Huldufólk

Also Known As: the hidden people; singular huldumaður, huldukona; often used interchangeably with álfar, elves
Region/Culture: Northern Europe
Mythos: Icelandic Mythology, Scandinavian Mythology
Primary Type/Nature: Fairy Folk and Spirit Beings
Mythical Attributes: They are invisible unless they choose otherwise, longer-lived than people, and able to reward or ruin a household according to how it has treated them.
Role in Mythos: They are Iceland’s unseen neighbours, farming, fishing and worshipping inside the rocks and hills of the same land the living farm above.
Relation to Humans: A farmer who greeted their stones politely, left them a share of the milk and built around their mounds could expect quiet luck; one who mocked or damaged their dwellings could expect his own to fail. Ignorance was forgiven, but deliberate insult was not, and their memory was long.

The sound comes from inside the rock. Most often it is churning, the steady knock of a dash in a butter churn coming up through several feet of basalt. Sometimes it is a spinning wheel. On the lakes in early spring it is voices, low and unhurried, carrying across ice that has begun to soften, and the worn holes in that ice have a name of their own, álfa vakir, elf-holes. None of this struck the people of the old turf farms as remarkable. It only meant the neighbours were home.

Their name is the whole idea in one word. Huldufólk means the hidden people, from a root meaning to cover or conceal, and in nineteenth-century usage it doubled as a polite substitute for álfar, elves, a word that in daily Icelandic speech had curdled into an insult meaning fool. Jón Árnason, who spent decades collecting these stories from farmhouses across the country and published them in 1862, found the two terms functionally identical. Konrad von Maurer, travelling the island a few years earlier, took the view that huldufólk was a euphemism, the sort of name you use when the real one might be overheard.

They look like us. This is the first and strangest thing the sources insist on, and it is what makes them so much more unsettling than trolls. Árnason reports them as human in form and feature, and the differences that folk accounts allow are small enough to be missed in bad light: no division between the nostrils, or only one nostril, or the philtrum running as a raised ridge rather than a hollow. A farmer named Ólafur from Purk-isle wrote out his own account for Árnason in 1845 and thought their bodies simply finer than ours, the flesh soft to the touch, the bones smaller. There is a story of a hidden woman married to a mortal man who could not endure the benediction in church and vanished into foam on the floor when she could not get out in time, and afterwards people said her body had felt like jelly.

Where they came from is a piece of scripture that has been chewed over for centuries in Icelandic kitchens. God came walking to see Eve’s children. Some of them were still unwashed and she was ashamed of the state of them, so she pushed those out of sight and presented only the clean ones. God, who was not deceived, told her that what man hides from God, God will hide from man. The concealed children went into the mounds and the hills and the rocks and became invisible, and every one of the huldufólk is descended from them, while the rest of us come from the children Eve was willing to show. Other tellings make them the offspring of Lilith, or angels who fell without falling far enough to reach hell and were caught halfway, in the ground.

The life they lead down there is a mirror held up to the one above it, tilted just enough to sting. Their cattle are glossier and give more milk and better wool than anything a hard year on thin Icelandic grass could produce. They cut hay. They knit. They row out to fish, and men have heard the splash of their oars and the murmur of talk with no words in it, and seen boats hauled up on shingle that was empty a moment later. Elf-chatter over a lake in spring was reckoned a good omen for the trout. At Christmas and New Year they change houses, those being their moving days, and their halls are lit and hung with a splendour no turf farm could match. They settle their disputes at Things held on sheer column-shaped rocks, and older records give Iceland two elf-kings who ruled as viceroys, each crossing to Norway in alternate years to report to the high king of the elves there.

They are also, a good many of them, Christian. The good ones are the ones who took the faith and kept it, and they have their own churches and their own priests and their own rites. Bells ring in the cliffs. Hymns are sung inside the stone. Maurer was shown an elf-churchyard where a burial could be heard going on, and heard best in winter, when the frozen ground has to be broken with a pickaxe.

