Sveinsson, Folk stories

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from oral tradition in neighbouring countries were the most easily
adapted, but some of them came to Iceland in written form, and many
of these are rather odd.
There is no doubt that saints legends were current all over the coun-
try, as one might expect. But the comic stories were also very popular;
indeed they already bulk surprisingly large in early literature. Ljós-
vetninga saga tells of how someone tries to kill a fly on an old man s
bald head with an axe, and of course the blow does more harm to the
old man than to the fly (cf. AT 1586A Fatal killing of the Insect ).
V�ga-Gl�ms saga tells how a man tests his friend by telling him that
he has killed a barn-calf (hl�: uk�lfr), and the friend thinks he means a
man called Hl�: u-K�lfr and refuses his help (cf. AT 893, The Unreli-
able Friends , The Half-friend ). Flóamanna saga tells how a man
takes the cockerel s rough treatment of the hen as an example and
succeeds in controlling his wife (cf. AT 670, The Animal Languages ).
An account of the court poets of King Haraldr h�rfagri tells how they
were fooled by a pretty woman (cf. AT 502 and 709); Ragnars saga
Lo: brókar tells of the task that Ragnarr imposed upon �slaug, to come
to him neither dressed nor undressed, neither fed nor unfed, not alone,
yet not accompanied by any person (cf. AT 875, The Clever Peasant
Girl ). H�konar fl�ttr H�rekssonar (Fms. XI) and Hei: reks saga both
tell of the giving of good counsels. H�kon follows those given him
and escapes difficulty and deadly danger; Hei: rekr goes contrary to
those given to him, and gets into no little trouble as a result (cf. AT
910A, Wise through Experience ). Hrói the Stupid is a traveller who
comes to Sweden and falls into the hands of villains who trick him
and treat him roughly, though it all comes out all right in the end
(Flateyjarbók 1945, II 149 58).
We could quote many more stories of this kind. The models are
usually foreign, as can sometimes be seen from the contents, though
266 THE FOLK-STORIES OF ICELAND
they have often been given an Icelandic feel. There are also other stories
of a similar kind in manuscripts which are direct translations, with
little or no alteration, from foreign sources. In the seventeenth and
eighteenth centuries the number of these stories rises steeply, and poets
then composed r�mur and other kinds of poetry out of them. Some of
this material then gets into oral tradition. But many of these kinds of
story as told by the old women story-tellers in the nineteenth century
cannot be traced directly to any of these translations or their literary
derivatives, and we must suppose that many such were brought into
the country in oral form. In these cases we often find that the same
stories exist in the oral tradition of neighbouring countries, sometimes
in very similar forms, and it is probable that that is where much of this
material comes from. It was so entertaining that everyone wanted to
hear it.
Some stories tell of the incredible stupidity of old men and women,
and among these the stories of the brothers of Bakki form a separate
group. Most countries have such characters (in Denmark the people
of Mols, in Germany the Schildb�rgers, in England the Wise Men of
Gotham and so on), and the stories about them travel from one coun-
try to another. Icelanders must have picked up some knowledge of
them, and some foreign material appears in stories about the three
idiot brothers G�sli, Eir�kur and Helgi, but most of what is told of
them is totally Icelandic, grown in Icelandic soil and based on the
Icelandic way of life. It is anyway pretty well impossible to distin-
guish such comic stories from other anecdotes about old people.
ICELANDIC WONDER-TALES 267
PART V
THE WORLD OF MEN AND THE HIDDEN WORLD
I
Eir�kur �lafsson of Br�nir (1826 1900) tells the following stories about
hidden folk whom he himself had seen or heard about in the district
near Eyjafj�ll where he spent his childhood (Jfiork. 98 100).
When I was in my twelfth year, I was walking on a fine day near the farm Hl�:
by Eyjafj�ll, I think in February, late in the day. I then saw a boy with a little
broom in his hand driving three cows and a dirty heifer down to the brook just
above the home-meadow. The cows and the heifer stood in a row by the stream,
drinking, and the boy stood over them with the broom in his hand, some two
hundred yards or so away from me. It immediately struck my mind that these
cows must belong to elves. They were the same size as our cows, one pied
red, one with a grey neck and one with black flanks. At length the cows stopped
drinking and the boy drove them back a little way to a stone wall with a gate
in it, and two of the cows had gone through the gate. Then one of the farm-
people called to me and said: What are you staring at? I looked round at him,
but when I looked back to see what had become of the cows I could see noth-
ing, and I much regretted having taken my eyes off the cows, because I wanted
to see what became of them. Just beyond the gate or wall there was a great
stone, covered with grass, with a big hollow in under it. We children were
strictly forbidden to go in under the stone, or to make any noise near it; we were
told that it would be the worse for us if we did, because there were elves there.
Another time I saw a woman driving four ewes over the rocks known as
H�shamrar, above the farm at Hl�: ; then she drove them across to another
rock and vanished there. I did not know her, she did not belong to Hl�: or to
any of the farms round about, and so she must have been an elf-woman.
I remember well from my youth that I and all the congregation, and the
parson, the Rev. �lafur (I think it was the Rev. �lafur P�lsson),1 used to ar-
rive at [Steinar] church on the morning of the festivals before dawn. He would
begin to ring the bell and hold the service at dawn, starting with the hymn
The day that we should keep holy and so on. At that time there were no [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]

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