Translator’s note: Brynjolf Sveinsson (1605-1675) was a Lutheran bishop at Skálholt from 1639 to 1674 and is credited with gathering many of the original manuscripts that comprise the elder Edda, the older poetic legends that are the basis of old Norse literature. It was Brynjolf who also retrieved one of the most notable Icelandic records, the Flateyjarbók (Flatey Book), which tells not only the history of the kings of Norway, among them St. Olaf, but also the Greenland Saga that, along with the Saga of Erik the Red, alludes to the first settlement in North America.
Bishop Brynjolf was making his usual circuit ride and was once in Skálholt where he pitched his tent on a mountainside. With him in his entourage were four or five men.
At night, the bishop awoke to find an unusually large hand reaching inside the tent, and a voice came from outside, “A tent for a farmer, a coarse man!” The bishop then saw that a giantess had come, and one that was by no means small. So the bishop said to the giantess that she should take one of his horses that she found to her liking.
This the giantess did, leaving and taking a horse with her. She threw it lightly over her shoulder as though it were a sheep, then made her way up the mountain.
The next summer, the bishop made a stop at the same place. But when his entourage awoke the next day, the bishop had disappeared from his tent. They went out to look for him. After much searching, they found him in a cave in the mountain, sitting and talking with the giantess who had visited his tent the summer before. They saw that she was crying, and it seemed as though hail poured from her eyes.
What the bishop and giantess had talked about, they did not know. But the bishop followed them, heading homewards again. From this time, on, the bishop always made a practice each Christmas Eve night of tying a stallion in front of the barn at Skálholt. Each morning that followed, the stallion was gone, and people knew that the giantess had taken it for Christmas dinner.