Ástríðr

Astrid is the hunted mother at the very start of Olaf Tryggvason's saga — the widow whose flight saves, and nearly dooms, the future king of Norway. When her husband King Tryggve is murdered, the pregnant Astrid flees with what she can carry and hides on a holm in a lake, where she bears her son; from his first breath the boy is a marked child, hunted by the vengeful queen Gunnhild's armed men ranging the country to end the line. Astrid keeps him alive by flight, and at last sets out east across the Baltic toward her brother's safe court in Russia — but the sea-road east is a viking road too, and their ship is taken, and the three-year-old Olaf is carried off into the slavery from which he will only later be ransomed. Astrid is the saga's image of the mother as the thin thread on which a kingdom hangs — the fugitive widow whose desperate flight both preserves the royal child and delivers him, for a time, into bondage.