Atlas
The waterfall behind the waterfall
Fardagafoss falls just outside Egilsstaðir, at the foot of Fjarðarheiði, along the Miðhúsaá, the same watercourse that also carries Gufufoss and Folaldafoss. It is a waterfall that can be read up close: the path rises from road 93, the gorge narrows, and behind the falling water a natural cavity appears, making the idea of a hidden refuge plausible, at least to the popular imagination. Its best-known legend arises precisely from this meeting of drop, cave, and the roar of the falls. (east.is)
The account recorded by Jón Árnason
The oldest and best-attested form of the tale is not a medieval saga, but a tradition collected in the nineteenth century by Jón Árnason and published in Íslenzkar þjóðsögur og æfintýri. The text appears in the chapter devoted to fólgið fé, hidden treasure: at Gufufoss, the collection says, there is a waterfall with a ledge and a pool between two levels; among those rocks, unseen by those who look, a cauldron full of gold is said to hang, supported by an iron bar. The account then mentions Fardagafoss, higher up in the same valley, and describes its cave behind the waterfall, where one may pass without getting wet. (is.wikisource.org)
In this version, the focus is not the giantess herself, but the treasure that remains beyond reach. Fardagafoss serves as the tale’s physical threshold: above the waterfall lies the cavity; farther down, at Gufufoss, is the place where the precious object is kept yet cannot be recovered. This is where the legend’s tension lies: the place promises nearby wealth while at the same time withholding it. (norroen.info)
The local variant that gave the legend a face
Contemporary readings of the site, especially those connected with the hiking route, make the story more explicit and more personal. Here, the cave behind Fardagafoss becomes the home of a most fearsome tröllskessa, a giantess; tradition even adds an imagined tunnel beneath Fjarðarheiði, which would link her to Gufufoss in the Seyðisfjörður valley. In this version, the giantess owns a cauldron brimming with gold and, sensing death drawing near, lets it slip into a deep hollow at Gufufoss, where its handle is sometimes said still to be visible when the water is low. (east.is)
This variant should not be confused with the nineteenth-century text: it is not a correction to Jón Árnason, but a local and modern elaboration that makes the landscape more legible to visitors. The shift from the treasure pool to the giantess inhabiting the cave follows a narrative logic typical of place legends: the supernatural presence explains why that cavity is special, while the treasure accounts for the persistence of the name and the association. (is.wikisource.org)
Why here, of all places
The reason Fardagafoss has preserved this story is simple and tangible: the waterfall truly offers a space behind its veil of water, and the gorge suggests a hidden interior, almost a room within the mountain. In Iceland, many local tales arise from such threshold places — a cave, a cleft, an isolated boulder — but here the effect is especially strong because the tale relates two features of the same valley, rather than a generic place and an abstract treasure. Fardagafoss is higher up, Gufufoss lies farther down, and the myth holds the two levels together as though they were rooms in a single underground house. (east.is)
The name, too, helps place the waterfall within human rather than merely natural time. Fardagar are the days of the summer agricultural move, a term linked to the traditional calendar of household and workers’ movements; to read Fardagafoss in this light is to understand that the place name evokes passage, travel, the moment when one leaves one place for another. The legend does not arise from this etymology, but the name suits it precisely: Fardagafoss is a waterfall of transit, and the tale of the cauldron speaks of something that passes, disappears, and remains close at hand without ever being possessed. (islensktalmanak.is)
What those who arrive here can recognise today
Today, visitors can still read the tale in the landscape without turning it into a tourist guide. The cave behind the waterfall, the gorge tightening around the path, the sequence of the three falls on the Miðhúsaá, and the presence of Gufufoss farther downstream are enough to show why this tradition took shape here. One reading precaution is needed: the Gufufoss of the legend is the one on the Miðhúsaá, and should not be confused with its namesake in Seyðisfjörður; the connection with the valley beyond Fjarðarheiði belongs to later versions and to the site’s present-day narratives. (norroen.info)
For this reason, Fardagafoss should not be read as a decorative curiosity, but as a narrated landscape. The waterfall does not serve to “explain” the myth; rather, it is the myth that has, over time, taught people to see the waterfall as a threshold, a possible home for a tröllskessa, and the place where a treasure remains forever just beyond one’s grasp. (is.wikisource.org)
