iceland: confrontations between the natural and the supernatural (plus: contemplations of the nomadic life)
what happened to the elves in iceland? has something about the materialistic nature of modern society blinded us to the spiritual reality?
Before embarking on my nearly three-month overland trip from Germany to Armenia, I was near the Mid-Atlantic Ridge in Iceland. This is the point where the North American and Eurasian tectonic plates meet. Given that my ambition was to travel alone and overland from Western Europe to Western Asia, starting here seemed fitting.
I was 22 with high hopes for the future, soon to be disillusioned by the realities of DC, but for now there was much ahead of me on my backpacking journey in the summer of 2010. I would revisit Germany, where I had studied my junior year in college. Back then, I had gone all over the Balkans, visiting Slovenia, Croatia, Bosnia, Serbia, Kosovo, Macedonia, and Montenegro. The former Yugoslavia is where I fell in love with traveling alone, staying in cheap hostel dormitories and meeting other solo travelers from all over the world. And this time, I would pass through my favorite region yet again, seeing places I hadn’t before, including Albania and a national park in Croatia.
I avoided developing a specific plan ahead of time. Unexpectedly, I would wind up spending over a month in Turkey, including over two weeks in the Kurdish southeast, visiting ancient cities and spectacular ruins which I hardly knew even existed. I would end the trip with a jaunt around Georgia and Armenia before flying back to Germany via Latvia from Yerevan, Armenia’s capital. Yerevan as my ultimate destination was the only fixed aspect of my itinerary, and I loved it that way.
Beforehand, however, I was in Iceland en route to Germany. It’s a good way to get there. There were cheap flights on Icelandair to Reykjavik, the Icelandic capital. Then there were even cheaper budget-airline options from Reykjavik to Germany. Given how expensive Iceland is, however, the layover there would need to be brief, and so I stayed there for just three days.
Fortunately for anyone considering a similar stopover in Iceland, three days is enough to get a taste for the country’s rugged, rocky, and mesmerizing landscapes. I still harbor unrealized dreams of renting a car and driving around the whole island. At the time, however, I settled for a couple day trips out of Reykjavik.
One of these took me to the aforementioned Mid-Atlantic Ridge in Thingvellir National Park. There, the Eurasian and North American plates are steadily moving away from one another, leaving gaps and valleys where a person can stand between the geological foundations of these massive landmasses. Iceland is one of the only places where you can actually walk around the Mid-Atlantic Ridge, since the vast majority of it is at the bottom of the Atlantic Ocean.
As always, this frontier zone between continents contains numerous active volcanoes. One of these, Eyjafjallajökull, was in the midst of a months-long chain of eruptions at the time I was in Iceland. These caused evacuations of farmers and the groundings of flights. The latter would ultimately include my own flight from Iceland to Germany.
But the same geological conditions which occasionally cause disaster also enable Iceland to construct electrical power plants which harness the Earth’s renewable geothermal energy.
What I found most mesmerizing in Iceland was Gullfoss (Golden Falls). I had been to a larger waterfall before, specifically Niagara Falls. But Gullfoss felt much more isolated and removed from human society.
Of course, the tourist infrastructure to transport people with expert guides from nearby Reykjavik is heavily developed. You could easily spend just one day in Reykjavik en route to Europe and have time to check out Gullfoss. It isn’t truly so edge-of-civilization. But I decided to embrace it anyway as a uniquely wild experience. This neatly quenched my adolescent desire to romanticize and mythologize my travels.
With a group of fellow travelers, I walked up to the edge of the rocks through which this water cuts. There, I could contemplate the raw reality of water’s destructive power as well as the extreme beauty of rapids shrouded in mist. The lack of a railing has of course enabled many tourists to creep too close in the name of a selfie for Instagram. These join the global ranks of those who habitually risk death in the hopes of drawing likes. Yet fascinatingly for the risk-averse, which in this case includes me, none has died or even been seriously injured. Perhaps it is because the spirits in this area have been largely left alone, and so they do not seek vengeance against visiting tourists by tripping them over the edge to their deaths.
