Búkolla in the Second Icelandic Tale

Overview

An old couple’s only cow disappears after calving. They send their disliked son to find her and forbid him to return without her. At successive rests he calls for Búkolla to bellow if she is alive. Her answers lead him to a cave below high rocks, where she is chained beneath a sloping rock. He frees her and starts home, but an immense ogress and a smaller companion pursue them.

Búkolla speaks when the boy asks what to do. She tells him to lay a tail hair on the ground, then makes it become a great river. The smaller ogress fetches the larger one’s father’s enormous bull, which drinks the river. A second hair becomes fire, but the bull extinguishes it by expelling the water. A third hair becomes a mountain. The pursuers obtain a boring iron and open a passage; the larger ogress wedges herself in the narrow opening and becomes stone. Boy and cow arrive safely home.

The 1866 volume explicitly calls this another story of another Búkolla. Its preceding account concerns Helga, a captive cow and an enchanted helper, so those episodes are not silently combined. In this second tale the cow’s speech and successive hair transformations are directly narrated; no human transformation or species-wide magical ability is asserted.

Origins & earliest records

Icelandic Legends, collected by Jón Árnason, translated by George E. J. Powell and Eiríkr Magnússon, second series (1866), Another Story of another Bukolla, pp. 519–522.

Records & interpretation

Complete second Búkolla tale in the surviving alternate-copy OCR; damaged printed p. 520 in the earlier Google scan is not used to reconstruct missing claims.

Selected bibliography

Documented works and useful reading. This is not a list of every appearance.

1. 01

   Icelandic Legends, second series: Another Story of another Bukolla, pp. 519–522

   Collected by Jón Árnason; translated by George E. J. Powell and Eiríkr Magnússon · 1866

   Complete named second tale. The preceding Helga/Bukolla narrative is a distinct account.

Family, evolution & connections

Bukolla and her calf - the second tale

Only the opening’s expressly narrated birth in Another Story of Another Bukolla.

The single branch records the cow’s calving. The calf is unnamed, and its father and subsequent fate are unstated. The earlier Bukolla tale is a separate witness. Ownership of the pursuing bull does not make him this calf’s father.

References

Sources supporting this profile. Linked pages have their own scope and editorial standards.

1. Primary textIcelandic Legends, second series, 1866 alternate surviving copyResearch access: 2026-10-05

Image credits

A sourced illustration has not yet been added. This gap is included in the coverage record.