The Icelandic saga named after the tenth-century Viking poet Egill Skalla-Grímsson was written

. 1230 and is preserved in three redactions from the fourteenth century onwards. The fullest and earliest more or less complete text to survive is in the compilation of Sagas of Icelanders known as

(MS AM 132 fol.), but modern editions supplement this text from other manuscripts. The oldest manuscript fragment, known as theta, probably dates from the mid-thirteenth century and is the earliest evidence for the existence of the text. The two main manuscripts besides

are a fourteenth-century text in Wolfenbüttel and the seventeenth-century Ketilsbók copies of a lost fourteenth-century manuscript (AM 453 and 462 4to).

Like other Sagas of Icelanders, Egils saga

2226 words

Citation: Phelpstead, Carl. "Egils Saga". The Literary Encyclopedia. First published 19 October 2010 [https://www.litencyc.com/php/sworks.php?rec=true&UID=24931, accessed 21 November 2024.]

• View recommended reading for this article