Nancy Marie Brown’s Looking for the Hidden Folk: How Iceland’s Elves Can Save the Earth is an enchanting inquiry into the Icelandic perception in elves. Brown has a deep attachment to and data of Iceland, its otherworldly panorama, its folks and their beliefs. (She is the writer of a number of Nordic cultural histories, and she or he has Icelandic horses and an Icelandic sheepdog on her farm in Vermont.) However, slightly than defending elves’ existence, this compelling and extremely readable guide provides a thought-provoking examination of the nature of perception itself, drawing compelling connections amongst people, storytelling and the atmosphere.
Looking for the Hidden Folk begins and ends with a go to from Ragnhildur Jonsdottir, a well-known Icelandic elf-seer and advisor to building initiatives. While not everybody can see the Icelandic elves like Jonsdottir can, many individuals have witnessed the injury the elves have supposedly precipitated (placing boulders in the paths of automobiles, flooding roads, damaging bulldozers) when the elves’ houses in the rocky lava fields are destroyed to be able to create highways for Iceland’s booming vacationer economic system. Brown chronicles the some ways elves defend their atmosphere, guarding the land from unwise or hasty modernization. (Although it’s apparently potential to barter with them.)
How will we come to imagine in the actuality of unseen issues? Quantum physics and darkish matter are actually ideas of actuality, beforehand unknown till they have been found by scientists. Could or not it’s, Brown wonders, that we will be taught to see elves by way of the same shift in perspective? By valuing elves as guardians of the land, would possibly we be taught to dwell extra respectfully and sustainably in nature?
If all this sounds just a little high-concept, don’t concern; a lot of the guide is grounded in charming tales from Icelandic sagas, notably those who element the relationships amongst the folks, flora, fauna and geology of Iceland. In the finish, Brown might imagine extra in elf tales than in elves, however that’s exactly the level. Storytelling is the actual, otherworldly magic of Iceland, a spot the place elves, people, volcanoes and rocks are intertwined.
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