Þjóðhildr

Thjódhild is Erik the Red's wife — and the woman who brings Christianity to Greenland against her stubbornly heathen husband. While Erik remains loyal to the old gods, Thjódhild embraces the new faith, brought home by their son Leif from Olaf Tryggvason's court, and builds the first church in Greenland — a small chapel set a little apart from the farm, for she will not live as Erik's wife while he holds to heathendom. Her quiet, firm conversion is one of the saga's intimate pictures of the faith dividing a household: the wife who builds her own church and withdraws from her husband's bed rather than abandon Christ. Thjódhild is the saga's image of the woman of faith at the world's western edge — the matriarch of the Greenland colony who chose the new God over her marriage's old comfort, and raised the first Christian roof on the rim of the known world.