Þorbjörn the Strider

Thorbjörn Strider is the uncanny foster-father of Herstein in Hænsa-Þóris saga — a strange, half-otherworldly old man of whom the saga says, tellingly, that he was 'not always all there', hinting at second sight or a touch of the supernatural. He plays the part of the eerie helper in the feud that follows the burning of Blund-Ketil, his foreknowing and his odd, unpredictable nature setting him apart from the ordinary run of saga men. Thorbjörn Strider belongs to the corpus's recurring cast of the uncanny — the figure on the edge of the natural world, neither wholly sorcerer nor wholly mad, whose strangeness unsettles those around him and whose dreams and intuitions touch what others cannot see. The weird old foster-father, half in this world and half in another, who haunts the margins of the burning's long aftermath.