Identity
According to Egil's Saga, the Kylfings were trading and plundering in Finnmark around the year 900. Thorolf Kveldulfsson, King Harald's tax agent in northern Norway, engaged Saami scouts to monitor the Kylfings' movements and report back to him. Countering their raids, he is reported to have killed over a hundred Kylfing marauders.
Some scholars see them as Scandinavians while others consider them to have been a Finnic tribe, and assert a connection between the word Kylfing and the Finnish, Saami, and Karelian myths of Kaleva. Elsewhere they are described as a mixture of Norse and Finnish people who were employed as mercenaries and tax-agents by Scandinavian rulers; in this context Ravndal interpreted the kylfa element to refer to a "club" in the sense of organization. Arbman argues that the Kolbiagi were a separate fur-trading guild. Postan et al., on the other hand, hypothesize that Kolbiag denoted a junior participant in a Varangian trade guild, rather than a separate group.
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