Iceland’s natural beauty made me think things like that. Though, if I’m being honest, I’ve always been a bit of an animist. I recognize how scientifically unacceptable it is to suggest that animals, plants, places, and inanimate objects have spirits or souls inhabiting them. But I’ve decided that I don’t really care.
My allyship to science is seriously wanting. I prefer to indulge, rather than to suppress, the spiritual reactions I have to nature. At some point, just because I felt like it, I decided to grant these perceptions of reality with the same validity I award to what I see with my eyes, hear with my ears, or touch with my hands. Even if the inputs are much more difficult to actually interpret.
I am happy to embrace these frowned-upon sensations, rather than to explain them away using the materialistic logic of modern science. Which is partly why my old Enlightenment prejudice against astrology and witchcraft is now limited at best. Indeed, it continues to weaken constantly. No surprise, then, that when I was faced with the soul-stirring natural beauty and vast, empty, volcanic expanses of Iceland, I was very far from feeling dismissive of the many Icelanders who still believe in the hidden people. “The Enlightenment didn’t come to Iceland until 1941 when the American army invaded Iceland. Then we had the Enlightenment and it began cleaning the elves away.” This is according to Icelandic elf-school leader Magnús Skarphéðinsson, as quoted in BBC Travel’s “The Elusive ‘Hidden People’ of Iceland.”
Above: Gullfoss (Golden Falls)
According to a 2007 study by the University of Iceland, 63% of Icelanders either believed in elves or were agnostic about their existence. The elves - called huldufolk (hidden people) - are believed to live in large rocks near beaches, lava fields, and even in people’s yards. Although they are much shorter than we are, they live much like humans do. They raise their families, tend their farms, and even go to church. According to the previously mentioned BBC Travel article, Icelandic priests have even baptized elf children into the Icelandic Church. It was supposedly hoped that this would build tighter bonds between elves and humans. Such bonds are important. The elves have been known to intervene and save people’s lives, but they are also territorial creatures who will defend their homes if encroached upon.
The same BBC article quotes documentary filmmaker Michael Nawrocki on this subject. In 2016, he co-directed the documentary Iceland: A Story of Belief. Nawrocki:
“Say you’re a homeowner and you have a rock formation in your backyard that has been designated as an elf rock, and you want to put in a hot tub. You start to break that elf rock apart, and your neighbour comes out and says ‘What are you doing, that’s an elf rock?’ That’s going to mean trouble for you. About 80-90% of Icelanders will leave [the rock] alone. Part of that is that belief that maybe there’s something there. Part of that is a cultural heritage. I’ll forgo my hot tub for my elf rock.”
A 2013 Atlantic article, “Why So Many Icelanders Still Believe in Elves,” details further real-world implications. The presence of the “fiercely territorial” hidden people has inhibited the development of roads and other infrastructure.
When their habitat is disrupted, hidden people take vengeance. As The Atlantic article explains, they destroy machinery, injure workers, spread illness among humans and sheep, and spark the deaths of people and livestock. Although the most sinister stories are no longer so predominant, there is a sense that various accidents and technological breakdowns at construction sites within huldufolk territory could be attributed to hidden people. Thus, the development of infrastructure in Iceland must sometimes pass both environmental and spiritual tests to be approved.
The Icelandic Road and Coastal Commission renders no judgment on the Elf Question, acknowledging that the opinions of its employees vary significantly. But its response to an inquiry by The Atlantic in 2013 included the following:
“We value the heritage of our ancestors and if oral tradition passed on from one generation to the other tells us that a certain location is cursed, or that supernatural beings inhabit a certain rock, then this must be considered a cultural treasure. In the days when the struggle with the forces of nature was harsher than it is now, conservation came to the fore in this folklore, and copses and beautiful natural features were even spared.”
