Grettir the Strong

Grettir Ásmundarson was trouble from boyhood. The saga lingers on his graceless youth at Bjarg: lazy at the chores his father Ásmundr set him, savage when crossed, repaying every task with sullen mischief and sharp verses. He killed a man young, over a quarrel about a food-bag, and was sent abroad.^[1]

He was strong past any measure — that was clear from the start — but the strength came welded to a temper that made enemies wherever he went, and a father who never warmed to him. The saga is building a particular kind of hero: not the golden Gunnarr or the wise Njáll, but a difficult, half-monstrous man whose gifts and his griefs spring from the same ungovernable root — closer to Egil than to anyone, and lonelier than either.

Abroad and at home, Grettir built a reputation as the strongest man alive. He cleared a haunted howe of its barrow-wight and took its treasure; he killed berserks who terrorised a Norwegian household at Yule; he wrestled bears and broke men who challenged him.^[1] For a while he was exactly what a saga hero should be — feats, fame, the admiration of all.

But the temper rode with the strength. Killings followed him, some just, some rash, and lawsuits trailed behind them. He was becoming a man too strong and too quarrelsome for ordinary society to hold — already drifting toward the edge of the law before the thing happened that pushed him over it for good. That thing was a ghost.

At Þórhallsstaðir a shepherd named Glámr — a big, surly, godless Swede — died on a haunted hillside one Yule and would not stay dead. He walked: rode the roofs by night, broke the doors, killed beasts and men and servants, until no one would stay on the farm and the whole valley lay under his terror. He was a draugr, the living dead, and the strongest dark thing in the sagas.^[1]

Grettir, drawn by exactly the kind of challenge no one else would face, came to the farm and waited. He let Glámr break in and lay still under his cloak while the monster tore the hall apart — and then they grappled. It was the hardest wrestling of Grettir's life: through the wrecked hall, out into the night, neither able to throw the other, the strongest living man against the strongest dead one.^[2]

Grettir broke him at last — drove him backward through the door so the roof burst, and they fell out into the open with the moon riding through cloud. And as Glámr lay beneath him, a cloud slid off the moon and the dead thing fixed Grettir with its eyes — the one sight, the saga says, that ever truly dismayed him.^[1]

And then Glámr, with a malice beyond any ordinary ghost, spoke his curse before Grettir could draw the blade. Grettir had gained, that night, only half the strength that would have been his; from now on he would grow no stronger. His deeds would turn to ruin and manslaughter; he would be outlawed; he would dwell alone. And worst — Glámr laid this weird on him: that he would carry the memory of those terrible eyes, would fear the dark ever after, and never bear to be alone, and that this would drag him to his death.^[2]

Then Grettir struck off his head. But the harm was done. The strongest man in Iceland walked away from Þórhallsstaðir afraid of the dark — and 'Glám-sight,' seeing things other than they are, passed into proverb. A hero cursed to need company, on the eve of a life that would force him into utter solitude: the trap of the whole saga, sprung by a ghost.

Glámr's words came true with grim precision. Abroad in Norway, Grettir — needing fire for his freezing shipmates — swam for a hall's flame and, by terrible mischance, the house burned with men inside it. Blamed for their deaths, he was condemned in his absence, and at the Thing in Iceland he was made a full outlaw.^[1]

It is the longest outlawry in all the sagas — nineteen years. An outlaw could be killed by anyone, anywhere, with no penalty; he had no home, no law, no protection, and a price on his head. For most men outlawry was a swift death. Grettir was too strong to be taken — and so his sentence became something crueller than death: nineteen years of being hunted, homeless, and, by Glámr's curse, unable to endure the solitude that outlawry forced on him. The one thing he could not fight was the one thing he was condemned to.

For nearly two decades Grettir lived in the wild places — the heaths, the lava-fields, the caves — moving always, taken sometimes and always breaking free, hunted by men who wanted the bounty and the fame of killing him. The saga fills these years with feats: he out-wrestles the men sent against him, survives ambushes, performs strength no one else could.^[1]

But the curse hollowed it all out. He could not stay anywhere alone, because in the dark Glámr's eyes came back to him; and an outlaw who cannot bear to be alone is a contradiction the world will eventually kill. While he was away, his good brother Atli was slain at home — and Grettir, outlawed, could not lawfully avenge him. The strength that made him unkillable could not buy him a single safe night's sleep.

At last Grettir found the one place that suited an outlaw cursed to need company: the island of Drangey in Skagafjörðr — a sheer rock rising from the sea, reachable only by ladder, rich with sheep and birds and impossible to storm. There he settled, and crucially he was not alone: his devoted young brother Illugi went into outlawry with him, and a thrall to keep the fire.^[1]

For a while it was as safe as his life could be — the curse's grip eased because he had his brother beside him. But the local chieftains wanted the island and the bounty on his head, above all Þorbjörn Öngull. They could not take Drangey by force. So Öngull turned to the one weapon strength could not answer: sorcery.

Öngull's foster-mother, an old witch, cursed a tree-root and sent it floating to Drangey; against all sense Grettir's axe glanced off it and gashed his own leg, and the wound festered and would not heal. Sick and weakening — the saga's strongest man brought low not by any blow but by witchcraft — Grettir lay helpless as Öngull's men finally climbed the rock.^[1]

Illugi stood over his dying brother and fought them off the doorway as long as a man could, and when he was at last taken he was offered his life if he would swear to let Grettir's death go unavenged. He refused, and they killed him too — one of the great loyalties in the sagas, a boy choosing death beside his brother over life without honour.^[2] Öngull cut off Grettir's head; the curse of Glámr had run its full course, exactly as foretold.

The saga has one last, astonishing reach. Þorbjörn Öngull had used black sorcery to kill an outlaw who could not otherwise be beaten, and the law turned on him for it — he was driven from Iceland and fled east, all the way to Constantinople, to serve in the emperor's Varangian guard.^[1]

And Grettir's half-brother Þorsteinn Drómundr followed him there — across the whole known world — joined the same guard, and at last killed Öngull in the streets of the great city, with Grettir's own short-sword, the one that had beheaded Glámr. The vengeance for an Icelandic outlaw's death is exacted in the heart of Byzantium: the feud's longest journey, and proof that no distance and no sorcery, in the end, outruns the duty of a brother. So closes the saga of Grettir the Strong — the mightiest man in Iceland, undone by a ghost's curse and a witch's root, and avenged at the edge of the earth.