Þórir hundr (the Hound)

Thorer Hund — 'Thorir the Hound' — is one of the chief leaders of the rebel farmers who kill St Olaf at Stiklestad, and the figure on whom the king's first miracle is worked. A powerful northern chieftain with his own grievances against the king, he stands in the front of the host against Olaf, wearing a reindeer-skin coat (got by Finnish magic) that the king's own famed sword cannot bite, and his spear-thrust is among the wounds that fell the king. But then the saga turns: when Thorer goes to tend the dead king's body and wipes the blood from the beautiful, sleeping-seeming face, Olaf's blood runs onto Thorer's own wounded hand and the wound heals at once — the first of the miracles that make the slain king a saint. Thorer Hund is the saga's image of the killer touched by the holy — one of the men who slew the king, whose own hand bears witness, in its sudden healing, to the sanctity of the man he helped to kill.