the dark and built the king who wanted him dead a poem of twenty stanzas, the first Norse verse to carry end-rhyme all the way through. He spoke it at dawn. Eiríkr, over the plain objection of his queen, let the neck keep its head, and the poem was named Höfuðlausn, 'Head-Ransom.'
The poem that outlasted even that one came out of grief. When his son Böðvar drowned in a squall, Egil laid the body in the family mound, shut himself in his bed-closet and lay down to starve. His daughter Þorgerðr talked her way in, shared seaweed with him to sharpen his thirst, slipped him milk by a trick, then argued that he should stay alive long enough to make Böðvar a memorial. Sonatorrek, 'the hard loss of sons,' is a father cursing the sea-goddess Rán and Odin for the theft, then bending, slowly, toward a cold gratitude for the one thing the god had not taken back: the words to say it. Egil died old, blind and ill-tempered, having reportedly buried two chests of King Athelstan's silver near Mosfell that no one ever found. Generations later his bones were moved, and a priest struck the skull with an axe to test it; the blade whitened it but left no crack, which readers now cite as a fingerprint of Paget's disease, the bone disorder that also fits the ridged, overgrown head the saga keeps circling back to.