When Bjǫrn Hítdoelakappi first lays eyes on him, Kolli Oddnýjuson is a mere toddler, busily loafing about, as boys his age are wont to do, at an autumn þing (assembly) in western Iceland's Borgarfjǫrðr. Bjǫrn, eponymous hero of his saga, has been told that Kolli is the son of his arch-nemesis, Þórðr Kolbeinsson, who had duplicitously stolen his intended bride, Oddn´y from him. But one glance is enough to persuade him that this report cannot be true. In an impromptu stanza, Bjǫrn declares:

The double-crossing Þórðr has evidently been double-crossed himself; already at the time of the boy's conception, Bjǫrn had predicted that ‘gæti son sæta […] ríklunduð mér glíkan’ (soon the spirited lady's son [will be born] in my image), and now it is, indeed, the youngster's looks that give him away as the fruit of Þórðr's cuckolding. Bjǫrn confidently asserts that no child this promising could have sprung from the loins of his treacherous rival: little Kolli has about him ‘it fríðasta mannsefni’ (the most handsome makings of a man), a telltale dignity of disposition. Mannsefni – ‘a man to be’, as one dictionary definition has it – is a word that is all potential: the boy Bjǫrn observes is only ‘nǫkkurra vetra gamall’ (a few winters old), and is still no more than four or five some years later, when he takes part in his father's slaying. At that autumn þing, Kolli's manliness, already visible to the discerning eye, is still a prediction, entirely unrealized.