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sinni-ok-sessi · 7 months

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As we have established, I have Can't Shut Up Disease about the Bjarna-Dísa folktale and so I've spent most of this evening making a rough translation, the better to not shut up about it. My Icelandic is a little rusty at this point, so if you spot any parts I've obviously misunderstood, do let me know.

You can read the Icelandic online here, which I'm fairly sure is just a transcription of the text from Jón Árnason's Íslenzkar Þjóðsögur.

You can listen to Snorri Helgason's haunting (haha) song version here on his Bandcamp. The entire Margt býr í þokunni album is a collection of songs inspired by Icelandic folklore, would very much recommend.

Finally, you can find my translation of Bjarna-Dísa below the cut. I'm not sure how best to content warn for it other than to say that it's an Icelandic ghost story where the weather may actually be scarier than the ghost.

EDIT: apparently I'm doing more of these:

The Deacon of Myrká

Bjarna-Dísa

There was a man called Bjarni, the son of Þorsteinn. He was born in the late 18th century and lived until 1840. He had a sister called Þordís. She was about twenty when this story took place.

Þordís was pleasing in appearance, but was considered rather arrogant in attitude. She made a great deal of her clothing and imitated as best she could the fashions of Danish ladies, and she stayed at Eskifjörður marketplace in the last year of her life.

It so happened that Bjarni Þorsteinsson travelled down into Eskifjörður, and Þordís then joined her brother on his journey and planned to go with him to Seyðisfjörður, where Bjarni then lived.

Nothing is told of their journey before they took up lodgings at Þrándarstaðir in Eiðaþinghá. That was in the first half of Þorri [late winter]. They were there for one night. But the next morning, when they wanted to go pass over Fjarðarheiði, the weather was thick with snow and frost. Bjarni told his sister that she should stay behind, because the weather was unreliable and she was dressed for looks and not for protection.

She was in a simple linen dress and linen undershirt, sleeveless from the elbows down. She called it a serk and wanted no other kind of shirt. She had a cloth headdress, red and brown, and her hands and feet were poorly clad.

Dísa was not pleased to sit waiting. She declared that she should go with him, whether he would or no. They fell into an argument, and so set off both in poor humour, and made their way up onto the heath, in spite of the fact that the weather was growing worse and worse.

Now it came to pass that Bjarni had no idea where he was going, and Dísa grew weary from both cold and exertion, and always she complained that she was exhausted from all this walking; then Bjarni began to dig a cave into a snowdrift and when he had finished, it seemed to him that there was a gap in a gravel bank a little way away; then he said to Dísa that he wanted to go over there and see if he recognised the gravel bank. She asked him not to leave her, but it was no use.

So Bjarni went, but then the weather closed in; he thus found neither the gravel bank, nor Dísa again; nonetheless, he carried on indecisively until he crawled, barely awake, into Fjörður in Seyðisfjörður that evening, almost completely without strength, speechless and very scraped up around his face. He had gone astray past the mountain and fallen into brambles and ravines, lost his hat and was generally in a bad way.

At that time, there lived in Fjörður a farmer who was called Þorvaldur Ögmundsson. He was well thought of, powerfully strong and very brave. Those who knew him said that he knew no fear. He was straightforward and even-tempered, intelligent and the best man to ask for a favour.

He received Bjarni well and had him nursed back to health as best he could. And it was not until the next evening that Bjarni was able to tell the tale of his journey, so exhausted was he. Then he begged Þorvaldur to prepare himself to search for his sister; but the weather continued the same as ever. It was weather from the north, very harsh and dark, and so much frost that it was hardly possible for a strong man to find his way home between the houses. So Bjarni was there for two more nights, but on the fifth day after he parted from Dísa, the weather calmed a little.

Then they prepared themselves for the journey, Þorvaldur, Bjarni and a labourer by the name of Jón Bjarnason, a hard-working man and a good fellow; they made their way up to the heath, but a little way from the common route, because it was Bjarni’s guess that that would be the best place to search for Dísa.

When they had come north of Stafdalsfell, they heard a scream so loud that it resounded through all the nearby mountains. Jón and Bjarni were shocked but not terrified, and Þorvaldur did not know what it was to be afraid. He headed in the direction from which the sound had come, until he was east of Stafdalur. His companions had begun to fall behind. Then Þorvaldur questioned Jón’s courage to get him to keep up.

By then, the day had ended, and the weather was somewhat bright, and bitter frost came driving at them; the moon shone down and clouds passed overhead; thus the time passed. Then Þorvaldur saw something in a snowdrift, where he had had no hope of finding anything, though the area was well-known to him. There was a grassy hill stretching away from them.

Then he said to the others, “Þordís must be there now,” and it was as he said.

