Sonatorrek (Loss of Sons) is a Filmpoem of John Glenday’s poem The Lost Boy. The work is based on Glenday’s Uncle Alexander, who was in the D’ Battery 307th Brigade, Royal Field Artillery and died in the Battle of the Sambre on November 4th 1918, the same battle as Wilfred Owen. Glenday’s Grandfather, who was a blacksmith, signed the papers allowing his son to go into the Forces before he was of age.

“Sonatorrek is Alastair Cook’s incredible Filmpoem of John Glenday’s ‘The Lost Boy’, a poem after Egill Skallagrímsson’s Sonatorrek (Loss of Sons). Egill’s tenth-century piece is lyrical, confessional and personal. The dynamic of Sonatorrek is based on the notion of sacrifice: poetry is seen as a form of recompense for the loss of Egill’s sons, who are symbolically imagined as a sacrifice to Óðinn. The poem grapples with the disruption of the natural order of things, developing a framework of associations between disparate elements of nature, myth, the psyche, poetry, the metaphorical and the literal, in order to produce a kind of imaginative balance: to create, as it were, a sense of poetic justice out of the seemingly unjust trauma of loss.” {Debbie Potts}

The footage is used under a Creative Commons licence.