Gísli the Outlaw

Gísla saga opens under a shadow — a thrall's curse in the old country, killings, a burning — and the family, the Súrssons, carry the doom with them when they settle in the Westfjords of Iceland. At the heart of it are four men who should have been bound for life: Gísli, his brother Þorkell, his brother-in-law Vésteinn whom he loved, and Þorgrímr, married to Gísli's sister.^[1]

They moved to swear blood-brotherhood — the solemn rite of passing under a raised strip of turf, mingling blood, binding each to avenge the others. But at the last moment Þorgrímr refused to bind himself to Vésteinn, and so the oath collapsed half-made. In a saga, an oath that fails to form is more dangerous than one never attempted: it names exactly the fracture along which everything will break. These four would not all stand together — and so they would destroy one another.

The killing came in the dark, the cowardly way the saga most despises. Vésteinn, back in Iceland and warned not to come, came anyway — and was speared to death in his bed one night, the killer unseen, the weapon left in the wound.^[1]

Everyone understood, though no one could prove it, that the hand behind it was Þorgrímr's — the man who had refused the oath. Gísli drew the spear from his dead friend's body himself. The saga does not need to say what that means. A beloved man murdered in his sleep, the blood-debt fallen on Gísli, and the likeliest killer his own sister's husband: the broken oath had begun to pay out, and it would be paid in kind.

Gísli answered murder with murder, exactly mirrored. On a black autumn night he slipped into Þorgrímr's house, where his brother-in-law lay sleeping beside Gísli's own sister Þórdís, and drove a spear through him with the same secret thrust that had killed Vésteinn — a death for a death, wound for wound.^[1]

He got away unseen, and for a time no one knew the killer's name. It is the saga's terrible symmetry: the man who avenges a secret murder by committing one, against his own kin, to honour a friend his kin had killed. Gísli has done what honour demanded and what love demanded — and in doing it has set himself against his sister, his surviving brother, and the law. The trap is closing, and he sprang it himself.

Gísli could not keep it secret — because he was a poet, and the truth pressed out of him in verse. At a gathering he let fall a riddling stanza, ambiguous on its surface but, to the right ear, a confession of the killing.^[1]

The right ear belonged to his own sister. Þórdís, Þorgrímr's widow, caught the verse, unriddled it, and understood that her brother had killed her husband. She told her new protector — and Gísli was named. It is one of the sagas' sharpest strokes: the hero undone not by an enemy but by his own art, and exposed by the sister whose husband he had slain. Skill in poetry, the thing that makes Gísli admirable, is the very thing that destroys him.

Named as Þorgrímr's killer, Gísli was made an outlaw — and Þorgrímr's brother Börkr the Stout, who had married the widowed Þórdís, took up the hunt against him.^[1]

So began thirteen years of flight through the Westfjords — the second-longest outlawry in the sagas after Grettir's, and like Grettir's, a slow grinding-down of a man too able to be easily killed. Gísli moved between hiding-places and islands, sheltered by a dwindling few, hunted by Börkr and the trackers he hired. But where Grettir was cursed to be unbearably alone, Gísli had one thing Grettir never did: a wife who would not leave him.

The light in this dark saga is Auðr, Gísli's wife — the fiercest and most faithful wife in the whole corpus. Through thirteen years of outlawry she stayed with him in his hiding-places, shared his hardship, kept his secrets, and refused every inducement to give him up.^[1]

The saga tests her: Eyjólfr, late in the hunt, sends a man with a heavy purse of silver to buy her betrayal of Gísli's whereabouts. Auðr appears to take it — and then strikes the bribe-bearer across the face with the money-bag, drawing blood, and sends him off with the silver and her contempt. In a saga full of broken oaths and treacherous kin, her loyalty is the unbreakable thing, and the saga clearly loves her for it.

What wears Gísli down is not the hunt but his sleep. Through his outlaw years two dream-women visit him: a good one who comforts and counsels him, and a worse one who comes with horror.^[1]

As the end nears, the better dream-wife fades and the evil one takes hold — washing his hair in blood, binding a bloody hood about his brow, drenching him in gore. The dreams grow so terrible that Gísli, like Grettir before him, becomes afraid to be alone in the dark, unable to bear it when Auðr leaves his side.^[2] Two of the sagas' greatest outlaws, both undone in the same way: a strength no enemy can break, brought low by dreams that make solitude unendurable. The dreams even show Gísli his own last fight, fought and lost, before it comes.

The last night of summer, sleepless, Gísli left his house for a hiding-place in the crags of Geirþjófsfjörðr — but the dew and rime betrayed his track, and Eyjólfr the Grey came with fifteen men.^[1] Gísli took the high ground with Auðr and another woman beside him, each with a club in hand, and dared Eyjólfr to come up like a man.

The first attacker rushed the crag; Gísli cut him clean in two at the waist, and the halves fell either side. When Eyjólfr himself climbed up, it was Auðr who met him — she swung her club and broke his arm so he toppled back down the rocks. Gísli's tribute is one of the great lines of saga marriage: he had always known he was well wedded, he said, but never until now how well.^[2]

Twelve men rushed the crag at once. Gísli held them off with stones and blade, doing great deeds, until at last he was so wounded that his entrails came out — and he bound them up with his shirt and a cord, and fought on.^[1]

With the last of his strength he leapt down among his enemies and clove the man who had wounded him to the waist, dying in the same stroke, falling on him dead. The saga gives him the outlaw's perfect end: cornered, hopelessly outnumbered, his guts bound in his shirt, still dealing death as he died. Of all the deaths in the sagas it is among the most admired — a man the law had cast out for thirteen years, dying with a courage that shames the fifteen who came to kill him.^[2] Gísli Súrsson falls, and the broken oath of the saga's first pages is paid in full at last.