Up in Gol in Hallingdal, shortly before the main road divides to Ål and Hemsedal, there is a great high mound that has a distinctive shape; it is called Hahaugen. Mound folk have always dwelt therein, and to this day people in the village hear music and songs from the mound.
But one Christmas Eve in the olden days, a peasant boy, Gudbrand Golberg, skied away to the mound, for he wanted to see how the mound folk observed Christmas. The mound opened up before him, and out came a girl with blonde hair; she wore a blue skirt, and was so beautiful that he had never seen her match. She offered him a large horn of a Christmas drink; but when he took the horn and glanced down into it, Gudbrand was afraid to drink, for the drink was like fire and flame. He poured it behind him, over his shoulder; it fizzed in the snow and hissed on his skis, for a drop that splashed burned a hole right through. With that he let himself go down the steep slopes with the horn, and the old troll screamed: “Well, just you wait until I put on my trotting trousers!”
Even though Gudbrand gave it everything, it wasn’t long before he heard the troll trotting – trotting so that he thought it must be just behind his skis, ready to grab him by his neck. But by then he wasn’t far from home, either.
Then the Golberg troll called out of the Golberg boulder: “Run on the tilled, and not on the trodden, Gudbrand!” He understood that to mean that he had to stick to the parts of the field that were furrowed, and where the soil had been blessed when the crop was planted; the troll would have no power there. Gudbrand obeyed, for here he knew every stone. The troll followed him along the edges of the fields and threatened and swore that if it did not recover the horn, it would trouble the folk of Golberg to the ninth generation. But then the sun rose, and the troll stood there as log and stone.