Gyða

Gyða is the proud chief's daughter whose refusal founds a kingdom — the woman at the very start of the making of Norway. When the young king Harald sends his men to woo her, she sends them back with a stinging answer: she will not waste herself on a king who rules only a few districts, and will have him only when he has made himself master of all Norway, as other kings have made themselves masters of whole lands. Where a lesser man might have raged, Harald took her scorn as a challenge and swore the great oath — not to cut his hair until all Norway was his — that drove the whole unification. So the founding of the single Norwegian kingdom, and with it the emigration that settled Iceland and the whole world of the sagas, traces back to one proud woman's refusal. Gyða is the saga's image of scorn turned to history — the spark, in a single contemptuous answer, of everything that follows.