Þrándr í Götu (Thrond of Gate)

Thrond of Gata is the great pagan survivor of Færeyinga saga — the cunning, long-lived chief of the Faroes who resists Norwegian rule and the new faith through a lifetime of patient scheming, sorcery, and treachery. Where the saga's hero Sigmund Brestisson is the king's bright Christian champion, Thrond is the old order's dark, durable opposite: a manipulator who works through fosterlings and spells and long memory, outliving and out-waiting the men sent to break him. He has Sigmund murdered for the gold on his arm and shrugs off every reckoning, and in one famous scene works a grim necromancy to make murdered men speak and reveal their killers. Thrond is one of the corpus's most vivid villains — not a brute but a brain, the embodiment of the islands' stubborn refusal to be ruled or converted, who survives by cunning everything the new age throws at him.