Oddr (Odd-a-Tongue)

Odd-a-Tongue is one of the powerful chieftains drawn into the confederacy of Bandamanna saga — the 'banded men' who scheme to strip the self-made young trader Odd of his wealth. A weighty figure with land and standing, he is among the grasping great men whom the cunning old Ófeig must turn against one another at the Thing, working on each chieftain's particular vanity and greed until their alliance falls apart. The saga gives him, like the others, a sharp comic edge — his pretensions pricked, his land-claim mocked, his greed exposed. Odd-a-Tongue is the saga's image of the greedy confederate — one of the powerful, self-important chieftains whose collective avarice the satire of Bandamanna skewers, a great man undone less by force than by the old trickster's reading of exactly what each of the banded men most wanted, and most feared.