Outlaws. Horse Stealing. Rounding up a posse. Vigilante Justice. Feuds. Anti-heroes who walk tall, take no shit, give no fucks, and get into fights at the slightest insult. 

The Wild West right?

Nope.

Meet Grettir, the 10th century “hero” of the Icelandic Grettir’s Saga. Outlawed, twice, first for killing the man in a fight over a perhaps-stolen food bag, second accidentally burning down a house with 12 people in it. Along the way, he tears the arm off of a troll invading a hall, and dives to a cave under a waterfall and kills another one (Beowulf, anyone?). His biggest battle is killing Glam, an Icelandic zombie (draugr, in Old Norse) who is haunting a farm. Grettir is larger than life, both in reputation as well as physical size. His life ends when (spoiler alert) he’s living on the Island fortress of Drangey, gets a witchcraft-infected wound, and is then overcome by his enemies and killed. 

I’ve been reading Grettir in advance of an upcoming trip to Iceland. I was curious about Grettir as the hero of the saga, as he’s not an entirely sympathetic character (that’s Icelandic understatement). As a child he kills the geese his father make him take care of, partially flayed the horse his father made him take care of, and badly scratched his father’s back with a rake when his father made him scratch his back. Yet, he is somewhat of a national hero in Iceland, it’s said that more place names in Iceland are named after him than any other saga character. 

Looking around for analogs, I was thinking about the outlaws of the Wild West, like, say, Billy the Kid. His first arrest at age 16 was for stealing food, an odd parallel to Grettir’s first killing over a food bag.  Before the Kid had turned 21, he’d killed eight people. In contrast to Grettir, the Kid traveled in a pack, joining a posse called the Regulators nominally tasked with a executing a kind of “civilian” justice (oh the irony). (By the way, the word regulated in those days meant something more like well-functioning, in good working order or well-managed, rather than “controlled by government regulations”, 2nd Amendment students take note). Caught and convicted for murder by Sheriff Pat Garrett, the Kid escaped jail, and went on the run. Tracked down by Garrett, the Kid was killed near Fort Sumner, NM. 

Here’s where it gets weird. I’ve been experimenting with a location-based history app – one that will tell you the history of a particular location and places of interest near you. Randomly, looking for historical data, this page popped up: https://www.historynet.com/the-man-who-invented-billy-the-kid-book-review.htm. It’s an article about (this is gonna get a little meta), the man who wrote the biography of the person who was the ghost-writer for Pat Garrett’s biography of Billy the Kid. That person was Ash Upson. From the article:

Ash wrote that Garrett, “in addition to being long-headed…is likewise long-legged, his full height being somewhat under 10 feet.” In the previous decade Upson claimed to have met young Henry Antrim (the future William H. Bonney, alias Billy the Kid) at the Silver City boardinghouse run by the boy’s mother, Catherine Antrim. That might not be true, but the author confirms Upson “did meet Bonney in Roswell, the small hamlet which Ash had a hand in protecting during the Lincoln County War.”

OK, so Garrett was apparently also Grettir-sized, but that’s not the fun part. Roswell? Roswell NM? Where a UFO crashed in 1947? Yep. 66 years almost to the day after the Kid’s death, a weather balloon UFO will crash in Roswell[1]. The aliens came for Billy the Kid, we just never knew. Henry McCarty, aka Billy the Kid, is buried in Old Fort Sumner Cemetery. 

Grettir? Well, after his death his killers cut off his head for proof (to get the reward), and took it back to the Althing ( the Icelandic parliament ) to claim their reward. Incensed at the disrespect of cutting off Grettir’s head, and the use of witchcraft to kill him, the Althing in turn outlawed Hook, Grettir’s killer (Grettir would eventually be avenged by his kinsman Thorstein Galleon, who killed Hook in Constantinople).

Grettir was buried twice, once in Reykjastrang, then when the church was moved, he was buried in his hometown of Bjarg (legendary location here).