Thors Snorresson

Thors stands tall, wearing his long dark hair tied back with two loose strands always falling across his forehead. In his younger years he trimmed his beard into a goatee, later letting it grow fuller.

In his fighting days Thors was cold and unfeeling, a killer in Viking campaigns who found even his newborn daughter strange at first. Family gradually softened him, and he set aside his taste for violence to become a humble, warm man, firm yet gentle, who cherished his quiet life and steered his son Thorfinn toward peace. Having known intimately what it means to kill, he came to loathe bloodshed, growing somber when Floki arrived to conscript him for the war with England. He agreed to go only to shield his village from harm. His aversion ran so deep that he spared Askeladd and his men even as they threatened him, his crew, and his boy, holding to his belief that a genuine warrior has no need of a sword and that peaceful paths must always come first.

Thors was reckoned the strongest and most celebrated warrior across the Viking world, the one man able to overcome Thorkell the Tall in single combat. Rising on skill alone, he made Jomsviking captain at twenty-five, and the order's chief Sigvaldi admired him enough to grant him his daughter Helga's hand.

His mastery of unarmed fighting was virtually without equal; in 987 he knocked out a young Thorkell while empty-handed against the axe-wielding giant, and he could hold his own against several attackers at once. Even after more than a decade farming in Iceland, his edge never dulled. He single-handedly overcame one of Askeladd's crews, subduing men like Bjorn and Askeladd himself, yet dealt out only broken bones; when the fighting ended, not one man among them had been killed. As a swordsman he was equally unrivaled, cutting down whole groups on his own and besting Askeladd in their duel, the feats that won him the title Troll of Jom.