![]() ![]() The elves differ from the extremely tiny figures that are typically depicted as assistants to Santa Claus in popular American mythology. “‘Oh heavens! The elves have stolen the real baby and left this thing instead.’” The more elaborate stories cropped up in the folklore of the 16th and 17th centuries and have ripened with age. The older texts do not divulge much about what the elves do they mainly focus on the activities of the gods. Jacqueline Simpson, a visiting professor at the University of Chichester’s Sussex Centre for Folklore, Fairy Tales, and Fantasy, in England, says references to the word alfar, or “elf,” first appeared in the Icelandic record in Viking-era poems that date back to around 1000 A.D. “But to have people through hundreds of years talking about the same things, it’s beyond one or two crazy ladies. “If this was just one crazy lady talking about invisible friends, it’s really easy to laugh about that,” Jónsdóttir says. That poll is fairly consistent with other findings and with qualitative fieldwork, according to an academic paper published in 2000 titled “The Elves’ Point of View,” by Valdimar Hafstein, who now is a folkloristics professor at the University of Iceland. In one 1998 survey, 54.4 percent of Icelanders said they believed in the existence of them. Though Jónsdóttir’s belief in elves may sound extreme, it is fairly common for Icelanders to at least entertain the possibility of elves’ existence. “So, if one of them is destroyed, it’s, uh, well, it’s not a good thing.”Ī view from Gálgahraun lava field in autumn (Ragnhildur Jónsdóttir) “This elf church is connected by light energy to other churches, other places,” Jónsdóttir says. If a road is completely necessary, the elves will generally move out of the way, but if it is deemed superfluous, a possibility at Gálgahraun, “very bad things” might happen. “I mean, there are thousands or millions of rocks in this lava field,” she says, “but we both went to the same rock or cliff and talked about an elf church.” She knows about the elf church because she can see it, she says, and also sense its energy, a sensation many Icelanders are familiar with. Both she and another seer visited the field separately and came to the same conclusion about the spot. One of the many oddly shaped rocks at the lava field houses “a very important elf church,” which lies directly in the path of one of the roads, according to Jónsdóttir. Jónsdóttir, a greying and spectacled seer who also operates an “elf garden” in nearby Hafnarfjörður, believes that the field is highly populated by elves, huldufolk (“hidden people”), and dwarves, many of whom, she says, have recently fled the area while the matter is settled. At least a few believe it will displace certain supernatural forces that dwell within the hallowed volcanic rubble, and fear the potentially dark consequences that come with such a disturbance. Not all of the arguments against the development are so straightforward. One of Iceland’s most famous painters, Jóhannes Sveinsson Kjarval, once worked on his canvases there, perhaps magnetized by the charm of the terrain’s craggy natural relics. According to protester Ragnhildur Jónsdóttir, the thoroughfares would destroy some of the “amazingly beautiful lava formations” and spoil a habitat where birds flock and small plants flourish. The Hraunavinir, or Friends of the Lava, believe that any benefits from a project that snakes through Gálgahraun are cancelled out by its cultural and environmental costs. The project, led by the Icelandic Road and Coastal Administration and the nearby municipality of Garðabær, will provide a more direct route to and from the tip of the Álftanes peninsula, where the rustic, red-tiled compound of the country’s president and an eponymous hamlet of 2,600 people stand. At the edge of the ancient Gálgahraun lava field, about a 10-minute drive outside Iceland’s capital city of Reykjavík, a small group of local environmentalists has made camp among the gnarled volcanic rock, wild moss, and browning grass to protest a new road development that will slice the bucolic landscape into four sections and place a traffic circle in its core. ![]()
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