Þorgerðr Egilsdóttir

Thorgerd is Egil Skallagrímsson's strong-willed daughter — and the woman who, in one famous scene, saves her father's life and gives the corpus one of its greatest poems. When Egil's sons drown and die and the old poet shuts himself away in his bed-closet to starve himself to death in grief, it is Thorgerd who outwits him: she joins him, pretending she means to die too, then tricks him into taking nourishment, and finally goads him into composing a memorial poem for his sons rather than simply dying — and so coaxes out of him the Sonatorrek, the 'Loss of Sons', the most piercing lament in the North. By turning his grief into verse she turns it from a thing that kills him into a thing he can survive. Thorgerd is the saga's quiet study of a daughter's cunning love — the one person clever and strong enough to manage Egil, who saves him by giving his sorrow somewhere to go.