Steingerðr

Steingerð is the woman at the center of Kormák's lifelong, unconsummated love — beautiful, self-possessed, and forever just out of the poet's reach. Kormák falls for her at first sight and pours his longing into some of the finest love-verse in the sagas; they are betrothed; and then, twice, a curse and his own fatal hesitation keep him from coming to the wedding, and she is married to other men. Through it all Steingerð remains the fixed star of his devotion — he fights duels over her, follows her, never stops loving her — and she, for her part, never quite closes the door, meeting him again and again across the years in a long, melancholy dance of what-might-have-been. Steingerð is the saga's image of the love that is real on both sides and impossible all the same — the woman a great poet could immortalise in verse but never, because of a curse and his own nature, actually win.