Hrun
Hrun the Barbarian | |
Name | Hrun |
Race | |
Age | |
Occupation | Barbarian hero, later ruler of Wyrmberg |
Physical appearance | Very muscular with a wild shock of black hair. |
Residence | Wyrmberg |
Death | |
Parents | |
Relatives | |
Children | |
Marital Status | In a mutually beneficial relationship with Liessa Wyrmbidder |
Appearances | |
Books | The Colour of Magic |
Cameos | Interesting Times (mentioned) |
Hrun is a barbarian hero from Chimeria, featured in The Colour of Magic. He meets Rincewind and Twoflower in the Temple of Bel-Shamharoth and initially has the intention of stealing the luggage, but a sword that he had gotten a couple of days before, Kring causes the monster to appear. After Bel-Shamharoth is defeated thanks to Twoflower's iconograph, he calls his horse and help them escape the temple before it falls down. From then on, he agrees with Rincewind and Twoflower to accompany them in their trip to Quirm. Later, when they reach Wyrmberg, he banishes Lio!rt and Liartes from Wyrmberg so that Liessa can rule. He was going to rule as Liessa's husband. This may have been a short-lived marriage, as in Interesting Times, it is revealed that he has turned his back on the freewheeling barbarian lifestyle and taken a lowly Sergeant of the Guard's job elsewhere than the Wyrmberg. (Or perhaps Liessa has been deposed and exiled? Don't forget she was merciful enough not to kill her brothers - this opens up the possibility one of them came back to get even. If she is no longer DragonLady of the Wyrmberg, strict necessity may have forced her husband to become a wage-slave). His stated reason was that it's a job with a pension.
He briefly wielded Kring, an annoyingly sentient magic sword.
Earlier in The Colour of Magic, Rincewind lies to Twoflower that a Watchman dragging out casualties of a bar fight is Hrun (Twoflower has always wanted to meet Hrun, and Rincewind was getting tired of the tourist's always-cheery attitude.) The magical resonance from this outrageous lie caused Hrun a moment of concern during a battle with rampaging gnolls, but then neither Rincewind nor Hrun realised this.
Annotation
While Hrun is clearly a generic all-brawn-and-no-brains barbarian hero, it is a fair guess that he is related to Thrud the Barbarian, a comic strip character who first appeared in White Dwarf magazine and who has the same huge-body-and-orange-sized-head physique and about the same qualities ("The strength of twenty men, the speed and agility of a black panther and the intelligence of a garden snail").