Þuríðr (Bardi's mother)

Thurid is Bardi's mother in Heiðarvíga saga — and one of the most ferocious of the saga goaders. When her son is killed by the Southern men and the vengeance is slow in coming, she shames her surviving sons in the corpus's starkest whetting-scene: she serves them stones instead of meat at table, and when they object, tells them they should be no more able to stomach their food than she can stomach their failure to avenge their brother. It is the hvöt at its most savage — a mother using a meal of stones to drive her sons to kill. Thurid embodies the saga truth that the women, barred from the feud themselves, are often its fiercest engines, the unforgetting will that makes the men act. She is the saga's image of the goading mother at her most relentless — feeding her sons stones until shame drives them to the blood she demands.