the monster in the saga attacked the folds at Hleidargard, the situation
was very much like that at the beginning of the story about Bothvar in
the saga, where a bear is said to have attacked the cattle of King
Hring, Bothvar's father.[118] But a bear is a real, not an imaginary,
animal, and King Hring took a creditable part in the effort to dispatch
it. Hence, this story was substituted for the story about the
troll-dragon and adapted to the circumstances, King Hrolf himself taking
the lead in the hunt and thus acting in a manner that seemed more to his
credit than the way he acted in regard to the monster in the saga.

This story, namely that the man whose cattle have been killed by a bear
goes with his men and hunts it down and kills it, is the same that we
have in connection with the early life both of Ulf and of Bjarki, where
the bear is represented as being the great-grandfather of the former,
but the father of the latter. The bear-ancestor feature was not
applicable in the connection in which the story is used in the _rímur_;
hence, it was omitted. Now, did this story spring up spontaneously and
independently in all these three instances? No, Bjarki and Ulf got their
reputed ancestry from the Siward story; and this bear hunt story they
got from a common source through contact with each other, or Bjarki got
it from Ulf. The author of the _rímur_, liking it better than the last
part of the dragon story in the saga, as most modern readers also have
done, took it from the version contained in the saga of the early life
of Bjarki and used it for letting Hjalti display his courage. As a
result, he modified the story where it applies to the early life of
Bjarki. He has two sets of three sons each, while the saga has only one
set; and, what is still more suspicious, there is a Bothvar in each set.
This is the same kind of separation or repetition as the _rímur_ later
make with regard to the dragon story, dividing it into a wolf story and
a bear story. Again, as Finnur Jónsson, summarizing the account in the