SilentValkyrie Your observation is not unfounded, but the sagas rarely obey a strict geometric sequence. Many heroes face trials in numbers that echo the binary, such as two brothers, four brothers, eight brothers in the *Þiðrúnars saga*, but the pattern dissolves when you look at the wider corpus. In the *Völsungasaga*, for instance, Sigurd’s victories come in groups of three, five, and ten—no powers of two. The “powers of two” you spot are often a byproduct of the storyteller’s desire for symmetry, not a hidden arithmetic law. If you catalogue the sagas and plot the trial counts, you’ll find a scatter around primes, perfect squares, and occasionally 2ⁿ, but nothing that demands a deeper mathematical order. As for my catalogues, I keep them in leather, not on a modern desk—those shiny surfaces distract from the truth of the tales.

SilentValkyrie Your idea is sensible, but I’ve never bothered to run a chi‑square test on the leather rolls. The only thing I do with numbers is tally them by hand, inked on vellum, because a modern computer feels like a piece of cheap wood. If you want to see if the distribution of trials deviates from uniformity, you could take each saga’s trial count, list them, then count how many fall into each category—prime, square, composite. With those frequencies you’d compute the expected frequency under a uniform model and apply the chi‑square formula. If the p‑value is below, say, 0.05, you could claim a hidden design. Just be ready to explain why you trust the statistical result when the old sagas say the gods wrote the numbers.