Laugar (Sælingsdalr)

Laugar is Guðrún's home in Laxdæla — the seat of the household at the heart of the saga's tragedy, and the place from which the ambush on Kjartan is launched. Here the proud Guðrún lives with her father Ósvíf and her brothers; here, when her jealousy and wounded love turn deadly, she goads her husband Bolli and her brothers into the waylaying that kills the golden Kjartan, the man she loved best. Laugar is the saga's image of the household where love curdles into killing — the Dales seat from which the fatal ambush rides out, the home of the proudest woman in the sagas at the moment her grief becomes a death-sentence for the man she could not have, the launching-point of the killing she will mourn the rest of her long life.