Tag Archives: Icelanders

The Truth about Elves and Trolls

Holar

So we’re sitting on an orange leather couch at Helgi’s house, a golden sun pouring in the window at eight in the evening. Helgi sets out six shot glasses of amber-tinted aquavit—and Esther and I are the only ones who imbibe. We are drowsy. Very drowsy. Out the living room window are Tolkien mountains and Tolkien mists. It’s a Tolkien town. Before we even got to Helgi’s, we stopped at a turf house museum where we all commented how hobbit-like the houses looked. Coincidentally on the coffee table where our empty shot glasses sit, there is the first book of the trilogy, Lord of the Rings, in English. Another one in Icelandic. This starts to add up to something, even in my somnolent mind. We are in a place, another state, and it is one of sheer contentment. All beauty and peace has descended here at Helgi’s house in Holar. The world is still or at least slowed. For Esther and me, admittedly, the aquavit may have helped, but the others who aren’t drinking feel it too. We cannot move or speak. Even Esther, who never runs out of things to say, is silent. Not only that, her eyes are closed and her face bears a beatific smile. Finally Bev, maybe sensing social pressure and noticing that her hitherto garrulous friends have checked out, picks up the slack and asks a few questions to Helgi. Thank god for that, because the rest of us are not being good guests.

Turf House Museum: camera view

Turf House Museum: what I see

Gudrinn, Helgi’s wife, comes home from Akureyri where she had been attending a conference on the economy of the Arctic States. She looks full of information. Their 8-year-old niece shows up, too. Blond-haired and brown-faced from the sun, she speaks in a whispery, angelic voice. Surely she is an elf child. Helgi calls us to the dinner table. I float there. He puts out a meal of onion quiche, mushroom bisque, tomato salad, and skyr tarte, He has performed his kitchen magic.

Holar: what the camera sees

The talk turns to the supernatural. You never know if Icelanders are pulling your tourist legs when they tell you stories of elves and trolls. And politeness stops you from asking if they believe. By most standards, Iceland is the sanest country, but the sagas and myths lodge deep in their psyches and they relish telling the tales. Helgi and Gudrinn explain the oh-so obvious:

Holar: What I see

“Trolls are giants. It’s the Icelandic word for giant. Trolls can only move in the night. If the sun comes out and catches them, they turn into boulders.”

“They are always getting into trouble. Mostly with their engineering feats. They start moving rocks and then get caught when the sun comes up.”

“Elves are invisible people. They are the beautiful people.”

“How do you know if they’re beautiful if they are invisible?” I ask.

“You know because there are times when people can see them. You can corner one at a crossroad, for instance, and if you do, it will offer you everything to let it pass. There’s a story about an elf cornered by some guy and the elf offers him gold, silver, horses–anything to let him pass. But all the guy wants is sheep fat.”

“Elves know the secret of the universe. If they tell it to you, you have to keep it quiet. Or else.”

I’m going with it. I’m gullible. I get suitably woo-woo in certain settings, especially in the recreation of Middle Earth. I want to know the secret of the universe, but I’m also happy just knowing that there is a secret to the universe.

Before the conversation is over, Helgi says, “I think it is all the subconscious at work. That we project dreams, that sort of stuff.”

Well, that’s the equivalent of a buzzkill, and puts an end to the cowardly lions’ voice in my head, “I do, I do I do believe in ghosts.”

Later that night….

we are driving home on a mountain road, we have troll-like boulders to our right that are perched along the edge of a steep cliff, and to our left, the other lane of approaching traffic. We come to the crest of the road just as the blinding globular sun cuts at an angle that obliterates our vision, including Jill’s, who is driving. She says worriedly, “I can’t see the road. I can’t see where I’m driving.” If she drives to the right too much, we hit a boulder or missing that head right off the cliff. Too much to the left, there could be oncoming traffic. She stops the car in what feels like the middle of the road. We are encased in the glare of the midnight sun waiting for it to move an inch on the horizon to give us room to see. But in those few moments, when blinded like that, you can see anything: an elf at the crossroad or a troll turn into a boulder.

Stallions and Mares, Oh My

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Summer is mating season on the farm and the Icelanders prefer their horses do it au natural. No turkey-baster artificial insemination for these mares. They bring one prize-winning stallion to the farm and fence him in with a herd of mares.

So one evening after we’ve put our horses out to pasture, a truck pulls up to Helga’s and backs into the driveway. We can hear a horse kicking the sides of the wooden trailer. Gunnar and the other men unlatch the back of the truck and bring out the stallion on a halter and lead rope. He emerges stomping his feet, throwing his head around, nostrils flaring, neighing with a nervous wild energy. He‘s ragged looking, crazed and skinny like a coke-addled rock star. We are told he spends his summer touring farms. He gets a week with thirty mares each, week after week for the three months of summer. “Poor guy, strung out on too much sex,” Esther says. But Helga says, “It’s not an easy life for stallions. They spend their lives separated from other horses except for mating season. It’s really a lonely life.”

