The Wind-Gnome
There was once a skipper of Dyrevig called Bardun. He was so headstrong that there was no doing anything with him. Whatever he set his mind upon, that should be done, he said, and done it always was.
If he promised to be at a dance, the girls could safely rely upon his being there, though it blew a tempest and rained cats and dogs.
He would come scudding along on a Færing36 to his father’s house through storm and stress. Row upon row of girls would be waiting for him there, and he spanked the floor with every one of them in turn, and left their gallants to cool their heels as best they might.
Cock-of-the-walk he always must be.
He would go shark-fishing too, and would venture with his fishing gaff into seas where only large vessels were wont to go.
If there was anything nobody else dared do, Bardun was the man to do it. And, absurd and desperate as the venture might be, he always succeeded, so that folks were always talking about him.
Now, right out at sea, beyond the skerries, lay a large rock, the lair of wildfowl, whither the merchant who owned it came every year to bring away rich loads of eiderdown. A long way down the side of this lofty rock was a cleft. Nobody could tell how far into the rock it went, and so inaccessible was it there that its owner had said that whoever liked might come and take eiderdown from thence. It became quite a proverb to say, when anything couldn’t be done, that it was just as impossible as taking eiderdown from Dyrevig rock.
But Bardun passed by the rock, and peeped up at the cleft, and saw all the hosts of the fowls of the air lighting upon it so many times that he felt he needs must try his hand at it.
He lost no time about it, and the sun was shining brightly as he set out.
He took with him a long piece of rope, which he cast two or three times round a rocky crag, and lowered himself down till he was right opposite the cleft. There he hung and swung over it backwards and forwards till he had got a firm footing, and then he set about collecting eiderdown and stuffing his sacks with it.
He went searching about for it so far into the rocky chasm that he saw no more than a gleam of sunlight outside the opening, and he couldn’t take a hundreth part of the eiderdown that was there.
It was quite late in the evening before he gave up trying to gather it all. But when he came out again, the stone which he had placed on the top of the rope and tied it to was gone. And now the rope hung loosely there, and dangled over the side of the rock. The wind blew it in and out and hither and thither. The currents of air sported madly with it, so that it always kept sheer away from the rock and far out over the abyss.
There he stood then, and tried again and again to clutch hold of it till the sun lay right down in the sea.
When it began to dawn again, and the morning breeze rose up from the sea, he all at once heard something right over his head say—
“It blows away, it blows away!”
He looked up, and there he saw a big woman holding the rope away from the cliff side.
Every time he made a grip at it she wrenched and twisted it right away over the rocky wall, and there was a laughing and a grinning all down the mountain side—
“It blows away, it blows away!”
And, again and again, the rope drove in and out and hither and thither.
“You had better take a spring at once, and not wait till you’re tired,” thought he.
It was a pretty long leap to take, but he went back a sufficient distance, and then out he sprang.
Bardun was not the man to fall short of anything. He caught the rope and held it tight.
And, oddly enough, it seemed now to run up the cliff-side of its own accord, just as if someone were hoisting it.
But in front of the rocky crag to which he had fastened the rope, he heard a soughing and a sighing, and something said, “I am the daughter of the Wind-Gnome, and now thou hast dominion over me! When the blast blows and whines about thee ’tis I who long for thee. And here thou hast a rudder which will give thee luck and a fair wind whithersoever thou farest. He who is with thee shall thrive, and he who is against thee shall suffer shipwreck and be lost. For ’tis I who am in the windy gusts.”
Then all at once everything was quite still; but down on the sea below there swept a heavy squall.
There stood Bardun with the rudder in his hand, and he understood that it was not a thing to be lightly cast away.
Homeward he steered with a racing breeze behind him, and he had not sailed far before he met a galeas which gave him the Bergen price for his eiderdown.
But Bardun was not content with only going thither once. He went just the same as before, and he returned from the Dyrevig rock with a pile of sacks of eiderdown on his boat right up to the
