Like any young Woodsman, Stigandir was taught to ride. While horses had difficulty moving through some of the more thickly vegetated sections of Greenwood, Stigandir's kin lived just on the outskirts by the river. Thus Dagfinn, Stigandir's father, made sure all his sons and daughters could ride.
His brothers Knut and Geir especially had a certain knack for it. His mother used to watch them practicing in the field next to their home and marvel at their skill, saying they could thread a horse through the eye of a needle.
Stigandir, however, was a different story. What was simply instinctive and natural to his brothers, was clumsy and difficult for him. Matching his body's movement to the sway of the horse's back, to the rhythm of its gait, proved simply impossible. Where Knut and Geir got praise, all Stigandir got was a sore rear end.
Eventually, as he grew older (and outgrew the family horse), he simply gave up on it and for years it was never an issue.
Yet, decades later, on the trail of his former wife and abducted son, he found walking to be a tad too slow. He was traveling up the great North-South Road, through Dunland, when he decided enough was enough. The trail was fading an he felt like he was getting to old to hoof it across Eriador.
Fortunately, the next village he stopped at had numerous horses, as most Dunlending villages do, and charitably, they were willing to sell him one. Upon closer inspection, however, none proved big and robust enough to carry him so he set off again on foot.
Several villages later he was directed to an old man who lived alone in a hut in the foothills. The old man, too old to till his fields, and preparing to live with his children, did indeed have a horse to sell.
It was a giant draft animal, bred, born, and raised for dragging a plow over rocky fields. It was old, like the man, and quite ornery. The horse, it seemed, had itself been looking forward to some form of retirement, and hauling a giant Woodsman to Fornost and back wasn't what it had in mind.
Still, the beast had been used to teach the old man's grandchildren how to ride, and it understood the value of patience and forgiveness with a child (or manchild) on its back.
Stigandir haggled with the old man for a while and eventually got the horse for the nominal price of every last coin he had to his name. The horse, giant, dark gray, and dappled with lighter patches, had a Dunlending name, something along the lines of "Scydvodna" which Stigandir was in no mood to learn to pronounce.
Thus, making his way clumsily, uncomfortably, but slightly quicker than before through Dunland, Stigandir dubbed the beast "Old Skiddy".
A year later now and the two have reached a sort of agreement. Stigandir doesn't expect much from the horse in the way of speed or cooperation, an Old Skiddy doesn't punish his rider for every mistake by throwing him in to the gutter.
