I recently read Egil's Saga, one of the best known and most extensive of , and one that sets the tone for many of the other sagas in the collection I am reading. I almost took a class with Christina von Nolcken when I was at the University of Chicago, so I was quite interested to find that she had an online essay on Egil: Egil Skallagrimsson and the Viking Ideal. A slightly oversimplified view of the sagas is that when they were not raiding Denmark or the British Isles, the Vikings were generally either engaged in killing each other or suing each other for wrongful death. One of the most interesting literary features of the sagas is that major characters such as Egil are not only explorers, plantation owners, and warriors, but also poets. Egil's speeches at significant moments are spoken in verse, and it is clear that the Vikings esteemed poetry very highly.