Ketilríðr

Ketilrid is the heroine of the sagas' great romance and one of their most quietly heroic women — Holmkel's daughter, fostered beside Viglund the Fair and his equal in worth and beauty, who loves him from childhood and keeps that love whole through every reverse fate and her family throw at them. Where the famous saga women are goaders and avengers, Ketilrid's strength is constancy: parted from Viglund by scheming kin, married off against her heart, believing him perhaps lost, she neither betrays him nor breaks. Her faithfulness is the still center the whole romance turns on, and it is rewarded — almost uniquely in the corpus — with reunion and a happy end. She is the saga world's portrait of love as endurance: not the fierce, destroying passion of a Brynhild or a Guðrún, but the quiet, unbreakable kind that simply waits, and keeps faith, and wins.