Kormákr Ögmundarson

Kormák Ögmundarson is one of the great love-poets of the sagas — dark, fierce, hot-blooded, and undone by the very gift that defines him. He falls for Steingerð at first sight and pours his longing into some of the finest love-verse in the corpus; but a witch's curse is laid on the match, and though he loves Steingerð his whole life and fights duels over her, he can never quite bring himself to the wedding that would win her — twice he simply fails to come. The poet who can say everything possesses nothing. He loses her to other men, roams and raids and quarrels, and carries his unconsummated love to the end. Kormák is the saga world's portrait of the doomed romantic: a man whose passion is real and whose verses are immortal, but whom his own nature, and a curse, forever keep one step short of the thing he wants most.