It was the story of love that did not go smoothly for he flirted and did not propose to her father for her hand in marriage. Her father sold his farm and moved to the south. Man-slayings followed and Valgerðr was forced by her father to marry another man when Ingólfr deserted her for another maiden. He had many love affairs for he was inconstant. In the end he was wounded by outlaws and when dying he requested that he might be laid in the mound with his forefathers near the river path in Water Dale that “the maidens might remember him when they walked that way.”
Valgerðr had a famous brother, Halfreðr nicknamed Vandaeðaskald, signifying the “Troublesome Scald.” He was the favorite scald of the powerful Norwegian King, Olaf Tryggvason, who reigned from 995 to 1000 A. D. A full account of this King and of his favorite singer is given in Heimskringla by Snorri Sturlason, the Norse Historian, from which the following brief account is condensed.
Halfreðr was a wayward youth, given to wandering and adventure, a real Viking in spirit. He was born in 968 and raised at this very farm of Haukagil, Hawk-Gulley, where the notes for this chapter were roughly penned in 1910. He was “a tall man, strong and manly looking, somewhat swarthy, his nose rather ugly, his hair brown and setting him off well.”
A little brook tumbles down from the heath behind the house, the rolling meadow reaches away to the river and beyond it the mountains rise in glorious colors in this evening light just as they did when Halfreðr played beside this same brook as a child and Ingólfr flirted with Halfreðr’s sister. The turf house and the tún, the noisy dogs bringing up the ewes for the evening milking, the swish of the scythe in the grass and the call of the plover on the heights,—all are as in the days of old and it requires little fancy to place this sturdy youth in his old surroundings.
He was a poetical genius, a favorite of kings and a terror to his enemies. He did not so often unsheath his sword in a quarrel as he employed his stinging rhymes which cut his enemy deeper than the sharpest sword. Like his sister, Halfreðr had his love troubles. Kolfina loved him and he reciprocated but her father chose otherwise and betrothed her to Griss, a man who had accumulated great wealth in the service of the Emperor at Constantinople. Griss was “rather elderly, short-sighted, blear-eyed;” but he could see well enough when he went to woo Kolfina that a handsome youth was kissing her at the door of the lodge. Caught by Griss in the very act, Halfreðr shouted to him as he took his reluctant departure:—
“Thou shalt have me for a foe, Griss, if thou wilt try to make this match.”
The parents gave Halfreðr a good scolding and ordered him away at once. As he rides away he makes this rhyme:—
“Rage of the heath-dweller, trough-filler, beer-swiller,
Count I no more
Than the old farm-dog’s yelp