Aud the Deep-Minded was the second daughter of
Ketill Flatnose, a Norwegian
hersir, and Yngvid Ketilsdóttir, daughter of Ketill Wether, a hersir from
Ringerike. She married
Olaf the White (
Oleif), son of King Ingjald, who had named himself
King of Dublin after going on voyages to
Britain and then conquering the shire of
Dublin. They had a son named
Thorstein the Red. After Oleif was killed in battle in Ireland, Aud the Deep-Minded and Thorstein journeyed to the
Hebrides. Thorstein married there and had six daughters and one son. He also became a great warrior king, conquering in northern Scotland; however, he was killed in battle after being betrayed by his people. Upon learning of the death of Thorstein, Aud the Deep-Minded, who was then at
Caithness, commissioned the construction of a
knarr, a type of ship used in the Viking Age for Atlantic voyages. For unknown reasons, she had it built secretly in the forest. With several surviving kin aboard, she captained the ship to
Orkney, where she married off one of her granddaughters, Gróa, then to the
Faroes, where she married off another granddaughter, Ólöf, and she then finally to the area of
Breiðafjörður in Iceland, where her brother Björn lived. She brought her grandson,
Olaf Feilan, with her to Iceland. The ship had a crew of twenty men under her command and also carried
thralls, men who had been taken prisoner in Viking raids near and around the British Isles. When Aud the Deep-Minded arrived in the
western region of Iceland, she claimed all the land in
Dalasýsla between the rivers Dögurðará and Skraumuhlaupsá for her family, and gave the thralls their freedom (making them
freedmen, with a status between slave and free). She gave both the crewmen and the freedmen land to farm and make a living. One of the freedmen, Vifil, was given Vifilsdal, part of , the area in which Aud the Deep-Minded settled. Unlike most early Icelandic settlers, Aud the Deep-Minded was a baptized
Christian. She erected crosses in a hilly area where she often went to pray, which became known as ('cross hills'). According to
Landnámabók, which calls her Aud the Deeply Wealthy (
Auðr in djúpauðga), she died on the third night of a feast which she hosted as a farewell and which she asked those present to continue for three more nights as her wake, and she was buried in the
tidal zone because there was no consecrated cemetery in which to bury her.
Laxdæla saga, however, calls her Unn the Deep-Minded (
Unnr in djúpúðga) and depicts her as a
heathen woman renowned for her wisdom; according to its account, she died during the wedding feast for her grandson and was given a
ship burial. Aud the Deep-Minded had unusual power and authority for a woman, and successfully saved herself, her grandchildren and considerable wealth from a catastrophic situation, although examination of various accounts of warrior rulers named Olaf suggests that Olaf the White may not have been killed in Ireland, but returned to Norway in 871 to regain control of his father's kingdom. Her story also demonstrates that Iceland was not settled only by Norwegians of noble birth, but also by people from Scotland and the northern isles, including Vikings. The
National Museum of Iceland contains a collection of somewhat debased
penannular brooches and pins of undoubted Celtic provenance from the ninth and tenth centuries which would fit well in the context of the Hebridean
Norse–Gael. ==Legacy==