Bjargey

Bjargey is Howard the Halt's wife — 'the most stirring of women', and the steel in a broken household. While her aging, lamed husband lies sunk in years of grief and helplessness after their son's murder by the untouchable chief Thorbjörn, it is Bjargey who keeps the wrong alive and the will to vengeance from dying with the old man's hope. Patient, fierce, and shrewd, she nurses the feud through the long fallow years, gathers what allies and resources she can, and at the right moment rouses her crippled husband from his bed and arms him for the reckoning the law would not give. She is the saga's purest example of the woman as the engine of vengeance — not wielding the weapon herself, but being the hard, unforgetting will that makes the men act. Without Bjargey, Howard would have grieved himself into the grave; because of her, the old viking rises one last time.