Þórólfr Bægifót (Halt-Foot)

Thorolf Bægifót — 'Lame-Foot' — is one of the corpus's most frightening figures: a cruel, grasping old man whose malevolence does not stop at death. Quarrelsome and grasping in life, feared and disliked, he dies in a black temper sitting bolt upright in his high seat — and then will not stay dead. He walks again as a draugr, a corpse-monster heavy with malice, killing livestock and terrifying the district, his hauntings so dreadful that his own son Arnkel must move the swollen, uncanny body and rebury it far off. Even that does not end him; his after-death evil festers on. Thorolf Bægifót is the saga's great study of malevolence that outlives the man — the bad-tempered old chieftain whose spite is so concentrated that the grave cannot hold it, the ancestor whose walking corpse haunts the living long after his cruelty should have ended with his death.