Tvídægra (Two-Days' Heath)

Tvídægra Heath is the high, bleak moorland between the North Quarter and the west of Iceland — the desolate upland that gives Heiðarvíga saga, the 'Saga of the Heath-Slayings', its name. It is across this empty, weather-beaten country that the reluctant avenger Bardi leads his raid against the Southern men, and on the heath that his party is overtaken and the famous running battle is fought — a hard, scrambling fight over open ground far from any farm or help. The heath stands for the saga's grim, exposed character: vengeance carried out not in a hall or a homefield but in the trackless uplands, where men run each other down across the moor. Tvídægra Heath is the corpus's image of the wilderness as battlefield — the high lonely ground, between the settled quarters, where a long-nursed feud finally comes to blood under an open sky.