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lordmongrove

Justified & Ancient
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May 30, 2009
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'Mythical' creatures in Iceland.

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Last month, the mayor of the 2,200-person town of Egilsstaðir in eastern Iceland matter-of-factly announced that his government had verified video proving the existence of the Lagarfljótsormur, the Iceland Worm Monster. A fixture of Icelandic myth since 1345, the Worm is supposedly a 300-foot sea serpent, which thrashes about and slithers up onto the surface from within the glacier-fed Lagarfljót Lake. Some say the Lagarfljótsormur was put there by men, some say it was tied to the bottom by Finns to keep its bloody appetites in check, and some say its lashing and churning portends disaster. But rather than go the way of most wyrms—into myth, history, and crackpot theories—a casual, possibly coy half-belief in the Lagarfljótsormur and many more magical creatures still persists in Iceland, with modern-day sightings by government officials, entire classrooms of children, and as in the case of the 2012 film that supposedly confirmed the serpent’s existence, men casually observing a roiling river demon over a cup of coffee. Many suspect these “beliefs” are just opportunistic bids for attention or tourism dollars. But no matter the motive, the Lagarfljótsormur and its mythic kin now play a significant role in shaping Iceland’s relationship with and preservation of its own culture and the natural world it’s tied to.

Historically, the particularly dense population of trolls, elves, and dragons in Icelandic poetry and legend makes sense from a number of angles. Some myths were warning tales for the children of the first ninth-century settlers, growing up in a harsh, bizarre volcanic landscape. Some were origin stories for natural phenomena or lyrical amusements in a bleak existence. But perhaps most compellingly, some legends were an attempt to imbue the uninhabited island with an unseen and ancient native population, giving the struggling colonists a way to connect with the past and inject a little magic into life on the explosive, godforsaken rock they now found themselves on.

But belief in these legends—especially Huldufólk, Iceland’s version of elves—has endured well past the point of any historical utility. Part of it is just the entrenched superstition implicit in Icelandic culture, in which the Huldufólk, invisible men who live in stones, are said to have their own cities, economy, and culture, alternately harassing or protecting humans depending on their mood. In Iceland, the Huldufólk play a role in major holidays like New Year’s, Twelfth Night, Midsummer Night, and Christmas. The persistence of belief (or at least homage to belief) in these creatures shows up when Icelanders don’t throw stones to avoid possibly hitting an elf or when some families leave álfhól, the elven equivalent of a birdhouse, in their gardens. But participation in these legends runs deeper than just tradition, or a small group of devotees. In 1998, a survey found that more than half of Icelanders had some level of belief in elves alone, and in 2007, only 13 percent were willing to definitively state that elves’ existence was impossible.

Still, it’s tempting to chalk something like Lagarfljótsormur verification up to a tourism stunt. Iceland is overrun with road guides for elf spotting, walking tours of magical spots, and magical museums like the Ghost Center or the Elf School in Reykjavik. The Natural History Museum has maintained since the 1980s that the monster is nothing more than flotsam and jetsam in the river, while outsiders looking at the 2012 video claim the slow-moving coil in the ice is likely a frozen fishing net or a natural disturbance of gas rising up from the lakebed. The video itself was an entry in a contest, proposed in 1997 by the previous mayor of Egilsstaòir, promising about $4,000 for whomever could furnish proof of the creature. Though the panel of non-experts who reviewed the film deny their verification was a ploy, the announcement has garnered an ungodly amount of attention, and the local tourism association granted the submitter an additional prize.

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Yet it’s impossible for tourism to account for all the creature stories in Iceland. Amazingly, it appears that honest belief in local folklore started to rise again in the 1970-80s, possibly as part of a growing sense of environmental and cultural awareness—which may explain why members of the country’s Progressive Party are more likely to believe in elves than most. Believers often become activists, forcing state agencies to officially heed the word of seers and divert roads around “Huldufólk habitats,” or carefully remove elven rock churches to avoid their destruction. These advocates have even forced companies like Alcoa to consider elves in their site analyses for future projects, helping to preserve nature, culture, and a sense of Icelandic magic against the tide of industry. And in 2013, when elf activists forced a halt to yet another road construction project—this time to protect the “hidden people” of the lava fields—the Icelandic Road and Coastal Administration was forced to prepare a five-page response to media inquiries on their decision to plan around elves.

Iceland is a small island, administration officials explain, and though some of these beliefs may be contrived and many in the government might not share them, officials learn to err on the side of openness to possibility, just in case the serpent grows wrathful or the elves become spiteful and decide to rain rocks on government equipment. Honest and heartfelt, passive and casual, or opportunistic and money grabbing, Iceland’s magical beliefs have endured, and in doing so have incidentally become effective stopgaps for cultural and environmental conservation.

Somewhat broken wayback link (text copied in full above):
https://web.archive.org/web/2014110...e.good.is/articles/elves-and-wyrms-in-iceland
 
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The Icelanders are allegedly well educated folk; why do they pander to such nonsense?
 
Iceland has an age long tradition of preserving the ancient folklore. Without the writings of medieval Icelandic clercs we would only have an extremely limited knowledge of ancient Scandinavian myths and religion. We owe much of our what we know about these ancient beliefs to the Poetic Edda and the Icelandic Sagas of Snorri Sturlusson.

