The scullions were Danish... and they smugly explained to Regvidsen time and time again that Iceland was not a country and Icelanders were not people. They insisted furthermore that the lice-infested pack of slaves that lived on that funnel of Hell scrabbled along only on whale oil, rotten shark meat, and alms from the king.
--From Iceland's Bell, by Halldor Laxness (1902-1988), translated by Philip Roughton
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Alcoa, the biggest aluminum company in the country, encountered two problems peculiar to Iceland when, in 2004, it set about erecting its giant smelting plant. The first was the so-called hidden people-- or, to put it more plainly, elves-- in whom some large number of Icelanders, steeped long and thoroughly in their rich folkloric culture, sincerely believe. Before Alcoa could build its smelter it had to defer to a government expert to scour the enclosed plant site and certify that no elves were on or under it. It was a delicate corporate situation, an Alcoa spokesman told me, because they had to pay hard cash to declare the site elf-free, but, as he put it, "we couldn't as a company be in a position of acknowledging the existence of hidden people." The other, more serious problem was the Icelandic male: he took more safety risks than aluminum workers in other nations did....The Icelandic male had a propensity to try to fix something it wasn't his job to fix.
--Michael Lewis in Boomerang: Travels in the New Third World (2011)
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Graphic by Justin Pollard, John Lloyd and Stevyn Colgan
Amy Poehler once said that IKEA is Swedish for "argument."
--Lauren Collins, "House Perfect," in the New Yorker, 3 October 2011
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From time immemorial it has been the custom in all sizeable farms in Iceland to have a good reader available to read sagas aloud or recite rímur for the household in the evenings; this was the national pastime. These evening sessions have been called the Icelanders' University. Old people who had attended this university for eighty years or more came to know the curriculum pretty well, not surprisingly. Saga-readings and rímur-recitations at Brekkukot were for the most part performed by visitors who stayed with us from time to time, or even just overnight.... Visitors from distant parts of the country often proved to be excellent entertainers. The best were those from the north, particularly from Skagafjörður; they were heroic-looking men who wore thigh-boots, whereas the people from the south contented themselves with thin-shoes.
They were bursting with all sorts of poetry, good and bad alike, and their speech was much more vigorous than ours; and when someone from Skagafjörður was settled comfortably against our gable-wall and was launched on to the Úlfar-rímur set to a Skagafjörður chant, with that obligatory opening about King Cyrus, there opened up before us the whole wide world of heroic poetry all the way to the Orient, fitfully lit by strange flashes of illumination.
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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
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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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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
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