The Sagas of Ketil Trout and Grim Hairy-cheek (Viking Legendary Sagas Book 4)

The Sagas of Ketil Trout and Grim Hairy-cheek are two of the Sagas of the Men of Hrafnista, stories written in medieval Iceland about the legendary Norwegian ancestors of contemporary families. Like the rest of the Legendary Sagas, they are fantastic in tone, featuring trolls and other monsters. The Saga of Grim Hairy-cheek is in many ways a sequel to The Saga of Ketil Trout, as Grim Hairy-cheek is the son of Ketil Trout. He receives his unattractive epithet in his father’s saga when his mother Hrafnhild catches sight of a hairy Lapp while conceiving him with Ketil. Ketil Trout’s own nickname derives from his modesty or naivety when referring to a dragon he slays.

Ketil Trout is of a common type of hero in Norse saga, and indeed in international folklore; the ‘coalbiter’ or male Cinderella, who lazes by the hearth rather than taking part in domestic tasks until spurred on to adventure and heroic deeds, from which he receives ‘a name that will never die beneath the heavens.’ The despair of his father, considered a fool by other people on Hrafnista (modern Ramsta in Norway), he proves himself on a series of expeditions into the North where he slays dragons and fights trolls. Along the way he meets and marries Hrafnhild, daughter of Bruni, brother of the Lapp king Gusir. He slays Gusir, Bruni’s rival, and obtains the magical arrows Flaug, Hremsa and Fifa and Dragvendill ‘best of swords.’ With these accomplishments he goes on to prove himself a hero among his own people, but he is faithless in love, and bad blood exists between his people and those of his abandoned wife Hrafnhild.

Grim Hairy-cheek inherits his father’s lands and weapons, but also, it seems, something of his lucklessness in love and propensity for cohabiting with trolls. His saga is rather shorter, and episodic in nature; its most memorable episode contains elements reminiscent of Arthurian romance (the Loathly Lady motif) and later Scandinavian folklore (similar trolls appear in East of the Moon, West of the Sun). Grim himself is the father of Odd the Traveller, or Arrow-Odd, whose much longer saga is a sequel to his own story.

‘And this story shall also be told.’