Rannveig

Rannveig is Gunnar of Hlíðarendi's mother — and the keeper of his vengeance after his death. A strong, proud woman, she watches her peerless son die besieged in his hall when his bowstring is cut and his treacherous wife refuses him the hair to mend it. After the killing, Rannveig keeps Gunnar's famous bill — the halberd that sang before slaughter — and will give it to no one but the man who will use it to avenge him, guarding the weapon as a standing demand for the blood owed her son. She is the saga's image of the bereaved mother as keeper of the debt — not goading with words but holding the dead hero's weapon in trust, a silent, unrelenting insistence that the vengeance must come, and that the bill will pass only to the hand that takes it. The mother who turns her son's own weapon into the measure of who truly mourns him.