In Iceland, spirits are in the material world

Never mind the boiling geysers, wind-blasted precipices or frozen barrens. It's not the razor-sharp lava rock that daunts builders; it's the hidden people lurking below.

"There are all sorts of beings beneath our stones," said Brynjolfur Snorrason, a folklorist often asked to advise contractors on how best to avoid the lairs of Iceland's elves and other seldom-seen creatures whose presence nonetheless still seems to permeate this far northern island nation.

Highway engineers in recent years have been forced to reroute roads around supposed elf dwellings. Similarly, builders of the country's first shopping mall took care to lay electrical cables and other underground installations well away from suspected abodes of gnomes and fairies. Couples planning a new house will sometimes hire "elf-spotters" to ensure the lot is free of spirit folk.

In Iceland, such precautions are seen as simple prudence.

"It can be a strange country," said Arni Bjornsson, head of ethnological studies at the National Museum of Iceland. "Even hard-headed engineers, who say they don't hold with superstition, will build a road around a certain hill or boulder rather than take the risk of offending elves."

Icelanders love to boast of how their beloved island republic marches in the front rank of modern times. Literacy is 100 percent. Poverty is zero. And high-technology is pervasive.

Iceland is the most geographically remote of Europe's nations -- a thinly populated realm of fire and ice rising from the North Atlantic, just below the Arctic Circle -- but it's plugged in, powered up and prosperous.

And also overrun with elves, gnomes, trolls, light-fairies, lovelings and a unique species called "huldufolk," or hidden people. Iceland even has a glut of 13 unjolly Santas, the so-called Yuletide Lads, who skulk about cities, towns and rural farmsteads each Christmas -- traditionally bringing more mayhem than merriment, although lately they've stopped stealing children.

The nation's president, Olafur Ragnar Grimsson, theorizes that the surfeit of spirit-beings stems from Icelanders' abiding sense of loneliness and isolation.

"Icelanders are few in number, so in the old times we doubled our population with tales of elves and fairies," he said in an interview at the presidential residence, Bessastadir, located on a remote moor where snow dervishes and sea spume whip over bizarrely shaped formations of lava rock.

Even today, there are only 273,000 people occupying a land roughly the size of Maine and Massachusetts. And Icelanders still take spirit folk seriously: Public opinion polls and academic studies show more than half of all inhabitants think it possible or probable -- 10 percent call it "certain" -- they share their island with otherly beings, ranging from grumpy glacier-dwelling trolls to occasionally gregarious hidden people.

That lore is the occasional bane of construction engineers and real estate developers. Earlier this year, Iceland's highway agency had to change the course of a new road leading out of Reykjavik after citizens protested that the original route would disturb an elf's lair under a big rock.

"There are people who believe in elves, and we try to show respect for people's beliefs," said Viktor Ingolfsson, an official of the department. "If that means building around an elf stone, we try to accommodate."

Such broadmindedness might be just self-protection. Tales abound of broken limbs, busted equipment and other woes befalling builders daring to go where elves and hidden people traditionally tread.

"For the most part, huldufolk are harmless, even gentle beings," said Magnus Skarphedinsson, a schoolteacher and self-described elf expert. "But if you brutalize them, bad things will happen. Perhaps only that your project will have big cost overruns. But also you could fall from a disease. Or die. It can be very dangerous to bother elves."

There are skeptics, of course, the National Museum's Bjornsson among them: "Hidden folk have provided a wonderful excuse for clumsy workers: 'I didn't wreck that bulldozer, boss, an elf did it!'"

Bjornsson, one of Iceland's foremost experts in folklore, called himself a disbeliever, adding quickly: "But not entirely, not 100 percent. It is hard to be totally scientific in a country as spectacularly strange as ours."

Iceland was first settled in the late ninth century A.D. by Vikings from Norway and smaller numbers of Gaels from the British islands. They found an eerie, treeless wasteland still in the first throes of creation -- with vast billows of steam hissing from geothermal vents, volcanos spouting fire and new islets heaving into existence off the boulder-strewn shores.

Iceland remains a land in extraordinary natural flux. And its prosperity is very recent: Until this century, most Icelanders were impoverished sheep farmers or fishermen huddled in damp turf homes. The population was regularly -- and heavily -- culled by famine, plague and Earth cataclysms.

The rarely seen races populating Iceland are said to include elves, gnomes, light-fairies -- sisters to Tinkerbell -- dwarves, lovelings (slender wee creatures inhabiting hedgerows) and mountain spirits. Most of these have counterparts in the folklore of other lands. But Iceland's huldufolk, or hidden people, are a unique breed: Human-sized, highly sociable beings dressed in colorful costume, seeming to inhabit a sort of parallel universe.

"But sometimes they will invite humans to their cliff homes for a chat and pancakes," Skarphedinsson said.

Inevitably, perhaps, there's been an attempt by some entrepreneuring Icelanders to cash in on the elves. Tourist agencies flog "hidden world" maps purporting to show locations of elf homes. Guided tours of elfdom are also on offer. All this is less troubling to folklore purists than attempts to revise Iceland's spirit people to make them seem more correct and wholesome.

A prime example is what's become of the Yuletide Lads. Originally, these 13 creatures were nasty sons of the ogress Gryla, sent forth on dark winter nights to steal children for her stewpot. Then, earlier in this century, they were downgraded to less scary mischief-makers, leaving rotten potatoes in the shoes of bad children at Christmastime, but ignoring the good.

These days they are portrayed as rascally but cute gift-bringers fitted out in wool coats and red caps, and soon to be celebrated on Icelandic postage stamps.

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