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That, in the rímur, the men are said to leave the hall in the daytime, instead of at night, is a consequence of the substitution of the wolf for the troll-dragon; a wolf is usually hunted in the daytime. It might be surmised that their going out secretly is in imitation of the story as Saxo knew it. But this is not the case; Saxo does not say that Bjarki and Hjalti went out secretly.
In view of the fact that the troll is a troll-dragon, that the eating of its heart associates the episode very closely with the similar episode in the Volsungasaga, and that the rímur magnify Hjalti's strength by saying that it is equal to that of a troll, it is hypercritical to say that the saga here contains an incongruous element.
The Bjarkarímur are, therefore, at this point a later composition than the corresponding portion of the Hrólfssaga; and this fact affords further corroboration of the idea that the stories in the rímur of Bjarki's slaying the wolf and Hjalti's slaying the bear are later than the Hrólfssaga's account of Bjarki's slaying the winged monster.
The fact of the matter is that the account in the rímur of the killing of the bear, though brief, is so confused and indefinite that it does not bear analysis; and this is further evidence of the fact that the author of the rímur clumsily re-worked material that he found in the Hrólfssaga version of Bjarki's career, and for the dragon story, which is a good story, substituted two poor ones, namely the wolf story and the bear story.
But the author of the rímur, observing what pains the author of the saga took to motivate the going out secretly, felt that this feature of the story was so important that it must be retained, and so he retained it without motivation. In Saxo, Hjalti shows no fear when the bear is met, and he does not refuse to drink the animal's blood.
On the one hand, he has in mind the story of the bear with which Bjarki's father was identified and which was killed by the king's men, and the story of the dead propped-up dragon, which was, of course, not dangerous; on the other hand, he wishes to represent Hjalti's feat of killing the bear, which, in the rímur, the king's men avoided, as, in the saga, they avoided the dragon, as a notable achievement.
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.
These statements are deductions that the author of the rímur made from the story in the saga, in the light of subsequent events. In the rímur, it is said that Hjalti "became very strong, mighty as a troll, all his clothes burst open." Why, or whence, this reference to a troll? Another harking back to the Hrólfssaga, another deduction made from the story in the saga.
But in the rímur there is the same kind of fear as in the saga. In the saga, however, the author has found an excellent setting for Hjalti's fear; it is beyond improvement; while the ferocity of the man-eating wolf, in the rímur, is stretched to the utmost limit, in order to preserve the spirit of the heroic.
Furthermore, the rímur say, "The folds at Hleidargard were attacked by a gray bear; many such beasts were there far and wide thereabout. Bjarki was told that it had killed the herdsmen's dogs; it was not much used to contending with men."
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