Earl Sigurðr of Orkney

Earl Sigurd of Orkney is the Norse lord of the western isles whose death at Clontarf joins the Icelandic feud to the great Irish battle. A powerful earl and once Kári's lord, he carries into the battle of Clontarf in 1014 the famous raven banner woven by his mother — a banner that brings victory to the host it flies before but death to the man who bears it. As his standard-bearers fall one after another, none will take it up, and Sigurd at last carries it himself, and falls. His death is one of the threads by which Njáls saga reaches out of Iceland into the wider history of the viking world: it is in his Orkney hall that Kári had earlier killed one of the burners, and at Clontarf that some of the saga's surviving feud-figures meet their ends. Earl Sigurd is the saga's image of the doomed banner-glory of the western earls — victory and death woven into the same standard, carried at last by the lord himself.