The Folgefond, in the Hardanger district, is the snowfield which most people who visit Norway see sooner or later, and since it covers an area of 120 square miles, at a height of about 5,500 feet above the sea, it is visible from a great many points of view. It forms a background to many a picture of the varied scenery of the Hardanger Fjord, and it has the advantage of being easily accessible.
Of course, the belief in the old popular legends is dying out even in Norway, but there are still some aged grandfathers and grandmothers living near the great snowfield who can tell the tales as they were told to them. Thus they relate that where the Folgefond now lies was once a fertile and well-peopled valley, called Folgedalen, and that in one night its farms, forests, people, and cattle were buried in snow as a judgment for some great sin. One story ascribes the misfortune to the curse of a gipsy woman, who had been refused alms by the priest; while another relates that the valley was overwhelmed because the inhabitants had murdered their liege lord, the petty King of the district.
But why it happened and how it happened does not really much matter, for there the vast field of snow is to-day, and there it will doubtless remain for many centuries to come. As has been said, you can go up to the top of it and sleigh across a portion of its summit, or you can potter round about it and examine its many glaciers.
The two largest glaciers of the Folgefond are the Buar Bræ, near Odda, and the Bondhus Bræ, near Sundal, and to spend a day at either of them is a real treat. But it is not wise to visit these glaciers without someone who knows them, for one might easily fall into one of the great fissures in the ice, known as crevasses, especially if lately-fallen snow had hidden the opening of the mighty crack.
A glacier, as most people know (now that everyone goes to Switzerland, if not to Norway), is nothing more than a river of ice; not a nice, clean, smooth sheet of ice, but a rough mass of frozen billows, almost blue in colour, and generally covered with sand, dust, and stones of all sizes. Wherever, beneath the edge of a snowfield, the country shapes itself into a valley, there you will find a glacier.
If you make a snowball, and keep pressing and kneading it in your hands, you will soon convert it into a solid lump of ice. That is just what the sun does to the snowfield. It keeps melting the new snow, and this presses down into the old snow, so that the weight of the whole thing squeezes out the frozen snow into the valleys in the form of glaciers. And, as this process goes on year after year, the glacier would naturally keep going lower and lower down into the valley were it not for the fact that the point (or snout, as it is termed) of the glacier very frequently breaks off, and disappears into the torrent of ice-water which flows away from it. So some glaciers, although always moving, never grow any longer, but others creep a little bit farther down each year.
Lærdalsören
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There are many other interesting things about a glacier. One of them is the moraine, which consists of heaps of rocks and stones broken off from the edges of the valley by the great river of ice as it pushes its way imperceptibly forward. These rocks are embedded in the ice or borne on its surface, and are only given up when the extremity of the glacier melts away into the torrent. Some of the rocks thus transported are of immense weight, and the torrent is powerless to move them; year by year, therefore, the jumbled heap of boulders and rocks is added to until it often grows to an enormous size.