[From Soerum, Romerike (eastern Norway), 1836 or 1837]
My mother’s brother, Mads, lived at Knae in Hurdalen. He was often up in the mountains chopping wood and felling timber, and whenever he was up there working it was his habit to sleep out in the open too. He would build a shelter of pine branches, make up a fire in front of it, and lie there and sleep during the night.
Once he was out in the forest with two other woodcutters. Just as he finished chopping down a huge tree trunk and sat down to rest, a ball of yarn came rolling down a flat ledge and stopped right at his feet. He thought this was strange. He did not dare pick it up, and it would have been better for him if he had never done so either. But nonetheless he looked up, for he wanted to see where it had come from. Well, up on the hill sat a maiden sewing, and she was so beautiful and fair that she shone.
“Bring that ball of yarn here,” she said. Well, this he did, and he remained standing there gazing at her for a long time. She was so lovely that he could not take his eyes off her. At last he had to pick up his ax and start to work again. After he had been chopping for a while, he looked up again, but she was gone. He wondered about this the whole day. It was so strange that he did not know what to make of it. In the evening, when he and his companions were going to turn in, he insisted on sleeping in the middle. But it did not help much, I dare say, for later on in the night she came to fetch him, and he had to go with her whether he wanted to or not. She took him inside the mountain. Everything there was so fine that he had never seen such riches before, and he was never able to say just how fine it really was.
He stayed in there with her for three days. Later on during the third night he woke up and found himself lying between his companions again. They thought he had gone home after more supplies, but he told them what had happened. After that he was never quite the same. Suddenly, as he was sitting, he would make a couple of hops and rush away. He was huldrin [pixilated], I’ll have you know!
But a long time after this, he was busy up in the woods splitting logs for a fence. As he stood there, and had driven a wedge into a log so there was a crack all the way down the center, he thought he saw his wife come with his dinner. It was cream porridge, the very rich kind, and the pail she had it in was so bright that it shone like silver. She sat down on the log. He put down the ax and sat down on a stump beside her. At the same moment he saw that she had a cow’s tail, and it had slipped down into the crack. Well, he did not touch the food now, you might know, but sat there working the wedge back and forth until he got it out. The log snapped shut on her tail, and he wrote “Jesus” on the pail. But I dare say she had feet now; she jumped up so quickly that the tail snapped off and remained in the log. She was gone so fast that he did not even see what had become of her. The pail and the food were nothing more than a basket of bark with dung in it. After this he hardly dared go out in the forest for fear she would get even with him.
But four or five years after this he lost his horse and had to go out himself to look for it. As he was walking in the forest, he suddenly found himself inside a hut with some people in it, without realizing how he got there. An ugly old hag was busy going about her duties, and over in a corner sat a child who was at least four years old. The hag took the tankard and went over to the child.
“Go over,” she said, “and offer your father a drink of beer!” Mads was so terrified that he took to his heels, and after that he never saw anything of her or the child. But queer and half-witted he was ever after!