If the elves are accommodated during development projects, they may prove helpful to humans. The Atlantic article recounts the famous 2010 story of Arnie Johnson, a former member of Iceland’s parliament. Johnsen was in a brutal car crash over a cliff near a boulder inhabited by elves. The family of elves saved his life, and he returned the favor. He ensured that the construction of a new road, originally planned to run right over the elves’ home, would not involve the destruction of the boulder. As evidence, he presented the findings of the aforementioned seer. She found three generations of elves living in the boulder. These were the elves who had saved his life, and now they found a new home. They agreed, the seer reported, to have the boulder moved near Johnsen’s home, making way for the road.
In her journal article “The Hills Have Eyes: Post-Mortem Mountain Dwelling and the (Super) Natural Landscape in the Íslendingasögur,” anthropologist Miriam Mayburd discusses the environmental conditions behind Icelandic folklore. She points out that in many other places, beings like the hidden people are the “outsiders” and human beings are the “insiders.” But in Iceland, it is actually humans who inhabit the far-flung edges of existence. Vikings arrived in Iceland as the island’s first human settlers, and they were greeted by an uninhabited, terrifying, and unstable natural landscape containing deep twisting caves, underground lava flows, erupting volcanoes, geysers, and raging waterfalls like Gullfoss. Mayburd:
“In the setting of medieval Iceland, it is the human inhabitants who are on the island’s periphery, settling along its coasts, bays, and fjords, all while the land’s centre remains impenetrable, perilous, and unexplored…. Just who becomes the ‘other’ in this situation, and to whom? The familiar binary of inside versus outside is turned inside out…. Medieval Icelanders may have perceived themselves to be the outsiders, ‘the others’, inhabiting a desolate landscape unfamiliar to them and with a seeming alien life force of its own.”
Mayburd discusses how medieval Icelanders came to believe that they die “into” this landscape. In the process, they transform into - or merge with - the powerful entities residing in the mountains, volcanos, geysers, caves, and lava flows. She suggests that the desire to be buried “into” the mountains may have been connected to a sense that Iceland was actually pre-inhabited by powerful beings, with whom humans might somehow blend once they die. The mountains and hills themselves seemed to them like “animate organisms” with tremendous power.
Above: A geyser erupts near Reykjavik, Iceland’s capital
In an effort to make sense of this vast, empty, and unexplored landscape, Mayburd shows how medieval Icelanders populated it with a vast range of mythical beings. Sometimes, humans themselves were transformed into these beings. Outlaws who retreated into the interior of caves, where archeologists have found evidence of medieval habitation, often never died in the popular imagination. They changed instead into mythical and dangerous creatures one might encounter in the treacherous wilds of the Icelandic interior. In the end, Mayburd notes that there was ultimately no difference in medieval Iceland between the “natural” and the “supernatural,” or even between the “landscape” and a human. The “natural” landscape was itself a supernatural entity, into which humans could pass and with which they could merge. This dramatically contrasts with modern boundaries between the spiritual and material, human and non-human.
Thus the context for Icelandic folklore according to Mayburd: humans are the “other” who is invading an environment which is pre-inhabited by spiritual beings. Such as the hidden people. So it is no real surprise that there remains hesitancy about “encroaching” upon the “territory” of huldufolk - or upon nature itself. From the beginning, it is humans who have been the outsiders in Iceland. It is humans who are trespassing upon the territory of the powerful mythical beings which inhabit the awe-inspiring and destructive landscapes of a strange, alien island.
Of course, this is also a kind of folklore which emerges from the process of traveling into the completely unknown. The Vikings who settled Iceland were adventurers and discoverers in the purest sense of the words. They were the first humans (other than some Irish monks) to ever arrive in Iceland. That level of exploration and discovery seems impossible today, except in space and the ocean. What kind of folklore will emerge among the humans who will theoretically settle distant, uninhabited planets? What sorts of beings or forces will they sense on those desolate surfaces?
