Anonymous: Bergbúa þáttr [The Tale of the Mountain-Dweller] (1350) Daniel Sävborg (University of Tartu) Genre: Story. Country: Iceland. Bergbúa þáttr is a short work, traditionally counted among the post-classical group of sagas of Icelanders. It is preserved in a couple of post-medieval paper manuscripts, all derived from the now lost Vatnshyrna (late fourteenth century), as well as on a single vellum leaf from its sister manuscript Pseudo-Vatnshyrna (AM 564a, 4to, early fifteenth century). The þáttr takes place in Djúpafjörður in the Westfjords. The protagonist is a certain Þórðr who plans to go to the divine service at a high holy day together with his servant. The church is far away and, after a long journey, a snowstorm during the night forces them to take shelter in a cave. Þórðr carves a cross at the entrance of the cave and they sit down there. As they hear sounds from the inner part of the cave, the servant gets scared and wants to leave, but Þórðr calms him and they pray to God for help. From the inner part of the cave, they see two lights which they interpret as big eyes and hear a voice recite a poem of twelve stanzas. This is repeated three times during the night. In the poem, the speaker identifies himself as a bjargálfr, a “mountain elf”, and mentions the name Hallmundr, presumably about himself. The main part of the poem consists of colourful descriptions of earthquakes and fire, and there are also references to pagan myths (Þórr, Surtr, Elivágar). In the last stanza, the being seems to urge the men to learn the poem by heart. In the morning the two men leave the cave and proceed to the church where the service is over. On their way home, they cannot find the cave again, something they regard as a great wonder (undr). When they come home, Þórðr remembers the poem, but the servant does not remember a word. The servant dies exactly one year after the event, but Þórðr has a long successful life. Neither Þórðr nor the event is known from any other sources, and it is not clear when the story takes place; it might be any time between 1000 and 1350 (Ármann Jakobsson 2018), which makes the þáttr’s classification among the sagas of Icelanders uncertain. For a long time, most research on Bergbúa þáttr focused on the bjargálfr’s poem. Guðmundur Finnbogason regarded the poem as the primary part of the work, from the thirteenth century, and described the narrative prose as secondary, a simple frame created for the poem and not really a tale in itself. He interpreted the poem as a first-hand description of real, specific volcanic eruptions on Iceland in the thirteenth century (Guðmundur Finnbogason 1935). The interpretation of the poem as a description of real volcanic eruptions has recently been accepted and followed up by other scholars (Falk 2007; Nordvig 2014). Two lines in the poem resemble wordings in a poem included in Grettis saga about a certain Hallmundr who also lives in a cave, and scholars have regarded the two Hallmundrs as identical or at least claimed that they belong to the same tradition (Þórhallur Vilmundarson 1991; Lindow 2018).