Howard the Halt

The saga opens in the Westfjords, the same harsh, sea-cut corner of Iceland where Gísli was hunted. At the poor steading of Bluemire dwells Howard — once a viking, now old and halt, lamed in the leg, his fighting days long behind him.^[1] He is a man of good kin but no great wealth, and his strength is spent.

His treasure is his household: his wife Bjargey, called 'the most stirring of women' — sharp, proud, unbreakable — and above all their son Olaf, young and the doughtiest of men, great of growth and beloved. In the economy of a saga, a son like Olaf is both the family's glory and its most exposed nerve. The whole story turns on what happens to him, and on whether an old lamed man can answer for it.

Lording it over the district is Þorbjǫrn Þjóðreksson, the chief and priest of Icefirth — mighty, rich, and overbearing.^[1] He is the recurring saga figure of power without justice: a man so strong that he answers to no one, and knows it. By his own boast he has slain many men, including sackless ones — the innocent, the guiltless — and paid no price.^[2]

Such a man is a standing danger, because the law of Iceland has no executive: a chief who simply refuses to be brought to court can only be checked by another chief willing to face him. Þorbjǫrn has made himself untouchable. When he and the gifted young Olaf fall into a quarrel — over rights to a stranded whale, the kind of small property dispute that so often lights a saga feud — the mismatch is set: an arrogant killer against a brave young man with only an old lamed father behind him.

The quarrel ends as such quarrels do in the sagas: Þorbjǫrn kills Olaf. Howard's brave son — the doughtiest of young men, whose stout last defence the saga says was long in all men's mouths — is cut down by the overbearing chief.^[1] It is the wound the whole story turns on.

And then comes the second injury, which in saga logic is as grave as the first: Þorbjǫrn refuses all atonement. There is no weregild offered, no settlement, no acknowledgement — the killing of a sackless young man is left simply to stand, because the killer is too powerful to compel. For Howard the loss is double: his only son dead, and the death contemptuously unanswered. An old lamed man, alone, against the mightiest chief in the Westfjords — by every ordinary measure, there is nothing he can do.

Howard did the lawful thing first. Bent and aged, the old man rode to the Thing to seek atonement for his son — to put the killing before the assembly and have it judged.^[1] But his heart nearly failed him before the power of Þorbjǫrn, and the saga is clear-eyed about why: the law could declare a right, but it could not enforce one against a chief strong enough to ignore it.

Þorbjǫrn met the suit with naked arrogance — demanding to doom and deal in the case himself, to be his own judge, and so to bury it.^[2] Howard came away with nothing: no redress, no honour, only the humiliation of having begged and been refused. This is the saga's hard lesson, the same one Hrafnkell taught Sámr — that law without force behind it is empty, and that against an overbearing man the courts alone are useless. Howard rode home broken, and sank into a grief so deep it looked like the end of him.

What the law could not do, Bjargey did. While Howard lay sunk in mourning, his fierce wife kept the wrong alive and would not let it be forgotten — and at last she roused him.^[1] The scene belongs to one of the most charged roles in all the sagas: the goading woman (the hvǫt), the wife or mother who shames and spurs the men to vengeance when they falter.

Bjargey's word to Howard is famous in its dry confidence: she says there is no need to egg him on to the avenging of their son, for she knows the manhood that is in him.^[1] It is goading by faith rather than scorn — and it works. The old halt viking gathers himself, seeks out the backing of the upright chief Steinþórr of Ere, and what looked like a broken man's grief turns, at last, into a plan. The vengeance that the courts could not deliver, the household will.

The reckoning came. Backed by Steinþórr and risen out of his grief, old Howard the Halt led the attack, and Þorbjǫrn was slain — the overbearing chief who had killed a sackless son and scorned the law brought down at last by the man he had thought too old and broken to matter.^[1] The vengeance was late, but it was sure; the wrong, so long left to stand, was answered.

And then, unusually for a feud-saga, Howard gets an ending of grace. He does not die in the violence; he settles his affairs, sells his lands, and goes north, even sailing abroad, and in his old age comes into the new faith — bringing home great church-timber from which a church is later raised. He dies, as the saga's last chapter has it, full of years and honour: his grave set in that stately church, and Howard held ever after for a very great man.^[2] It is a quietly remarkable arc — a story that begins with a helpless lamed old man sunk in grief, and ends with him vindicated, at peace, and honoured — the rare saga where late vengeance is followed not by ruin but by rest.