Þórdís Súrsdóttir

Thordis is Gísli's sister — and the woman whose cleverness destroys her own brother. Married to Thorgrím, the man Gísli secretly kills to avenge their murdered friend Vestein, she is caught between blood-loyalties no one in the saga can resolve. Gísli concealed his vengeance in a riddling verse, thinking it safe — but Thordis is sharp enough to unriddle it, and she works out from his own ambiguous words that her brother killed her husband. When she reveals what she has understood, the outlawry comes down on Gísli, and the long hunt that ends in his death begins. Thordis acts from her own grief and loyalty to her dead husband, yet in doing so she dooms her brother — a woman forced to choose between the two men she is bound to, and whose intelligence makes the tragedy possible. She is the saga's image of kinship at war with itself, the clever sister who cannot help but understand the thing that destroys her own family.