Although it is not obvious to every visitor to the island, Iceland is inhabited by a whole host of folk besides the Icelanders. There are elves....There are trolls....Icelandic dwarfs...live in rocks. Collectively this army is known in Icelandic as huldufólk-- hidden people....
The visitor who thinks that all this is nonsense underestimates the hold the tales of hidden people have on the Icelandic mind....Belief runs so deep it is difficult to separate myth and reality...
At a public lecture about the huldufólk, when the speaker asked how many of the audience believed in elves, about 80% of those present raised their hands. Of them 50% had spoken to an elf and 25% had seen one. One man admitted to having made love to an elf (álfur in Icelandic) but it turned out he was hard of hearing and had thought the speaker had been talking about a calf (kálfur).
An Icelander living in Canada placed an advertisement in the national Icelandic newspaper. He wanted a female elf to go to Canada as companion to a male elf who had inadvertently travelled with a group of emigrating Icelanders. The male elf, starved of love and friendship, was making a nuisance of himself. The paper followed up the story hoping to join in the joke, but the advertiser wasn't joking, which probably didn't surprise the readers.
If you ask Icelanders about the hidden people you may well be told a story about Niels Bohr, the Danish physicist and Nobel prizewinner, with whom they feel a kinship since Iceland was under Danish rule when he was at the peak of his powers. At that time he used to have a lucky horseshoe hanging in his study. An incredulous visitor said that he found it hard to believe that so eminent a scientist could believe in such things. "Oh I don't," said Bohr, "but I'm told it works even if you don't believe in it."
--From The Xenophobe's Guide to the Icelanders, by Richard Sale
[Below: Icelandic singer Hafdis Huld takes us to see elves]
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