Thorgil

Thorgil radiates the menace of a man at home on the battlefield. Countless scars cover him head to toe, several across his face, the most striking of which slashes diagonally over his lips. He wears his hair long, keeps a beard, and has no eyebrows.

Where his father recoils from cruelty, Thorgil relishes it. Much like Thorkell, he delights in a hard fight and feels no hesitation about cutting down anyone in his path. His savagery shows when he proposes severing an arm from each of the two child thieves the household catches, and when Pater suggests putting them to work instead, Thorgil demands they still be struck and volunteers to do it himself, beating Sture without mercy. He prizes strength above all, taking pride in his father's supposed legend as Iron Fist Ketil and respecting Sture for offering to bear his sister's punishment as well as his own. That obsession blinds him, so when his brother Olmar wisely chooses to surrender to Canute, Thorgil recoils in contempt, brands him and Snake cowards, and walks away from the farm for good.

Born around 991 as Ketil's second child and first son, Thorgil is thought to have taken up soldiering early, since he is already a formidable, athletic fighter by twenty-four, trained in combat by Snake before he ever joined the army. He believed his father's boasts of being the fearsome Iron Fist Ketil, and the tale likely spurred him to follow that path.

He first appears returning from a townsfolk's assembly with his father and encourages Olmar's interest in enlisting. When two children are caught stealing bread, Thorgil deems the sentence far too soft and calls for their arms to be taken, only for the ruling to soften to a beating that he delivers with brutal force. Later, the family travels to the Danish capital to honor the late King Harald, where Olmar's disastrous attempt to join the King's Guard ends in a duel with Brodd; a hidden assassin flicks a coin into Brodd's eye, and he topples onto Olmar's blade and dies. Thorgil hails his brother's first kill, cuts down the remaining soldiers, and when guards challenge the lawbreaking, slaughters them too, forcing the family to flee aboard Leif Ericson's ship by handing over Thorfinn. When Canute moves to seize the farm, Thorgil and Olmar scheme to ambush him during the battle; Olmar falters, but Thorgil reaches Canute, kills two guards, and presses the attack until Wulf tackles and throttles him. Thorgil gouges out Wulf's eye to break free, then retreats wounded. With his father hurt and the men decimated, the choice to fight on falls to Olmar, whose surrender enrages Thorgil into abandoning the farm to live as a wanderer.