Icelandic Folklore Creatures and Where to Find Them.

Icelandic storytelling traditions are as old as the country itself. Before we started to write down the stories it's thought that stories were told at gatherings by those gifted in public speaking, those attending the gatherings would go home and repeat the stories. The stories were usually told during twilight hours when it was too dark to work, but too bright to light candles.

When Jón Árnason was a young boy, he loved hearing stories, nobody who stayed at his families' farm was exempt from telling him a story or two.

This interest carried on throughout his life and inspired by the Grimm brothers in Germany he and Magnús Grímsson started to collect Icelandic folktales. In 1852 their first collection (and the first printed collection of Icelandic folklore) Ízlensk æfintýri (Icelandic fairy tales) was released but attracted little attention.

They resumed collecting after a German professor named Konrad Mauer encouraged them to continue their work and promised to find them a publisher in Germany.

After Magnús Grímsson died in 1860, Jón Árnason finished collecting the tales on his own, the collection Íslenzkar Þjóðsögur og ævintýri (Icelandic folktales and fairytales) was over 1300 pages and in two volumes when it was published in Leipzig in 1862 & 1864.

Many others followed in Jón Árnason's footsteps, no-one can deny the important work he did for the collection of folklore in Iceland.

Jón Árnason didn't have the time to wander all over Iceland to collect stories so he relied on friends and acquaintances scattered around the country to aid him in collecting the stories.

He wrote old friends and schoolmates and included an overview of what type of stories he would like to receive. This overview sometimes ended up being printed in local newspapers and people would collect folktales and poems and send them to Jón Árnason. Some people wrote down stories themselves while others would get someone to write down the stories for them. Most of the collectors were priests and members of Alþingi (sometimes both!).

Sources came from all sorts of people from all sorts of backgrounds and with all sorts of 'job titles'. Some did have more than two jobs as was the style at the time. Agriculture was the main source of work during these times so it's not surprising that most of the sources were farmers.

Both females and males told their stories, with men in the majority.

As for the stories themselves, they happen all over the country. This map is a collection of all the stories from Jón Árnason's collection Íslenskar Þjóðsögur og Ævintýri that happen in Iceland.

A lot of these stories happen around the coast which isn't so surprising as most settlements are near the coast. There's also a fair amount in the highlands, which isn't surprising as Icelanders had a healthy fear of the highlands and it was said that exiles and trolls were the only ones who dared live there.

"A motif is the smallest element in a tale having a power to persist in tradition. In order to have this power it must have something unusual and striking about it" - Stith Thompson

The Thompson's Motif Index is a way of sorting folktales. Motifs are sorted first by an umbrella topic, then they are divided into more specific subcategories. The following chart is the most common umbrella topics used in Jón Árnason's collection. The numbers denote how many subcategories used in Jón Árnason's collection belong to the umbrella category.

Keywords are also very interesting to look at when it comes to Folklore and to see what was popular and on people's mind at the time.

In this table, you can see the number of stories using common keywords in Jón Árnasons' collection.

The hidden people came about when God went to visit Adam and Eve in the garden of Eden. They welcomed him and showed him everything inside the garden. They also showed him their children and he liked them all. He asked Eve if they had any more children than what she had shown him, Eve hadn't cleaned all of her children and hid them for that reason. This angered God and he said "That which is hidden from me shall be hidden from men" and those children became invisible to humans and lived in the woods, hills, valleys, and rocks. Human beings can never see the hidden people unless the hidden people want to be seen.

This is one of the origin stories of the Hidden People (sometimes referred to as elves) but stories of the hidden people have been around since before the introduction of Christianity to Iceland with mentions of "Elves" in Icelandic Folklore as far back as in the Poetic Edda.

The Hidden people are definitely an important part of Icelandic heritage, and it's no secret. News outlets such as  National Geographic ,  The Atlantic , and even the  BBC  have written little fluff pieces on the small island nation that holds on to their quirky beliefs.

But I'm going to tell you the honest truth, Icelanders have  delayed roadworks ,  rerouted roads , and even  returned rocks to their original spot  to appease the hidden people, and according to a survey done in 2007, 66% of Icelanders believe that there is at least a possibility that hidden people and/or elves exist.

In Jón Árnasons introduction to elf stories he talks about how the words 'hidden people' and 'elves' have been used synonymously. The 'hidden people' term being a more gentler and less offensive way of referring to these beings.