View from the dinner table

Sitting at the dinner table that night we have a perfectly framed view out our window at the unfolding mating scene. The stallion goes from one mare to the next, barely taking time to graze in between trysts. We’re exhausted simply from watching all this rampant hormonal activity. Periodically we put our forks down to declare, “He’s still at it.” Then one horse, a pretty white mare, goes down after he is finished with her. “Is she hurt?” Kathryn rushes to the window and we crowd around her, staring out the window. “Should we call someone?” The stallion is hanging over the mare, sniffing her, nudging her gently with his nose. Suddenly, to us, this is a love story and we go all gushy anthropomorphizing the equine world. “Oh, will you look at that,” we say. “She’s the love of his life. He’s upset she’s hurt.” The mare doesn’t move. She is lifeless and we slowly realize the mare died during mating, which happens more often with natural mating than we like to think about. The stallion butts his head against her as if trying to bring her back to life. “He’s grieving,” Kat says. “He’s heartsick.” He stands over her, nudging her every so often – and then, sure she’s dead, he struts up to another mare. “Oh,” Kathryn says, and then, “Oh, my. “ We watch incredulously as he mindlessly, instinctively mounts the next closest mare while the dead white one is only three feet away. “Yep. It’s a line up, girls – next!” Esther says. “Just like men,” we mutter. One of us says under her breath, “I often wonder how long it would take my husband to find someone new if I died.” We’ve all seen it before—the devoted husband who barely makes it out of his dear wife’s memorial service before hitching up to someone new. We shake our heads, equine-izing our husbands. Lonely life? He’ll live.

Getting Lost

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: Armed with only a map (Ortelius, 1590)

First time, right off the bat, pre-GPS and armed with only a map, we got lost.

Within 20 minutes of leaving Reykjavik we saw a fork in the road and after putting all our collective navigational skills to work, we took the wrong turn. It took about an hour before realizing it. We were nine women stuffed in a van, three layers deep, with luggage on our laps and at our feet—four teenagers, four middle-agers, and Esther, who defies age-related genres. The teenagers wisely tuned out on their IPods in the way back. Bags of cheese pretzels and chocolate-covered cookies got passed around. We listened to a CD of the Dixie Chicks. Kathyrn was driving and the rest of us grownups were supposed to be navigators. Our index fingers dutifully, if erroneously, followed the map. We took turns passing it around every 20 minutes or so, occasionally interrupting our stream of conversation to weakly feign interest in the directions, saying something helpful like, “We should be in Smorgasbordafjordur any minute now.” After making such a declaration, we passed the map to the next person, as if to say, my job’s done. At one point, I heard Kat murmur to herself, “Mmm, we’re supposed to go through a tunnel at some point.” But by then the landscape had changed from a few horses in the fields (when one of us would irrepressibly shout ”horsey!”) to hundreds of horses in the fields. There were herds of mares and colts (“babies!”), a horse lover’s dream — all the Icelandic horses the eye could behold. We gave up on the map and picked up our cameras, dangling them out the window to click away.

“Horsey!”

Kathryn did her best to lure us back to getting our destination. She would pull over to a road sign, squint at the town name and say, “Does that look like anything on the map?” Our heads would collectively bump in the backseat as we focused briefly on the map again, “Mmm, sort of.”

Until finally Kat said, “Folks, we’re on a dirt road, no highway in sight.”

This alarmed Esther: “We’re lost. Pull over.”

“Yoohoo”

We pulled off the road at a juncture and parked on a hill with a view of a mesmerizing blue fjord. Below us on the beach was a family of about eight - grandparents, parents, and children digging for mussels. Esther grabbed the map from us, got out of the car and headed for the family. “Look at her go,” Kat said. And we looked at Esther because she walks like a cowboy: skinny, slightly bowed legs, tends to hitch up her pants up before she struts anywhere. She had her curly red hair tamped down with a multicolored Peruvian wool beanie, wore her round red-rimmed Harry Potter glasses and, around her neck, a dash of more tribal color from a Bali scarf. She approached the natives, waving the map over her head and giving them her signature greeting, “Yoohoo, yoohoo.” At first they looked as if they were going to ignore her. But it is hard to ignore Esther. She tramped down the hill closer to them, “Hello, does anyone speak English?” Now if they were wise Icelanders they would have denied all the English classes they ever took, or denied they even had tongues, but one man reluctantly approached her, albeit cautiously as if approaching an unnatural phenomenon. We watched the gesticulating communication from the safe distance of our van, until one of us said, “I have to pee.” Which started many murmurings of “oh, yeah, me too, I’m dying,” except from the teenage girls, who would rather die than pee in the wild. So the rest of us tumbled out of the car and surreptitiously looked for a suitable rock to duck behind. In sync all four of us crouched down behind a rock, peed, jumped up, and pulled our pants up as quickly as possible. But that, for some reason, got the natives’ attention, at least their steely stares. Did we offend? We acted like a pack of territorial dogs, sending one out to scope while the rest of us marked our territory. Esther made her way up the hill looking discouraged. “I don’t think they liked me very much. And we’re way off track.” We assured her that they just didn’t understand her. “I have to pee,” she said, and found a rock to pee behind. Before we got in the car, we waved to the family on the beach, yelled out our thank yous, and drove away realizing we may have jeopardized Icelandic/American relations for a while.

Icelandica

fast horses, wild women, Iceland adventures