It takes place mostly in and around Eyjafjörður in North Iceland, and recounts the life and fall of Glúmr Eyjólfsson, a powerful man whose nickname, Víga, refers to his propensity for killing people.
Glúm's grandfather, Ingjald, was a son of Helgi inn magri [is] (the Lean), the settler of Eyjafjörður, and farmer at Þverá (later the site of Munkaþverá monastery).
Glúmr goes to Norway to visit his maternal grandfather, the chieftain Vigfúss, who warms to him after he defeats a marauding berserker, and presents him with three family heirlooms, a black cloak, a gold-inlaid spear and a sword, saying that he will prosper as long as he keeps them.
When Glúmr returns, he speaks the first of several skaldic verses about the injustice, beats cattle belonging to Þorkell and Sigmund that are loose on his and his mother's land, and laughs uncontrollably, which we are told he was in the habit of doing when the killing mood came on him.
That winter, Glúmr sees in a dream Vigfúss' personal spirit,[n 1] a giant woman, walking towards Þverá; she is so large that her shoulders brush the mountains on each side of the valley.
This is the killing that the other side then decide to prosecute; Glúmr succeeds in evading conviction at the regional assembly and at the Althing the case is settled providing he swears an oath in three temples in Eyjafjörður that he did not do it.
[n 2] Glúmr has now given away the cloak and spear given to him by his grandfather Vigfúss, and in a dream he sees his dead kin seeking to intercede for him with Freyr, who however remembers Þorkell's ox and is implacable.
[5][6] The Ingólfr episode which precedes it, with Ingólfr being compelled to test friendship by claiming to have committed murder when in fact he has only killed an animal for whom the person is named (Kálfr: a calf), is reminiscent of a parable found in the early-12th-century Disciplina Clericalis by Petrus Alphonsi; it has also been suggested that it modified this story to allude to an early-13th-century event, the killing of a man called Hafr (which means goat) and the suspicion that it was committed by Sighvatr Sturluson.
[14][11][12] He suggests that Glúmr can best be seen as an adherent of the philosophy of the Eddic poem "Hávamál", which he characterises as "[more] a mystical atheism than a faith"; for the saga author, Óðinn was not a personal force, while fate and luck were.