Gísli (of the Southern men)

Gisli is one of the sons of Thorgaut among the Southern men of Heiðarvíga saga — and his slaying is one of the killings that fuels the saga's long cycle of vengeance. He belongs to the party against whom the reluctant Bardi, schooled by his old fosterer Thorarin, finally takes the reprisal for the killing of Bardi's brother; his death is one stroke in the running battle on the heath that gives the saga its name. He is barely individualised — a name among the Southern men, a casualty in the tit-for-tat of blood — but he stands for the saga truth that a feud is not a single killing but a chain of them, each death answering another and demanding the next. Gisli is the saga's image of the feud's arithmetic — a man slain in the reckoning between two kindreds, one more name in the tally of blood that the heath-slayings exact before the long quarrel is at last settled.