Mountains of volcanic rock rose and fell as our 4×4 careered down the two lane highway. We were now a few hours outside of the Icelandic capital in Reykjavik, moving further along the Southwestern coastline and away from the busloads of tourists traversing the Golden Circle loop.
Eventually we slowed, turning onto an unremarkable dirt road. Our guide pulled up in front of a large cave, parking against the fierce Arctic wind so it wouldn’t rip the car doors off their hinges.
“Welcome to the Elf Church”, my guide exclaimed with a grin.
I assumed this was an attempt at a joke.
“Elves, like Lord of the Rings?”, our American tour companion queried.
My guide chuckled, “I don’t believe in things like that, that’s something to sell movies.”
Icelandic elves are hidden people, he explained. They live in special parts of the landscape. The rocks and in the mountains. The legend, passed down orally for centuries, goes that these elves gathered here to perform rituals.
He recounted an old wives tale he was told as a child — if a baby or young child turned out to be badly behaved, it was because its parents had left them unattended for too long, and the elves had got to them. Elves like to steal babies, and then replace them with an ill-humored elf, transformed into human form. The only indication given was if the child grew to be particularly naughty, a point of despair for parents.
“What do you think?”, I asked, intrigued.
He grew sterner. He explained that he didn’t believe in the traditional sense, but he knew people who claimed to have seen them. The otherworldly, at times freezing landscape would have that effect, I figured dismissively. What he said next caught me off guard.
“But I believe in the spirits, that there is something out there, in the mountains. You can feel it, if you stay out here long enough.”
On a high after a few days of hiking, glacier viewing and Icelandic beer drinking, this was captivating. My guide was a man of few words, so we continued on the tour, and I didn’t push it.
Do Icelanders really still believe in elves? Or was my guide just having me on? Back home, warm and in my dorm, I began to investigate.
The first point of call was a consultation with Google, and the academic meccas of Quora and Reddit. Online descriptions seemed to match the explanations given by my guide, describing a concept present in both Faroese and Icelandic folklore. For those new to the Nordic sphere, Faroese is a North Germanic language from the mid-14th to mid-16th century and underpins a similar cultural fabric attributed to the Faroe Islanders — a self-governing archipelago of the Kingdom of Denmark. These online descriptions describe the shared mythology of hidden people or “huldufólk” — humanlike beings that live in the Icelandic landscape or a ‘parallel plain’, think like the alternate dimension in the 2016 film, Arrival.
It appears that Elvish folklore is also somewhat of an academic obsession for Nordic scholars. Entire dissertations have been written for universities across the world, such as the impressively named Charles Robinson III’s work for the University of California. In it, Robinson attempts to discern between hidden people and elves, but perhaps complicates the picture even moreso: “Elves are small and good… except for the dark ones… Huldufólk are larger, our size, and stricter, meaner, more natural, closer to nature, spiritual, like an avatar, with a slightly darker energy”. While descriptions and behavior vary greatly, the same enduring folklore remains.
They maintain a strong tie in Icelandic culture, permeating holiday traditions and literature. They hold intimate connection to 4 main holidays — New Years Eve, Thirteenth Night, Midsummer Night, and Christmas, and include farming traditions like giant bonfires or leaving cream and butter out for the elves, a symbolic reminder of their existence. One of the first mentions of elves in the Icelandic literary canon appears to be in Snorri Sturluson’s Prose Edda, a hugely influential text that forms much of the foundation of our modern understanding of Nordic Mythology. Others argue that the oral nature of these histories means these ‘sightings’ could date back to the first days of Norwegian settlement in the Viking era. These ideas have influenced European literature more broadly, inspiring Tolkien’s own mythology, as directly as Gandalf’s godlike characterisation being appropriated from descriptions of the Norse God Odin.
Naturally, the esteemed Reddit users offered the most logical commentary. Most users denied widespread belief, pointing to a nationwide practical joke on tourists, and an effort to garner international publicity to drive tourism. One interesting post I came across was that the idea more broadly represents a traditional Icelandic relationship with the environment, the concept that the landscape is not neutral and must be looked after because humans are not its only inhabitants.
So I’d been had. Feeling vindicated, I skimmed a few more articles eager to learn more about this enigma. But even if the actual belief numbers were inflated, and my guide had been lying to me for the magic of the tour, it appears the folklore is still very much cherished. So much so that it has dictated urban planning and political decisions.
In an article published in 2013 by The Atlantic, a survey cited that 54% of Icelanders believe in the possibility of the existence of huldufólk. The protection of sacred “elf sites” has been on the agenda of multiple environmentalist groups like “Hraunavinir”, and natural disasters like volcanic eruptions have been attributed to poor elvish appeasement.
The invocation of this folklore also often surfaces in political discourse, with the Icelandic Road and Coastal Administration using from at least 2013 a five-page standard reply to press enquiries about elves in relation to construction in ‘elf territory’, including to The Atlantic. Fascinatingly, MP Árni Johnsen relocated a boulder, home to an “elf family”, to his backyard after a serious car accident. His car was totalled but he was unscathed, a miracle he attributed to the elves using their powers to protect him.
While it may be more likely that the majority of Icelanders love to exaggerate this ‘belief’ to laugh at tourists, it is clear that the elvish anachronism and its wider folklore is entrenched in the Icelandic culture and psyche. Who knows — maybe there are elves out there laughing at our ignorant musings, never to be seen by the human eye.