Icelanders are very conscious of their contribution to the preservation of this cultural treasure, and they are proud of it. This probably explains why folkloric beliefs remain so vivid in Iceland today. This and the rural (until recently) nature of the country.

If nowadays Reykjavik is a big city, the country has long been sparsely populated through a net of small farmsteads. I guess this rural environment, organized along small family cells, favoured the preservation of local folklore and tradition.

Around the time the Eyjafjallajokull erupted I was touring around Iceland. Nearby Skogar, in the south, I had the privilege to meet the 90+ years old owner of the local museum. Apparently, the old man enjoyed chatting with the visitors, commenting the objects on exhibition. I remember him taking time to explain visitors how the ancients used ingenious devices to carry on their harsh lives at the beginning of the 20th century. He concluded with this memorable sentence (or something like that) : "Everything I know, everything I have learned, I owe to these ancestors / people. That's why I want to preserve and to share it, so that other people can learn ...". That's not the kind of things you would frequently hear in the streets or fashionable neighbourhoods of Paris or Shanghai !

If you're fond of tradition, you can be well learned, and still preserve folkloric "unbelievable" beliefs. If not for the love of truth, for the sake of poetry !
 
The Icelanders are allegedly well educated folk; why do they pander to such nonsense?
For years I've been hearing about people believing in elves in Iceland.

Then a couple of years ago I was bought The Little Book of the Hidden People by Alda Sigmundsdóttir. She begins her introduction with an account of how she disappointed a reporter by explaining a report of a construction project delayed because of elves was actually delayed because of archaeological finds.

She goes on to say there may be Icelanders who believe in elves, but that, assuming their assertions are genuine, they're the exception. She says she knows nobody who believes in elves.

In the comments of a YouTube video that I can't even remember the subject of, but it was presumably relevant, I quoted this section of the book. I was quite aggressively told by an Icelander that she clearly doesn't know what she's talking about, people do believe in elves in Iceland. When I responded with reason and curiosity, he became more nuanced in his responses and said that older folk still often believe in elves but not so much younger folk. I could surmise from history, such beliefs are probably also more common in rural areas. Either way, my impression is that the media portrayal is, as usual, more than a little misleading.
 
Might there--and I merely make the suggestion--be a hazy delineation between belief and observance in play?

To take an example from my own life, I observe a good number of superstitions not because I believe in the magical mechanisms in my heart of hearts, but rather because I am a slightly romantic traditionalist and it pleases me (all else being equal) to pretend to myself that the world could encompass such things.

My point is that if you observed my bowing to magpies, propitiating spirits, lighting candles and buying charms and what have you, and then you enquired about my beliefs, I'd most likely mischievously refuse to rule out the possibility that these things were possible, even while believing that such a circumstance is wildly unlikely.

If I were to 'keep up the act', as it were, for a lifetime (and I'm looking likely to do so), it would become a lot of less easy to distinguish my 'functional belief' ("he says it's possible and acts as though it might be") from any "true belief"; and, in fact, as we are habit-forming creatures, the former runs a distinct chance of slowly morphing into the other as the years pass. In my dotage, I doubt there will be a distinction to maintain: the world qt large will view me as a dotty old chap who believes in superstition, and it'll either mock or indulge me as it sees fit.

You might object that maintaining in such pretences about the supernatural is puerile or eccentric; I might counter that such self-deception is one part of the process of shaping and maintaining a cogent self.

Take for example the man who marries without passion yet remains a loyal companion for life (viewing such behaviour as true to his nature--the story he prefers to believe about himself--his 'better angels'). The decades pass and this man realises that decades of companionship, duty and fidelity have somehow seeded a real love on formerly barren ground--a love, moreover, that is likely more enduring than the transient fires of youth.

Or the traitor who betrays his people out of greed but cannot admit to himself that so base a motivation is what brought about his betrayal. He invents a host of ideological justifications: he's an avowed communist, perhaps. He starts by telling these stories to others while knowing the truth was greed, but after hundreds of retellings his awareness of their fictionality fades and what started off as mere expedients that allowed him to save face have became 'functionally true' for him. The conclusion: the chap is buried with a hammer and sickle draped over his coffin, thousands of miles from the home of his ancestors, and is celebrated as a hero by a people whom he hardly knew.

Are such things common?

Yes.

And we deceive ourselves and invent plots for our subjective autobiographies to cover much less consequential matters than the two examples I've sketched.

I'm not sure you even have to be a strict behaviourist to claim that in such circumstances if it walks like a duck and quacks like a duck, in some sense it is a duck even if its DNA says otherwise.
 
It often feels to me that people choose a belief for social convenience or to suit their emotional needs that they know, at some level, is not rationally supportable. This is more an intuition though, which doesn't count for much; intuition is the enemy of rational thought and I don't know what the psychologist would say.

I used to hold a number of crazy ideas. When I abandoned them, I didn't so much feel I'd disabused myself of them by learning more, but that the part of me that always knew I was just believing what I wanted came to the surface. I've had the experience of learning why my opinions were wrong, mostly in the more science denial areas. But I suspect the relationship some people have with elves, perhaps religion, some conspiracy theories, is more a semi-conscious decision to define oneself as a believer.
 
PeteBrydie; you have a point.

And perhaps its the idea that Icelanders are uneducated farmers that is part of it.
 
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