When I was a high schooler, I read some Icelandic sagas. These left me fascinated by Icelandic folklore. This process of exploration and adventure into uncharted terrain, by which Icelandic folklore emerged, has always felt deeply related to why I have loved to travel. It is to encounter unknown places and to learn about them. At the same time, it is to discover unexplained mysteries, hear about unknown places, and expand my own understanding of my ignorance. Like the medieval Icelanders, I am unafraid to color this ignorance by inventing fantasies in my head about places I’ve never seen before. Or even about places I have. At times, the reality seems to live up to these high expectations. At other times, reality is a disappointment, like when the huldufolk are subjected to the vicious light of modern science.
Perhaps it is true that electrical lighting is what has driven away the hidden people. Suppose we accept that spiritual beings only reveal themselves in the dark of night or in the deep recesses of an unexplored landscape. Anthropologist Adriënne Heijnen suggests both in “Dreams, Darkness, and Hidden Spheres: Exploring the Anthropology of the Night in Icelandic Society.” Thanks to modern science, that darkness which once concealed spiritual beings is now subjected to artificial light. And the formerly unexplored regions which struck terror into the Viking settlers have been categorized, mapped, and studied extensively by teams of scientists.
The mystery confronting medieval exploration appears lost. The realities perceived within those unknowns have been debunked. By who? By the coldly calculating geologists who emotionlessly measure volcanic activity and dryly assess the predictable movements of tectonic plates. Grim-faced teams of chemists, physicists, and other soulless entities are confident that they will inevitably explain away whatever remains of the old fantasies. In the meantime, however, the huldufolk live on within Icelandic culture, though their existence is now shaped by the evidence-demanding scientific mind’s specifications. But there are methods beyond the strictly scientific for perceiving this hidden reality.
For most people, Heijnen notes, the huldufolk have always been invisible. Their presence could be perceived almost exclusively at night, specifically in dreams. Which, in Icelandic as in many other traditions, are not the product of human imagination or subconscious. Rather, they are perceptions of a hidden reality which we only perceive while we are asleep. It is in that hidden reality, rather than in the materialist world to which the scientists eagerly cling, where Iceland’s spiritual beings live. And they still linger there, even if many of them have been driven away from human consciousness by what Heijnen and others have called “the human colonization of the night” and “the integration of modernist cosmology.”
Today, Heijnen notes that the hidden people are often only permitted to exist if they conform to “the ontological demands of modern ideology,” or “modernist cosmology.” This so-called “modernist cosmology” “supposes ‘the exclusive existence of known or knowable (i.e., rule-governed) things and processes in the world; forces may be hidden but are part of a complex system of causation subject to human discovery and control.’” In other words, it entails a confidence that human beings can theoretically explain the whole of the universe through scientific methodologies. And perhaps also that science itself can ultimately explain away all purely spiritual traditions. This leaves limited room in the human mind for fantastical creatures like the hidden people. But there is still a small space in which they might continue to exist.
Heijnen describes how these hidden beings have “adapted” to “the ontological demands of modern ideology.” Whereas once the huldufolk were considered to be invisible, they are now often visualized in drawings. They are assigned measurements, mapped out by residential location, and systematically compared in schools with beings from other countries. They are thus sorrowfully subjected to “(semi)-scientific investigations and activities,” such as one conducted by a woman Heijnen met in 2000.
This semi-scientific woman felt the presence of the huldufolk in her garden and even in her living room. She painted tiny faces with red hats on stones around her yard, signifying the homes of specific huldufolk. She led Heijnen around her garden, showing her all the different elves who lived there. Some scientific readers might suggest that the anthropologist Heijnen seems simply to be roaming around Iceland interviewing highly delusional people. But this semi-scientific woman’s neighbors purchased several of her rocks from her, using them somewhat like garden gnomes.
