In 2018, en route back to America from presenting at a folklore conference in Brussels, I had a very short layover in Iceland. I’d never been there before, and wanted to see the beautiful mountains and landscapes, but quickly realised that I wouldn’t have a chance to see much more than the capital, Reykjavik. There would be no Game of Thrones filming location tours for me, and probably no visits to world-famous geothermal hot baths unless I booked a tour right away and pushed myself.
As my options for seeing Iceland dwindled by the hour I quickly focused on what I could see locally. I then remembered a curious controversy I’d written about for the LiveScience website years earlier, about how protests over the building of a road in Iceland centred on the fact that it would destroy the natural habitat… of elves.
It happened on the Álftanes peninsula, 10 or so kilometres (six miles) outside Reykjavík, in an 8,000-year-old lava field called Gálgahraun. In 2013, dozens of environmentalists staged a high-profile protest against a road slated to cut through the lava field. The campaign made international news because some of the protestors claimed that the proposed road would disturb elves who lived there (see “Elfin Safety Concerns, FT311:14-15).
THE HIDDEN FOLK
In their book Icelandic Folk and Fairy Tales, folklorists May and Hallberg Hallmundsson explain that the Icelandic conception of nature is intimately tied to its folklore of elves and fairies: “To the Icelanders, the land was never just an accumulation of inanimate matter – a pile of stones here, a patch of earth there – but a living entity by itself. Each feature of the landscape had a character all its own, revered or feared as the case may be, and such an attitude was not a far cry from believing that it was actually alive.” The spirit of the land came to be personified in elves and other huldufolk or ‘hidden folk’ (see Claire Smith, “The Land of the Hidden People” FT201:42-45). These elves, trolls and fairies are believed to live in their own hidden world and generally ignore humans, but must be treated with respect; to do otherwise invites anything from mischievous pranks to child abduction or even curses (FT43:45, 74:16, 93:20).
Iceland has several semi-officially designated “elf areas,” small caves and rocky crags where the magical beings are said to dwell. While not all Icelanders believe in the literal existence of elves, a great many of them – at least 100,000 in this small nation of fewer than a third of a million people – express some form of belief in them. Some of the protesters actually cursed the road construction crew (and, by extension, anyone supporting the project). This took the form of a nithing pole – a traditional Icelandic/German pagan device used to curse enemies. Nithing poles are traditionally topped with a freshly severed horse head, but on this occasion a suitably snag-mawed fish head was used instead. It had been six years since I reported that story, and many of the
