From this time till the end of his life he is a houseless outlaw, abiding in all the most remote parts of the island--"Grettir's lairs," as they are called, it would seem, to this day--sometimes countenanced for a short time by well-willing men of position, sometimes dwelling with supernatural creatures,--Hallmund, a kindly spirit or cave-dweller with a hospitable daughter, or the half-troll giant Thorir, a person of daughters likewise. But his case grows steadily worse. Partly owing to sheer ill-luck and Glam's curse, partly, as the saga-writer very candidly tells us, because he "was not an easy man to live withal," his tale of slayings and the feuds thereto appertaining grows steadily. For the most part he lives by simple cattle-lifting and the like, which naturally does not make him popular; twice other outlaws come to abide with him, and, after longer or shorter time, try for his richly priced head, and though they lose their own lives, naturally make him more and more desperate. Once he is beset by his enemy Thorir with eighty men; and only comes off through the backing of his ghostly friend Hallmund, who not long after meets his fate by no ignoble hand, and Grettir cannot avenge him. Again, Grettir is warmly welcomed by a widow, Steinvor of Sand-heaps, at whose dwelling, in the oddest way, he takes up the full _Beowulf_ adventure and slays a troll-wife in a cave just as his forerunner slew Grendel's mother. But in the end the hue and cry is too strong, and by advice of friends he flies to the steep holm of Drangey in Holmfirth--a place where the top can only be won by ladders--with his younger brother Illugi and a single thrall or slave. Illugi is young, but true as steel: the slave is a fool, if not actually a traitor. After the bonders of Drangey have done what they could to rid themselves of this very damaging and redoubtable intruder, they give up their shares to a certain Thorbiorn Angle. Thorbiorn at first fares ill against Grettir, whose outlawry is on the point of coming to an end, as none might last longer than twenty years. With the help of a wound, witch-caused to Grettir, and the slave's treacherous laziness, Thorbiorn and his crew climb the ladders and beset the brethren--Grettir already half dead with his gangrened wound. The hero is slain with his own short-sword; the brave Illugi is overwhelmed with the shields of the eighteen assailants, and then slaughtered in cold blood. But Thorbiorn reaps little good, for his traffickings with witchcraft deprive him of his blood-money; the deaths of his men, of whom Illugi and Grettir had slain not a few, are set against Illugi's own; and Thorbiorn himself, after escaping to Micklegarth (Constantinople) and joining the Varangians, is slain by Thorstein Dromond, who has followed him thither and joined the same Guard on purpose, and who is made the hero of the appendix above spoken of. [Sidenote: _Merits of it._]