The tale that says most about them is Hildur’s. A farmer takes on a quiet, capable housekeeper who will say nothing about where she is from, and every year the shepherd hired at Christmas is found dead in his bed on Christmas morning. One year a new man decides to stay awake. He lies still while Hildur slips a bit into his mouth, and the bridle is a magic one, and there is nothing he can do as she climbs onto his back and rides him through the air until the ground splits open beneath them. He gets free of the bridle, keeps hold of a stone that renders him invisible, and follows her down into a lit palace where a man in purple and gold comes out to greet her as his wife. She is the queen of the elves. Her mother-in-law cursed her for marrying beneath the family, and the terms of the curse are exact: she may come home once a year, and only at the price of a man’s life. The shepherd survives, tells what he saw, and the whole arrangement collapses. Hildur is seen no more. The killing stops.

Their power is mostly the power of not being seen, which turns out to be enough. They cannot be looked at unless they permit it, so they can be at your elbow when you are rude about them. They keep the luck of a farm the way a landlord keeps a lease. Kindness shown to them, especially help given to a hidden woman in labour, is repaid handsomely and often in gold, and their gratitude runs for generations. So does the other thing. Wreck a mound, foul a stone, jeer at a cliff, and the vengeance falls hard and does not lift until the insult is made good.

But they are bound by rules, and the rules are their limit. A man who offends them without knowing they are there is forgiven, because the offence has to be deliberate to count. Christian rite works on them, and the church that they half belong to is also the thing that can dissolve them. Above all they can be found out. Hildur ruled a kingdom and could ride a man through the sky like a horse, and one shepherd who kept his eyes open ended her hold entirely. Their strength rests on staying hidden, and it lasts exactly as long as that does.

Which is why they are still, quietly, a force in Iceland. Certain patches of ground remain álagablettir, enchanted spots, where nobody mows or builds. Roads have been rerouted around boulders. In 2015 the Road Administration lifted a seventy-tonne rock in the Gálgahraun lava field, believed to be the elf church Ófeigskirkja, and set it down whole among other stones rather than break it, after years of protest. The folklorist Valdimar Hafstein has argued that these stories work as supernatural sanction against bulldozers, a way of saying no to development in a voice the developer cannot easily argue with. Ask an Icelander directly whether the hidden people exist and you will mostly get a shrug. Very few will say they believe. Almost nobody will say they don’t.

Frequently Asked Questions

What are the huldufólk?

The huldufólk, or hidden people, are supernatural beings of Icelandic folklore who live inside rocks, hills, cliffs and mounds and are invisible unless they choose to be seen. They look exactly like human beings and live a parallel life of farming, fishing, churning and churchgoing on the other side of the stone. In nineteenth-century Icelandic usage the word was largely interchangeable with álfar, elves.

Are huldufólk the same as elves?

For most practical purposes, yes. Jón Árnason, who compiled the great collection of Icelandic folktales in 1862, found the terms synonymous, and huldufólk was the more polite of the two, since álfur had come to be used in ordinary speech as a word for a fool. Some Icelanders distinguish them and some do not, and the question is still argued about today.

Where do the huldufólk come from?

The best-known origin story is a Christian one. Eve had not finished washing all her children when God came to see them, and she hid the dirty ones, and God said that what man hides from God, God will hide from man, so the hidden children became invisible and went to live in the rocks. Other Icelandic tales make the hidden people descendants of Lilith, or fallen angels who were caught between heaven and hell.

Are the huldufólk dangerous?

They are dangerous only if you give them reason. Icelandic folk belief holds that they reward courtesy and help, particularly help given to a hidden woman in childbirth, and that they take lasting revenge on anyone who deliberately damages or insults their dwellings, though someone who offends them in genuine ignorance is excused. The story of Hildur, the elf queen who rode a shepherd through the air with a magic bridle and left a dead man behind her every Christmas, shows the worst of what they were thought capable of.

Do Icelanders still believe in the hidden people?

Belief today is less a yes-or-no matter than a refusal to rule it out. Enchanted spots called álagablettir are still left unmown and unbuilt, roads have been diverted around stones associated with the hidden people, and in 2015 a seventy-tonne rock in the Gálgahraun lava field held to be an elf church was moved intact rather than destroyed after public protest.