Hildigunnr

Hildigunn is one of the great goaders of the sagas — the widow whose grief, turned to fury, sets the Burning of Njáll in motion. When her husband Höskuld, a gentle and well-loved man, is treacherously killed, she keeps his blood-stiffened cloak unwashed, and at the decisive moment she flings it over the shoulders of her uncle, the reluctant chief Flosi, so that the dried blood and clotted gore shower down on him, and shames him with a fierce speech into taking the vengeance honour demands. It is the hvöt, the whetting, at its most terrible — a woman using a dead man's bloody cloak as a weapon to drive a hesitating man to slaughter. Hildigunn embodies the saga truth that the women, barred from fighting themselves, are often the engines of the feud — making the men act, and answerable, in their own way, for the blood that follows.