Víga-Glúms saga () is ígaGlúone of the Sagas of Icelanders. It takes place mostly in and around Eyjafjörður in North Iceland, and recounts the life and fall of Glúmr Eyjólfsson, a powerful man whose nickname, Víga, refers to his propensity for killing people. It is believed to have been written in the first half of the 13th century and one passage may allude to a political scandal of that time.
Plot
Glúm's grandfather, Ingjald, was a son of (the Lean), the settler of Eyjafjörður, and farmer at Þverá (later the site of Munkaþverá monastery). Glúmr is the youngest son of his son Eyjólfr, and initially unpromising. After Eyjólfr's death, his second son also dies and soon after that his infant grandson, and the son's wife inherits half the farm; her father, (the Tall), and his son Sigmundr take the half where the house is and start to encroach on the half where Glúmr and his widowed mother Astrid live. Glúmr goes to Norway to visit his maternal grandfather, the chieftain Vigfúss, who warms to him after he defeats a marauding berserker, and presents him with three family heirlooms, a black cloak, a gold-inlaid spear and a sword, saying that he will prosper as long as he keeps them. Meanwhile, Sigmundr has been pressuring Astrid to leave her land, the boundary fence has been moved, and Þorkell and Sigmund have accused two reliable farmhands of Astrid's of slaughtering two of their cattle, and in settlement of a court case about this, deprived her of her right to farm a famously ever-fertile field, Vitazgjafi, which the two halves of the family had been working in alternate years. (The two carcasses are later found trapped under a snowdrift.) When Glúmr returns, he speaks the first of several skaldic verses about the injustice, beats cattle belonging to Þorkell and Sigmund that are loose on his and his mother's land, and laughs uncontrollably, which we are told he was in the habit of doing when the killing mood came on him. He then goes out to Vitazgjafi when Sigmund is mowing hay there, has Sigmund's wife sew him a replacement fastening for his cloak, then kills Sigmund with the spear.
That winter, Glúmr sees in a dream Vigfúss' personal spirit, a giant woman, walking towards Þverá; she is so large that her shoulders brush the mountains on each side of the valley. Þórarinn of Espihóll, another powerful chieftain in the area, is both Sigmund's father-in-law and another descendant of Helgi the Lean; he reluctantly brings a case against Glúmr at the next Althing, but Glúmr's arguments and supporters prevail and Þorkell is forced to sell his half of the farm to Glúmr for less than half its value and to leave after six months. Before he goes he offers an ox to Freyr at his temple nearby, which the god accepts.
For forty years Glúmr is a powerful man in the district. He marries Halldora and has two sons and a daughter. He arranges the marriages between his cousin Arnórr and Þórgrímr Þórrisson and daughters of the chieftain Gizurr the White. (They were rivals for the same woman; their sons grow up as friends but later become enemies and one kills the other. An itinerant wise woman predicts their enmity.) He punishes his foreman, Ingólfr, for neglect of his duties by framing him for a murder, then clears his name by confessing to it himself, and arranges Ingólfr's marriage to the woman he wanted. However, after Víga-Skúta marries his daughter and then deserts her, Glúmr and he are each able to evade the other by trickery but Glúmr does not achieve revenge; and Glúmr's son Vigfúss' quarrel with Bárðr, which ends with Bárðr being killed by two Norwegian associates of Vigfúss', leads to an irreparable breach between Glúmr and the people of Espihóll. Vigfúss is sentenced to the lesser outlawry, but refuses to leave Iceland within the time specified, and his father shelters him; because the location is sacred to him, this is also an offence against Freyr.
In a battle between Glúmr and his allies (including the fugitive Vigfúss, whom his father hails by another name to conceal his presence) and the men of Espihóll and their allies touched off by Þórgrímr's son killing Arnórr's son, Glúmr himself kills Þórarinn's brother Þorvaldr krókr (Hook); however, he persuades Guðbrandr, the twelve-year-old son of Þorvarðr Ǫrnólfsson, who has stirred up matters between the two families, to claim the death. This is the killing that the other side then decide to prosecute; Glúmr succeeds in evading conviction at the regional assembly and at the Althing the case is settled providing he swears an oath in three temples in Eyjafjörður that he did not do it. Glúmr swears an ambiguous oath on the temple ring, first in the local temple of Freyr.