Hjalti

As an infant, Hjalti is a small boy of roughly a year old, with cropped dark-blond hair and blue eyes, dressed in a blue tunic. He appears older in a dying vision that belongs to Gardar, where he looks about six with longer hair swept into bangs.

Hjalti is only ever shown as a baby and through the memories and visions of his grieving parents, so almost nothing of his character is revealed.

Hjalti spends his brief early life in a small settlement in Svealand, a historical part of Sweden, with his parents Arnheid and Gardar. Around his first year, Gardar marched off with the other village men to contest control of a newly found iron marsh, telling the boy he was leaving in order to keep him safe, a claim that puzzled Arnheid, who felt staying home would have protected him better. Weeks later, raiders fell on the village, killing the elderly and carrying off the youngest children, Hjalti among them, since unmarried female captives could be sold for more.

Years afterward, once Gardar resurfaces at Ketil's farm and attacks Snake in October 1018, he asks after his son. Arnheid hides the truth, claiming she had sent Hjalti to Gardar's brother in Birka before the attack and telling him the boy is now six. As Gardar dies, an anime scene grants him a vision of coming home to embrace a six-year-old Hjalti. Arnheid's own dying vision shows her riding in a carriage beside Gardar with a newborn in her arms and Hjalti asleep in her lap, and her last words about going home to the family waiting for her strongly suggest the child was killed the day of the raid.