Icelandic Folklore is rife with tales of Elves and Hidden people that inhabited hills and rocks in the landscape.
The international media has had a particular infatuation with the Icelanders\' elf belief, generally using it to propagate some kind.
But what do those elf Stories really tell us about the Iceland of old and the people who lived there? In this book, author Alda Sigmundsd�ttir presents Twenty translated elf Stories from Icelandic folklore, along with fascinating notes on the context from which they sprung.
Icelandic Folklore is rife with tales of Elves and Hidden people that inhabited hills and rocks in the landscape.
All this and more is the subject of this book.
They are a part of their identity, a reflection of the struggles, hopes, resilience and endurance of their people.
To the Icelanders, Stories of Elves and Hidden people are an integral part of the cultural and psychological fabric of their nation.
They even had supernatural powers: they could make themsElves visible or invisible at will, and they could see the future.
Their livestock was better and fatter, their sheep yielded more wool than regular sheep, their crops were more bounteous.
Their clothes were luxurious, their adornments beautiful.
Their homes were furnished with fine, sumptuous objects.
The Hidden people lived inside hillocks, cliffs or boulders, very close to the abodes of the humans.
This was the world of the Hidden people, which more often than not was a projection of the most fervent dreams and desires of the human population.
In a country that was, at times, virtually uninhabitable, where poverty was endemic and death and grief a part of daily life, the Icelanders nurtured a belief in a world that existed parallel to their own.
That is what the Stories of the elves, or Hidden people, are really about.
Yet Iceland\'s elf folklore, at its core, reflects the plight of a nation living in abject poverty on the edge of the inhabitable world, and its people\'s heroic efforts to survive, physically, emotionally and spiritually.
The international media has had a particular infatuation with the Icelanders\' elf belief, generally using it to propagate some kind of kooky Icelanders myth.
But what do those elf Stories really tell us about the Iceland of old and the people who lived there? In this book, author Alda Sigmundsd�ttir presents Twenty translated elf Stories from Icelandic folklore, along with fascinating notes on the context from which they sprung.
Icelandic Folklore is rife with tales of Elves and Hidden people that inhabited hills and rocks in the landscape
