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Irregular verbs are always fun to deal with, especially the ones with forms so different from the infinitive that you don’t even recognize them. One that I would come across from time to time was að valda, but I never really spent much time on it until now. It it a common enough verb, so spend a few minutes getting to know it – it looks very strange in the past tense 🙂

að valda – to cause, be the cause of
present past
ég veld olli
þú veldur ollir
það veldur olli
við völdum ollum
þið valdið olluð
þau valda ollu

One thing to note is that valda takes the dative case, i.e. the thing being caused is in the dative:

Jarðskjálftinn olli miklum usla.
The earthquake caused great damage.

Reykingar valda krabbameini.
Smoking causes cancer.

Mannleg mistök ollu slysinu.
Human errors caused the accident.

When you want to say that something caused something else to happen, you can use the expression að valda því að – því being the dative form of það:

Hvað olli því að hann reiddist?
What made him get mad?

Snjókoma veldur því að fólk dvelur heima.
Snowfall makes people stay home.

The noun for cause is orsök:

orsök (f) – cause
singular plural
nom orsök orsakir
acc orsök orsakir
dat orsök orsökum
gen orsakar orsaka

Þetta er ekki orsökin vandamáls hans.
That is not the cause of his problems.

And the title of this post: orsök og afleiðing – cause and effect.

afleiðing (f) – result, consequence
singular plural
nom afleiðing afleiðingar
acc afleiðingu afleiðingar
dat afleiðingu afleiðingum
gen afleiðingar afleiðinga

Hope this helps with the sneaky verb að valda 🙂