Which Icelandic outlaw hero fought a berserker and later the ghost of Glámr? Grettir is the answer.
Grettir Ásmundarson is the central figure of Grettis saga, an Icelandic family saga about a famously strong but troublesome man. During adventures in Norway, he fights bears and berserkers, including the berserker brothers Þórir þömb and Ögmundr illi. The saga presents Grettir as exceptionally capable, but also impulsive and prone to actions that bring legal trouble.
His most famous supernatural battle comes in Iceland. The shepherd Glámr dies after confronting a local haunting and returns as a dangerous revenant. Grettir wrestles with Glámr and defeats him, but Glámr curses him before dying. The curse is linked to Grettir’s fear of darkness, worsening misfortune, loneliness, outlawry, and an early death.
A common mix-up is to treat Glámr as an ordinary ghost. In Icelandic saga tradition, such revenants are physical and formidable, closer to a draugr than to an incorporeal spirit. Grettir eventually spends nineteen years as an outlaw before dying on Drangey.