Kári Sölmundarson

Kári Sölmundarson is the avenger who closes the greatest of the sagas. Njáll's son-in-law and a seasoned fighting man, he is the one who fights his way out of the burning house at Bergþórshváll when Njáll, his sons, and his household are burned alive inside it — the sole warrior to escape the fire. What follows is his: a relentless, years-long pursuit of the burners across Iceland and over the sea to Orkney and Wales, hunting them down one and two at a time, even as the law grinds toward a settlement he will not accept while killers walk free. Kári's vengeance is the saga's long, dark engine — and yet it ends not in more blood but in reconciliation: storm-driven and shipwrecked, he comes at last to the house of Flosi, the very man who led the burning, and the two are reconciled. The avenger who finally lays the feud to rest by choosing, at the end of all that killing, to stop.