Grettir Ásmundarson

Grettir the Strong is the saga world's great outlaw — the mightiest man in Iceland and its most haunted. Difficult and unlucky from boyhood, he grows into a strength no living man can match; but his fate is sealed when he wrestles the corpse-monster Glámr and the dying ghost lays a curse on him: that his strength will grow no more, and that he will fear the dark for the rest of his days. For a man condemned to a life of hiding, the dread of darkness is a slow death sentence. Outlawed, he survives nineteen years — the longest outlawry in the sagas — on strength and wit, drifting from refuge to refuge, until he holes up on the sheer island of Drangey, the strongest man in Iceland reduced to a fugitive on a rock. No one can take him by force, so he falls to sorcery: a cursed log, a witch's spell, a wound that will not heal. Even the greatest strength, the saga says, is no proof against fear and the dark and the malice of small men.