There's a story that elves want to be referred to as hidden people, and not as elves or elven-folk, an elven woman once came with a look of anger on her face after a woman who was telling off a boy called him an elf. The elf-woman said to the women "We hidden folk are as much elves as you humans are"

The term elf was used in the past as a way of calling someone stupid or not quite all there. You're not supposed to refer to hidden people as elves unless there's no ill intent behind it.

But what do modern Icelanders think? Is there a difference between elves and hidden people?

Most do not believe that there's a difference, but lets say theoretically there is a difference. What are the differences? How do they vary?

There seem to be a few things that we seem to agree mostly on. Mainly that the Hidden people are human-like and bigger than elves, and that elves have large pointy ears. But, where are they all? Where are they hiding? The following is a map of the locations of stories of the Hidden People.

Like their unhidden counterparts, they seem to stay near the coasts, at least they let themselves be known where humans are, and it seems that humans and hidden people have a lot more in common than one would think. Hidden people live in houses, they like to party, they have leaders and hold deliberative assemblies, they work and rear livestock and attend church.

Let's take a deeper look at where they live compared to humans.

Unlike their unhidden counterparts (humans) they don't seem to have decided to move to the capital area. The biggest population seems to be in the South of Iceland with a whopping 59 people per hidden people story (compared to 548 people per story in the capital area). It seems that prime real estate for elves is under glaciers, near the oceans and in places with plenty of rocks, valleys, mountains and hills.

So my next question is, if hidden people can make themselves seen at will, in which area do the most social hidden people live?

It seems that more stories don't necessarily mean more sightings. In fact the Eastern region seems to have the most social hidden people with 11% of people surveyed in that area claiming to have seen an elf or hidden person, while the southern part of the country with the most stories only have about 4% surveyed seeing hidden people. Perhaps the hidden people in the south are more shy, or opted to move further east after the 1900s.

Every culture has some form of ghost stories, and Iceland is no exception. We have three types of ghosts, Afturgöngur (revenants), Uppvakningar/Sendingar (Zombies/Sendings) & Fylgjur (familiars).

Afturgöngur are those unlucky enough to have died with unfinished business, or were so happy and fulfilled in life that they weren't ready to leave quite yet, unwanted babies that were 'carried out', and those that felt like their bones were disrespected would also come back. Sometimes these revenants come back to relay a message, or to complete unfinished business.

Uppvakningar/Sendingar are the dead that are summoned by the living, usually wizards to do their bidding or are sent to the summoners enemies as revenge or to kill them. Usually the person on the receiving end is also a wizard and manages to send the sending back or somehow manages to trick them and make them harmless.

Fylgjur or familiars are spirits that follow you from birth, everyone has a familiar and there are even familiars that accompany entire families. They can be either human or animal depending on who you ask.

Similar to the stories about the Hidden people, ghost stories usually take place where the humans are.

Most people when asked will have a ghost story or two to tell you, either something unexplainable that happened to them or someone they know, or a story that they were told. But stories and belief are two different things. Do Icelanders in general believe in ghosts?

76% of Icelanders surveyed in 2007 believe that there's at least a possibility that hauntings might be real.

Does belief change depending on the region?

In each part of the country there's a majority that believes that there's at least a possibility of hauntings being real, but the amount changes with regions and with a small sample size in some regions we can't quite conclude anything for sure.

So instead let's look at haunted houses how many surveyed have been unlucky (or lucky) enough to spend the night in a haunted house?

It might be safe to say that if you want to avoid ghosts, the North East part of the country is a safe place to go. If you want to run into a ghost or two, I recommend the North-West and the East of Iceland.

Ghosts vs Hidden People

If we compare both locations of hidden people stories and ghost stories, there's a definite pattern of these stories taking place near human settlements, such as towns and farms, with the hidden folk being a bit more wary of the highlands than ghosts (I told you that humans and hidden folk are similar!)

Population doesn't seem to be a big factor in how many stories were recorded in each area.

Every country has their own little creatures, stories and superstitions. What creatures hide in the forests, valleys and mountains of your local area?

I am a firm believer in that everyone likes to read a ghost story every now and again, even the non-believers, and because of that I would like to leave you a parting gift of some modern ghost stories from downtown Reykjavík.