Sedulia's Quotations

Colin Firth on liking ABBA

I think it's time we all came out. I think you either like ABBA or you're lying.

     --British actor Colin Firth, interviewed by Tina Daunt in the Los Angeles Times, 18 July 2008

Richard Sale: Icelandic elf emigrates to Canada

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]

Egil the Viking curses the king

When they got to Herle, Egil and his men wasted no time but ran fully armed up to the farmstead. When Thorir and his household saw this, everyone of them who could shift for themselves, men and women alike, ran for their lives from the farm. Egil and his men looted everything they could get their hands on, then went back to their ship, and they didn't have long to wait before a good wind began to blow from the mainland. They prepared to sail, but when they were ready to set out Egil went ashore onto the island, picked up a branch of hazel and went to a certain cliff that faced the mainland. Then he took a horse head, set it up on a pole and spoke these formal words: "Here I set up a pole of insult against King Eirik and Queen Gunnhild" --then, turning the horse head toward the mainland-- "and I direct this insult against the guardian spirits of this land, so that every one of them shall go astray, neither to figure nor find their dwelling places until they have driven King Eirik and Queen Gunnhild from this country."

Next he jammed the pole into a cleft in the rock and left it standing there with the horse head facing the mainland, and cut runes on the pole declaiming the words of his formal speech. After that he went aboard, and they hoisted sail and made for the open sea.

        --From ch. 57,  Egil's Saga, written ca 1230 by Snorri Sturluson (1158-1241) of Iceland about Egil Skallagrimsson (910-990), translated  by Hermann Pálsson (1921-2002) and Paul Edwards