Herstein Blund-Ketilsson

Herstein is Blund-Ketil's son in Hænsa-Þóris saga — the young man who is away the night his good father is burned alive, and who becomes a mover of the vengeance that follows. Spared the fire by absence, he carries the grief and the duty of answering it, and the saga marks him with an uncanny touch: he is warned of the disaster by a dream, the kind of foreknowing that runs through the corpus. He works, with his kin and allies, to bring the burners to justice through the lawsuits and reprisals that the burning of a beloved chieftain sets in motion. Herstein is the saga's image of the heir to a wrong — the son who survives the atrocity that takes his father, dreams its coming too late to prevent it, and is left to carry the long, hard work of seeking redress for a killing he was not there to stop.