Glyrna is a Völva from Hammerfel and the last surviving member of her family's line of priestesses — a lineage of Völva healers, seers, and spiritual guides stretching back through her mother and her aunt, both of whom died when the Wexians burned the village. Young, barely trained by her own account, and the one person the Wexians wanted most to coerce into locating Sumarbrander, she refused every interrogation Aric subjected her to and walked out of captivity with a stranger named Balti who had rescued her for no reason except that she was worth rescuing. She walked the world tree in a seidr vision and found the sword. She provided the strategic insight that shaped the final campaign. She steadied Balti — the angry, grieving half-elf who had spent a decade mistaking rage for purpose — and told him he had already become what he was fighting to be. In the epilogue she stands beside Gunvald in the throne room of Fjord's Hold, arranging the Sumarbrander shrine and teasing a king, having outlasted the war, the calling she never wanted, and every expectation Hammerfel had ever placed on her.

Character & Appearance

Glyrna has golden hair — worn in curls — and sharp blue eyes that her captors found disconcerting even when she was on her knees in shackles. She is small; Balti noted how small she felt against his shoulder when he carried her out of the village, surprised by the discrepancy between her physical size and the force she had projected in the square. Glyrna standing in front of Balti to defend him in the war camp — nearly a head shorter than he was — with her chin up and her eyes blazing, is one of the book's defining images: the gap between her stature and her authority had always been considerable.

She was warm where Balti was guarded, trusting where he was suspicious, quick to find comfort and offer it. She drew out his history in a sauna on a farm when no one else had managed to crack him open. She insisted that Iverine's abandonment had been cowardly, not inevitable, at a moment when Balti had spent his entire life accepting blame as his natural condition. She was not a gentle character in the sense of being soft — she was sharp-tongued with Wexian commanders, unflinching in captivity, precise in her strategic thinking. But her sharpness came from clarity rather than anger, and she deployed it in service of others as readily as herself.

She also had a well-developed sense of humour, particularly at the expense of powerful men who needed bringing down a peg. In the epilogue she reduces a king to mock surrender with a single sentence about his failure to keep a competent Völva.

Origins & Völva Heritage

Glyrna was born in Hammerfel, the village sacred to Thor built on the crater left by Mjolnir's battle with the giant Hrungnir. She was Hallmundr's cousin — their mothers were sisters, both Völva priestesses who served the village as healers, seers, and spiritual guides. Hallmundr's mother had been warm in his early childhood and grown increasingly distant as her seidr practice deepened; Glyrna's mother had shown little maternal warmth at all by the time Glyrna arrived late in her life. Both women were killed when Hammerfel burned.

With their deaths, the entire Völva line of Hammerfel rested in Glyrna's hands — young, barely trained, but unmistakably gifted. The Wexians knew it. When they took captives from the village, she was the one they kept alive.

Resisting the Calling

Glyrna had initially refused to accept the Völva calling. Like the other maidens of Hammerfel she was required to learn the chants and songs used to induce seidr trances, but unlike the others she had the genuine talent to harness the power. She held back from it for years — she had watched what the calling did to her mother and her aunt, the way it slowly disconnected them from the people around them, and she did not want that life. The war did not leave her the option of refusal.

The Cost of Seidr

Glyrna was precise and honest about what seidr demanded. It was not a tool — it was opening a channel to another plane. Every use cost something: parts of herself stayed with the gods, left as sacrifice at the roots of the world tree. "Every time I use it, I feel less," she told Balti plainly. The wards she cast to hide the company's movements left a stinging cut on her wrist and stiffness in her movements for days afterward. The battle vision in which she walked between worlds nearly lost her entirely, her voice layering with other voices, her eyes going unfocused. It required Hallmundr's grip on her shoulders to pull her back.

She also understood the limits of what seidr could promise. When Gunvald asked how long her wards would hold, her answer was unambiguous: "Long enough, I hope. The gods don't grant guarantees."

Wexian Captivity

Glyrna was taken captive by the Wexians when Hammerfel burned and held for Aric's interrogation. What they wanted was straightforward: a Völva who could use seidr to locate Sumarbrander. What they got was a woman on her knees in shackles who told them their victories would bring nothing but ruin, who prophesied their destruction to the Thegn's face while a sword tip was pressed beneath her chin, and who did not flinch.

The Wexian general Cenric, encountering her again during the campaign, said simply: "She's supposed to be dead." They had killed every other Völva they had taken and found insufficient. That Glyrna was still alive — still weaving runes in the air, still chanting with a distaff across her lap, still defiant — was, to him, a genuine impossibility.

"You can bind me, you can spill my blood, but you will never have the sword. Sumarbrander was made by the gods for those who honour the seidr, not for butchers who call themselves kings." — Glyrna to Aric, A Tale of Scorched Ash and Elm

Rescue & the Road

Balti pulled her out of the village and she spent the following weeks travelling with him toward the Great Fjord, evading Wexian patrols through forest cover and the occasional hospitality of wary farmers. It was on that road — in a sauna on an elderly farmer's property, of all places — that the two of them had the conversation that began to shift things between them.

Glyrna drew out Balti's history with patient, direct questions and the willingness to sit with the silence when it came. She heard about Iverine — the elf girl who had been kind until kindness cost too much — and told him the abandonment had been cowardice, not inevitability. He had spent his entire life absorbing the blame for other people's decisions about him. She refused to let the framing stand. It was the first time anyone had done that, and he did not quite know what to do with it.

