Title: Ketils saga hœngs

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Description:

The saga of Ketil "trout" or "salmon," as his cognomen or by-name, hængr, translates to, is a fornaldarsaga and a part of the Hrafnistamannasögur, the sagas of the men of Hrafnista, a region in northern Norway. Ketil is the father of Grímr hairy-cheek (LINK) and the grandfather of Arrow-Odd (LINK), and is thus the progenitor of the Hrafnistamen lineage. His name "trout" comes from his youth, when he killed a dragon and, in typical saga character understatement, remarked that he had killed a trout. Ketil's father was Hallbjörn half-tröll, who was half-Norwegian and half-Sámi. The Sámi are a group of Sámi-language-speaking people who have inhabited Sápmi, a supranational region overlying the northern parts of Norway, Sweden, and Finland, for thousands of years. In the sagas, Sámi people are either referred to as Finnar ("Finns") or Lapps, and are always treated with contempt, suspicion, or fear by Scandinavian saga characters. In the sagas, these 'Finnar' are always dubiously more-than-human, thought of as trollish (LINK), a word meaning capable of magic and thus dangerous, rather than the later, folkloric meaning of a troll as a big, brutish creature living in forests and cliffs. Ketil's part-Sámi heritage is thus given as an implicit explanation to the saga's medieval audiences of his and his descendants superhuman abilities and abnormal characteristics.