Góðan daginn og gleðilegan þriðjudag!1
As you can likely surmise, we Icelanders have been preoccupied with thoughts of the volcanic system in our backyard, and how to best respond to this new reality we are facing. In particular, how to help the people of Grindavík, and how to protect our capital area if the volcanic activity moves closer to us. A spate of earthquakes in the Bláfjöll mountain range has given us pause … though as yet it does not look as though magma is forming under the ground in that location.
We are moreover stricken by the horrific accident earlier this month when a man fell into a crevice and disappeared. It brings home just how huge, powerful and merciless our nature can be—how beautiful it can seem on good days, yet how quickly things can turn deadly if the utmost caution is not taken.
Sadly, many of our foreign visitors are not used to a landscape like ours, and sometimes take fatal risks. But that is another story.
What I want to focus on today is how we Icelanders have learned to live with our volatile nature over the centuries, and how people coped psychologically in the past.
In particular, I am fascinated by the study of folk tales, and how they reflect people’s efforts at dealing with trauma at a time when the resources we have now—trauma counselling, therapy, medication, et al—were not available.
At the University of Iceland I did my undergrad minor in folkloristics, and among other things learned what scholars today believe might have been a cause for the Icelanders’ belief in elves. I get into this in detail in my Little Book of the Hidden People, interpreting the tales from a modern, psychological perspective. In short, they posit that the belief in elves helped people to cope with the dismal conditions of their own lives, and losses of their loved ones.
There are a number of motifs in the hidden people (or elf) stories that support this theory, this first one connected to that terrible accident I mention above.
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