Hallgerðr Langbrók

Hallgerd Long-Legs is the most fatefully beautiful woman in Njáls saga — proud, vindictive, and long-memoried, the wife whose grudges drive much of the killing. Married three times (and the death of each husband trails behind her), she is matched at last to the hero Gunnar, and her thefts, slights, and refusals to forgive set feud after feud in motion around him. The saga makes her the human embodiment of the small, unforgiven insult that grows into slaughter. Her defining moment comes at the very end: Gunnar, besieged and his bowstring cut, asks her for two locks of her long hair to mend it — and she refuses, repaying a slap he gave her years before, and so lets him die. 'To each his own way of earning fame,' she says. Hallgerd is the saga world's great study of beauty wedded to an unforgiving heart — the wife whose memory for wrongs is longer than her husband's life.