So he went to her. She was not at that time lying down, as he would have expected from a dead person, but rather she was positioned most like when people are sitting in a chair; the linen dress was tented around her middle and frozen in spikes, and she was bare below and bareheaded, the snow-house blown away so that you could only see the bottom of it.

Þorvaldur spoke then to his companions, saying that they should approach and help each other to arrange the corpse on a skin which he had brought with them for transportation. They dragged it towards him. Then he told Bjarni to cut the frozen covering off her, because he wanted to dress her in trousers, which he had with him, so she was not naked as they carried her. Bjarni did as he was told, though he was afraid.

Then Þorvaldur lifted her up in his arms and intended to dress her in the trousers, but at this, she let out such a great howl that it overpowered him; Þorvaldur has said that it seemed to him impossibly strong and mighty.

His companions recoiled from deadly fear, but Þorvaldur reacted thus: he put Dísa down hard and said rather quickly: “No good are you, Dísa, to struggle like this, because I am not at all afraid, and if you carry on like this, then you will find out that I shall tear your apart nerve by nerve and then throw your body to the wolves; on the other hand, if you behave agreeably for us while we carry you and we have no trouble getting you down, then I shall make a coffin for you and bury you in a Christian grave, though I imagine you aren’t worthy of such a thing.”

After that, he took her, dressed her and arranged her on the skin, called his companions to him and made his way home.

(Other stories say that Þorvaldur may have broken Dísa’s back to make her be quiet, and thus she stopped howling. There are many other ugly stories about their exchange. Þorvaldur was a decent, honest man, but superstitious like many in the 18th century, and the story he told himself must be the most accurate.

(The stories say that Dísa and Bjarni had had a cask of strong spirits. Dísa may have been drunk, but alive, and Þorvaldur dealt with her out of superstitious fury.))

Þorvaldur had seen that the tracks from Dísa’s lair were like this: that she had walked, so that each path was different, to about four fathoms away and then leapt backwards in a single leap with both feet, back into her den, and she had done this twice. Hermann of Fjörður in Mjóafjörður, who was called very wise, has said that this was the habit of those who walked after death, and they needed to do it three times in order to become full revenants, but Dísa lacked the third path.

Now they carried on down from the heath; the weather was so dark overhead that it was hard to find their way, yet they arrived unharmed at Fjarðarsel; it was then a short way out to Fjörður over the shoulder of the mountain, but Þorvaldur did not trust himself to find his way along the fjord; he asked for lodgings for him and his companions. But the farmer refused; he said that he had become wary of the unpleasant spirit that followed them.

Then Þorvaldur began to make arrangements: he set the body in a shed across from the doors to the living quarters and went into the living quarters with his companions, and the farmer sat with his son on the edge of the sleeping platform. Both of these two were called Björn; they each held a spiked walking stick in their hands and paced back and forth in front of the door. Thus they continued into the night. Þorvaldur did not become sleepy, and did not undress, but went out alone to look at the weather. One time during the night, when he wanted to turn back to the main building, Dísa appeared before him in the doorway, as though she wanted to follow him inside, but he turned her away and hurried into the living quarters.

With the coming of day, the weather quietened, so that they were able to reach Fjörður. The hut in which Dísa had spent the night was scratched as though by claws. Now Þorvaldur went to a coffin-maker, just as he had promised, and had Dísa brought to Dvergasteinn. The priest there at that time was Þorsteinn Jónsson the poet (d. 1800). He offered Dísa burial in the Christian manner. But it so happened that the next morning there was a strangely deep hole at the foot of Dísa’s resting place; the hole was filled, but in the morning it was open again. Again it was filled, and yet again, on the third morning, it was open as before. Then the priest himself came and said a blessing over the hole. Men say that from that point on, it did not re-open.

Now it must be told about Bjarni, that henceforth, whenever he intended to sleep, Dísa came and tried to take him by the throat, and this was no secret because both the blind and the sighted saw her. Men also said that she had often attacked him, even in the light. Then he went to Father Þorsteinn, who was mentioned before, and received some kind of protection from him, so that Dísa never succeeded in hurting Bjarni himself.

Bjarni had thirteen children, and they all died young and quickly. Men have it as true that Dísa must have hastened all of their deaths. She followed Bjarni until his dying day and often made her presence felt: killed living people, and sometimes attacked men, and there are many tales told of her tricks that would be too long to relate here.

And thus ends the story of Bjarna-Dísa, and the story here is written as it was told by Þorvaldur himself.

#I would love for people to read this because I think it's a very cool and creepy little story #with lots of room to imagine all sorts of horrible things if you want to #unfortunately I have no idea what to tag it as so *shrug* here goes #folklore #icelandic folklore #translations #ghost stories #(on which note I should really see if we have anything else attributed to Mr Cleverclogs Hermann of Fjörður because his stuff about #How to Make a Revenant is very interesting and I wonder how well-known it was)

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