Helga in fagra (the Fair)

Helga the Fair is the most beautiful woman in Iceland, Egil Skallagrímsson's granddaughter, and the still center of the small perfect tragedy of Gunnlaugs saga. Betrothed to the gifted, hot-tongued poet Gunnlaug Worm-Tongue, she waits while he sails abroad to win fame — and waits past the term agreed, until her family marries her to his smoother rival, the poet Hrafn. The two skalds destroy each other in a duel over her; both die. Helga is given little voice of her own — she is the prize the poets contend for — but the saga grants her one piercing closing image: married unhappily to a third man, she sickens and dies still gazing at the fine cloak Gunnlaug once gave her, the last thing she asks to hold. The beautiful woman fought over by poets, whose own grief outlasts them both and gets the saga's final, quiet word.