Hen-Thorir

The saga's villain is a study in money without worth. Þórir began as the lowest sort of trader — a peddler who went about selling hens, which earned him the contemptuous byname Hænsa-Þórir, Hen-Thorir — and by sharp, grasping dealing he grew rich.^[1]

But wealth bought him no standing: he remained despised, friendless, and mean-spirited, a man whose only god was his goods. To buy a little respectability he fostered the son of a chieftain and pushed his way toward the company of his betters. The saga sets him up precisely — the new-rich miser with no honour — against the world of generosity and reputation the other sagas prize. Everything that follows tests money against worth, and finds money murderous.

Then came a season of deadly scarcity — a hay-need, when the winter fodder failed and men's livestock, and so their lives, hung on who had hay and who would share it. Hen-Thorir had ample hay and stock to spare; many had none.^[1]

The generous chieftain Blund-Ketil, with needy tenants to keep alive, went to buy hay from Hen-Thorir — offering fair, even handsome, terms. Hen-Thorir refused: he would not sell at any price, out of pure miserliness, though his barns were full and his neighbours' beasts were dying. In the saga's moral world this is a profound failure — to hoard plenty while others starve is the opposite of everything a good man owes his district. Blund-Ketil, pressed by his people's need, then took the hay anyway — but carefully left behind its full value in payment, taking nothing he did not pay for.^[2]

Hen-Thorir, who had been in the wrong by every measure, treated the taking of his hay — paid for — as a deadly affront. Rather than accept the fair price, he went seeking a great man to back a grievance against Blund-Ketil, and worked to turn his own meanness into a legal injury.^[1]

It is the same dark engine as in Bandamanna: the machinery of law and feud bent by the unworthy to harm the worthy. But where Bandamanna plays that as comedy, Hen-Thorir plays it as tragedy. The miser found men willing to ride with him, summoned Blund-Ketil, and escalated a hay-debt that should have been nothing into a matter of armed men and killing. The saga watches a petty, avaricious spirit drag a whole district toward atrocity because it could not bear to be paid for what it would not give.

It ended in fire. By night Hen-Thorir and his backers rode to Örnólfsdalr, dragged brushwood against Blund-Ketil's sleeping hall, and set it ablaze — the household waking only to find the roof burning over them.^[1]

Blund-Ketil called out to ask who had lit so hot a fire, and whether anything could buy peace. Hen-Thorir's answer is one of the coldest lines in the sagas: there was nothing for it but to burn. And they did not leave, the saga says, until every soul in the house — every man's child within — was burned up.^[2] It is the same horror as the burning of Njáll, stripped to its meanest cause: not a great feud of honour but a miser's spite over hay he had refused to sell. A generous man and his whole household murdered by fire because a rich one could not bear to share in a famine.

Blund-Ketil's son Herstein had been away that night, with his foster-father Þorbjörn the Strider — a strange man of whom it was said that he was 'not always all there where he was seen.' Herstein woke from a dream of his father coming to him wrapped wholly in flame, and they rose to find the fire's glow on the horizon.^[1]

What follows is the saga's eerie turn. The cunning Þorbjörn took the vengeance in hand — and worked it as much by uncanny craft as by law. He had the chieftain Oddr ride a burning brand withershins (against the sun) around the ruined hall to lay a formal claim to the land; and Þorbjörn himself, vanishing from sight, spirited away the dead man's surviving goods and livestock, the loads borne off by unseen hands.^[2] The pursuit of justice for the burning is laced with sorcery and sharp legal trickery — the saga's blend of the supernatural and the litigious, both turned against the murderer.

The burning could not be left unanswered. It led to a battle at Whitewater and then to the great suit at the Alþingi, where the powerful kinsmen of the dead pressed the case against the burners.^[1] The law ground forward — and for once it ground true: Hen-Thorir was condemned, and his miserable life ended as the saga clearly thinks it should, killed in the working-out of the vengeance.^[2]

The saga gives the burning a larger meaning, too: the tradition held that the scandal of Blund-Ketil's death helped drive reforms of the assembly system, the founding of new things and courts to handle exactly such cases. So a peddler's spite over a load of hay reaches all the way to the shape of Icelandic law. Hen-Thorir is the corpus's sharpest portrait of wealth without worth — a man who had everything but honour, and burned a better man rather than share his plenty, and was destroyed for it. Against him stands Blund-Ketil, who paid for what he took even at the cost of his life: the saga's verdict on which of the two was the richer.