Olmar

A blond young man, Olmar stands around 170 centimeters and carries roughly 60 kilograms on his frame. The narrative first meets him at sixteen in 1015, and by 1018 he has grown into his twenties, his features shedding some of their boyishness across the years.

What Olmar wants, at least at first, is renown won by the blade. The trouble is that he can barely handle a sword and has never actually mapped out how he would leave the farm behind. His own insecurities push him around with ease, and anyone willing to dangle the prospect of turning him into a real man can bend him just as readily. He lurches between bravado and tears with little in between.

A drunken night with Fox and Badger lays his fragility bare. Bristling at being treated as a mere child, he squares up to the two seasoned killers and is mocked until he weeps. Fox then talks him into an attempt on Einar and Thorfinn, framing a first kill as the doorway to manhood. Olmar consents but loses his nerve the moment Einar swings back, bolting in fright while Fox jeers at how much death frightens him.

His fortunes sour further when Ketil drags him along to Jelling for an audience with the realm's new king. Olmar makes a fool of himself, begging Canute for a thegn's rank to match his brother Thorgil and showing off his swordplay, yet the very clumsiness marks him in the king's eyes as an ideal tool for luring Ketil's household into treason and clearing the way to seize their estate. Canute's envoy Brodd goads him into a duel; though Olmar cannot land a real blow himself, his sword finds its mark by sheer luck the instant another of Canute's men flicks a coin into Brodd's eye. The realization that he has killed leaves him stunned and shaken, and the remaining envoys move to cut him down before Thorgil, having grasped that the whole affair is a setup, arrives and kills them.

Once everyone comes home, Olmar looks on as Canute's soldiers collide with the farmhands his father gathers, and the reality of war finally shatters his old fantasies. Admitting he is not built for such a life, and with Ketil wounded, he leans on his position as the farm's lawful heir to offer surrender and accept banishment rather than let the killing drag on. He and Snake reach the enemy only to find Thorfinn already talking Canute's men down, and Olmar, stirred by that refusal to fight, resolves aloud to grow into someone like Thorfinn. Because of what Thorfinn achieves, the household is left standing. With Ketil no longer able to run the place, its management passes to Olmar, who compensates every family that lost a man or saw one maimed, cutting his clan's land and riches in half. The final glimpse of him is out in the fields, working hard.