Auðr Vésteinsdóttir

Aud is Gísli's wife, and hers is the fiercest wifely loyalty in all the sagas. Through her husband's thirteen long years of outlawry she shelters and sustains him, sharing his hiding-places among the Westfjords and his hunted, fugitive life without a word of complaint. Her great test comes when Gísli's enemy offers her a bribe of silver to betray where he hides: Aud takes the money, lets the man think he has won — and then flings the silver in his face and tells him exactly what she thinks of a man who would buy a wife's treachery. She fights at Gísli's side in his last stand, and after his death goes on pilgrimage rather than remarry. Aud is the saga world's purest portrait of loyalty — the wife whose faithfulness cannot be bought, broken, or outlasted, the still center of the outlaw's doomed and tender world.