Humoring the imaginings of a crazy person, perhaps. But what about the town of Hafnarfjörður, also discussed by Heijnen? There resides one of the best-known communities of hidden people. Those elves have been subjected to the “semi-scientific investigations” of the late skyggn (seer) and piano teacher Erla Stefánsdóttir, who confirmed the elves’ residence in Hafnarfjörður. She even created a map showing the locations of specific huldufolk families. The local government eagerly deployed her map as a tool to engage tourists. At the time Heijnen was writing (2005), the official Hafnarfjörður website cited a local woman’s dreams as “proof” of the hulufolk’s presence. They had visited her, the government proclaimed, in her dreams at night. And this local woman was not a skyggn, which refers only to those able to see the hidden people in waking daylight. This was just an ordinary random lady.
Like her, any of us can perceive this concealed reality in our dreams at night, if not when we are awake. But I suppose that neuroscientists working in a lab somewhere will one day take this experience away from us, too. “We already have,” they might say.
Above: The rift valley between North America and Eurasia (Thingvellir National Park)
It will come as no surprise to the neuroscientists that I personally encountered no signs of any huldufolk either in Reykjavik or anywhere else in Iceland. Then again, I was there when the sun sets only briefly each day, for about three hours between midnight and three in the morning. Even well after ten o’clock at night, it was often just as light as at midday. And spiritual entities are best perceived in darkness.
It was in the light of a midnight sunset that I found myself relaxing in a heated pool with several other travelers from the hostel. We had arrived there in the early evening, perhaps at seven. Then we lost track of time while swimming and floating in the geothermally heated water.
Other than the bright light of the sky, another reason I lost track of time were our extensive conversations. During these, we happily developed our own travel folklore. It was thrilling to be amongst other solo travelers at the onset of my trip. To hear about their plans, their past destinations, and their stories. The cities they’d seen, the national parks they’d hiked, the mountains through which they’d passed. The way these stories stirred my imagination, leaving me eager to develop my own. As the traveler Paul Theroux wrote, “the traveler is the greediest kind of romantic voyeur, and in some well-hidden part of the traveler’s personality is an unpickable knot of vanity, presumption, and mythomania bordering on the pathological.” This is the sort of mindset that enables a traveler to embrace highly questionable parallels between his own exploration and the folklore of medieval Icelandic settlers.
I spoke with a forty-five-year-old doctor from Australia who was sitting beside me in the pool and sleeping in my hostel dormitory. He said he had been traveling for almost two years. I asked him how long he planned to keep going. “Until I run out of money,” he told me. Something I’ve heard from countless people I’ve met who are just like him. Wasn’t he worried, I asked, about what would come after this? “No,” he explained with a relaxed shrug. “I’ll just find new patients.”
I’d been hearing the mantra for years that you better enjoy such-and-such before your career starts. Once your career starts, you don’t really get to do something like extended travel until you are in your 60s. You laugh now, youngster. But one day you will realize that there are certain things in adult life which must be avoided at all costs. This includes missing out on the coveted advancement opportunities available at your shitty job. Not to mention the “resume gaps” which accrue during travel time.
But the Australian doctor was just one of many travelers I have met who confidently disregards these guidelines. Later that summer, I met two other Australians on a perpetual world trip. They explained that they simply travel for a couple years, then work at a bar for a year relentlessly saving, then repeat the whole thing. They’ll do this until they die. I admit there is something sad about this to me - the lack of a family, the absence of any real roots, the disappearing sense of anything like a home.
But the long-term travelers in the pool spoke derisively about home. Every time they go home, they said, they find all the people they left behind just doing the same old shit they were doing before. This is a common mantra one hears from backpackers all over the place, and really from anyone who spends long periods abroad.
The stagnant and monotonous lifestyle of the sedentary “back home” frightens the perpetual travelers. They have become addicted to the nomadic life, and they view the sedentary with pity. “Travel is at its most rewarding,” proclaimed Paul Theroux, “when it ceases to be about your reaching a destination and becomes indistinguishable from living your life.”