She was also clear-eyed about what she was doing and what it cost. She argued back when Balti wanted to move faster than was safe, challenged his suspicion of hosts who meant them no harm, and was honest about the limits of seidr in a way that made him respect it more rather than less. She became, as he later acknowledged, an anchor — the steady point against which all his restlessness measured itself.

The War Camp & the Vision

At the war camp, it was Glyrna who vouched for Balti first and most forcefully — before he had spoken a word, before the chiefs had heard his intelligence, before Hallmundr's authority settled the young warriors' bristling. She placed herself physically between him and men twice her size and named him as the reason she was still alive. It was the simplest possible argument, and it was the only one that mattered.

When she and Balti stood before Gunvald's assembled chiefs to explain the Wexian threat, she took the moment that required her: "I've walked the world tree. I followed the stream of time and seen the sword from its creation to its entombing. And I know where the sword lies." The chiefs shifted uneasily. She did not move. Glyrna's vision — walked at considerable personal cost through the branches of Yggdrasil — placed Sumarbrander in Oksurland, in the stronghold of the dark elves, not at the mountain pass where Gunvald's own Völva had directed him. She was right.

The Campaign

The Battle Strategy

At the war council before the final battle, when the question of how to defeat Aric's forces without losing Sumarbrander had stalled into silence, it was Glyrna who broke it. "Sumarbrander will be the key," she said — not as a vague pronouncement but as a tactical insight. Aric's obsession with the sword was his weakness. If he believed it was within his grasp, he would abandon caution. Draw him out with the sword as bait and his greed would do the rest.

It was this logic that led to the plan involving the false Sumarbrander, and to Balti being the one to carry it — the Thegn's own son, bearing a replica of the sword on a battlefield, as the hinge on which the whole deception turned. Glyrna read the shape of Aric's mind and handed them the lever. Balti told the war council he could make it work. Neither of them were wrong.

The Battle Vision

During the final battle, Glyrna sat at the center of the encampment weaving seidr — chanting in the language of the gods, a distaff across her lap, runes smouldering faintly in the air around her, the scent of burning herbs and blood mixing in the cold air. When Cenric was brought in as a prisoner and saw her, he stopped. "She's supposed to be dead." He stared. The Wexians had killed every Völva they had found insufficient. That she was here, alive, working, was the crack that split his composure open.

When her vision broke — the runes fracturing, her body convulsing, her voice layering into something unnatural — it was Hallmundr who gripped her shoulders and dragged her back. She came to with a sharp breath and delivered the intelligence immediately: Anya and Völund were about to be overrun at the ridge. Hallmundr was mounted and moving before the sentence was finished.

Glyrna & Balti

Their relationship built slowly and honestly across the months of running, hiding, fighting, and travelling. Glyrna saw Balti clearly from the beginning — she had grown up on stories of elves as tricksters or spirits of the ancestors, and Balti was neither. He was flesh and blood, hardened by a life she could only guess at. She watched him tuck his hair over his ears to avoid stares at farmers' houses and did not pretend she hadn't noticed. She asked questions, accepted the answers, and pushed back when he accepted cruelty as deserved.

There was a moment, long into the campaign, when she saw that the false sword was taking something from him — feeding on the hatred he had carried so long it had become structural. She was the one who led him to the cliffs. She stood beside him while he held the blade over the edge. When he hesitated she said his name once, and it was enough. After he threw it into the sea and the hum stopped and he stood with his arm still outstretched and nothing left to hold, she stepped beside him and told him it was already gone.

When he asked her to come to Alfheim — to help him finish what they had started — she set her condition plainly: she was not going from one fight to another. He told her he wanted a future with her, not another campaign. She said she would go with him anywhere.

"You already are." — Glyrna to Balti, when he said he wanted to be better, A Tale of Scorched Ash and Elm

Life at Fjord's Hold

In the epilogue, Glyrna is in Fjord's Hold — the palace Gunvald built from the war camp — arranging the Sumarbrander shrine in the throne room with the practiced ease of someone who knows exactly what she is doing and exactly how little credit she will receive for it. She has stepped back from her formal role as a Völva: the war ended and she put the calling down, or tried to. She still hears the whispers of the gods. She still maintains the wards the palace would collapse without, because Gunvald has driven off every other Völva with his insistence that he knows better.

Their dynamic is warm and combative in the way of people who have been through something together and emerged with mutual affection intact. She teases him about his stubbornness. He mock-surrenders and immediately goes back to being stubborn. When she tells him the people need faith and hope — that the gods may not need incense and bones but human beings do — he goes quiet in the way that means he is listening.

She sailed to Alfheim with Balti after the war, following through on the promise she had made on the clifftop. She returned to Fjord's Hold, presumably with him, and stayed. Hallmundr told her at the beach, before she boarded the ship: "Fate brought you someone who makes you happy, and that means more to me than I can say." He had had his reservations about Balti. Watching the two of them together, he thought they would be alright.

She was supposed to be the Völva leading Hammerfel. Instead she was in Fjord's Hold, keeping a king honest, maintaining a shrine to a god who may or may not be listening, and glancing toward the woods beyond the castle gate where Balti was teaching Yngvar to hold a bow and when to let the arrow go.

Key Relationships