But why the urge among some to talk at all about the sedentary? Why not simply enjoy the nomadic life? Because the traveler has a disturbing apprehension that she won’t be on the move forever. One day she might commit the horror of “settling down.” The sedentary people are warnings of what will become of her if she gives in to the temptation to build a home, put down roots, have children, stop moving.
By speaking negatively about the sedentary, she convinces herself of own aversion to that kind of life. She thereby fortifies herself to resist any thoughts of joining them in their stationary bliss. But of course in the end she does join the ranks of the sedentary. And she tells herself she wants to, or she has to, or she has changed. Maybe she even really does want to. Maybe she really did change. Who knows, she says. She discovered, in any case, that her travel obsession wasn’t so lifelong after all. She just needs “one last long trip” before starting a family. Then it’ll be out of her system, she tells herself. She can get back to it once her kids go to college and she has paid off her student loans. Hopefully she will still be alive at that point.
And yet other long-term explorers, even once married with children, do not give in. They take their children along. Later on my trip, in Tbilisi, I met a Danish family who had just taken their preschool-aged children on a months-long road trip around Syria.
These types of things were on my mind as I prepared to depart Iceland for Germany, where my overland trip would begin. Would it be my first, only, and final trip of its kind? Would I ever traverse such a huge distance alone and overland again? I’d been reading so many Paul Theroux travel memoirs, and all I wanted sometimes was to be like him, traveling overland across continents and writing about it. I was determined to organized my life around these types of epic, overland, and solo international trips.
Fortunately, travel would in fact be a central part of my life for years to come. But as I sat in the pool talking about my travel schemes with my fellow backpackers, I couldn’t have known that I would never again experience anything like my upcoming journey.
“I’m not interested in travel anymore,” I told a friend recently.
He looked concerned. “Says the guy with the compass tattoo on his arm,” he said.
I shrugged apologetically. “Yeah, well.” I continued with minimal conviction. “I’m done traveling.” And then I immediately began planning to write about my journey from Germany to Armenia.
It began with technical difficulties. The Eyjafjallajökull volcano, perhaps animated by the powerful supernatural beings of the Icelandic interior, was still wreaking havoc on transatlantic flights. Cancellations were frequent, and there was talk of another large eruption to come, spooking airlines. In anticipation, the budget airline German Wings, on which I was supposed to fly to Germany, suddenly announced the cancellation of all its Icelandic flights for the indefinite future. Fortunately, there were cheap seats available on a nearly completely empty Air Berlin plane. I thus flew that day to Duesseldorf, from which I would take a train to Freiburg.
Why start my journey in a country where I’d already lived? It seems absurd to have worried about such a question. But it gave me anxiety at the time. Spending precious days somewhere I’d already visited, let alone lived, seemed like a waste of limited travel time. I have always felt a strange pressure to never go to the same place twice, to constantly see something new, to steadily increase my bloated country count. The “count,” however, no longer motivates me. It has been stagnant at 55 for three years.
It was a good thing, I decided, that I felt a special bond with Germany. It was important to revisit that. So I would not bypass Germany simply because going there would not satiate the obscenely privileged vanity behind my desire for a high country count. I sensed it already back then: that the quantity which I sought was not the point. I had a life in Germany once. I had friends there. I wasn’t ready to leave that behind. I wanted to continue the connection and create new memories.
Over the course of around 10 weeks, I would make my way by train, bus, taxi, and foot from Freiburg to Yerevan. I would actively choose to return to places I’d already visited, treasuring the chance to have multiple memories from different times in the same location. But I would also seek out new places spontaneously. I had few plans for my itinerary beyond that. I had no hostels, trains, or tours pre-booked. That is how I thought travel should be. That was a part of how I glamorized it all in my head. And in this case, the journey of discovery and exploration which followed did dramatically exceed my expectations. The reality, it turned out, was better than the fantasy.