The Little Book of the Icelanders in the Old Days

by Alda Sigmundsdottir

  Pissing in the moonlight, or her child would be born insane.

  Eating seal flippers, or her child would be born with flippers.

  Eating the soft palate of an animal head, or her child would have a cleft palate.

  ... And so on. And on. Many, many things.

  Now, let’s say that a woman was extremely, ridiculously careful, and did everything by the book to ensure that her child would turn out absolutely flawless. Ach, alas. There were still loads of things beyond her control that might severely affect her child. For instance:

  If someone came into a house with a sack on their back and did not put down the sack outdoors, the child would turn out to be a cripple.

  If someone came into a house wearing skates or crampons, the child would have skates or crampons for feet.

  ... Just as an example.

  And that wasn’t all. There were plenty of superstitions surrounding the actual birth, too. A woman must not, for example:

  Walk under the rafters of a newly-raised house, or she would not be able to deliver the child unless rafters were raised over her. (Which would presumably take far too much time and both would die.)

  Walk underneath a clothes line, or the child would be born with the umbilical cord around its neck and would therefore be strangled.

  Lie on a duvet of ptarmigan feathers, or the child would just not be born.

  A woman should, on the other hand, lie on a bearskin while delivering the baby, because then the child would receive a bjarnaryl, or “bear warmth”, and would never in its life be cold.

  It’s difficult to know just where all those superstitions came from. However, pregnancy is a state that anthropologists call “liminality”, taken from the Latin word “limen”, meaning threshold. Essentially this is a period of transition, or change, in which a person is on the threshold to what they are about to become, but cannot go back to what they previously were. An “in-between-time”, as it were. Applied to this particular instance, it means that the mother is no longer an un-pregnant woman, but has not yet become an “ex-pregnant woman” (or, put more plainly, a mama).

  I mention this because liminality is a state that is known to generate a huge amount of superstition. It’s on account of the uncertainty, you see - people trying to grasp at some sort of security straw, hoping to influence or control the Great Big Unknown by carrying out this or that superstition. At a time when only about half of children lived to see adulthood, it is easy to see why this was important. Which is probably why there were infinitely more active superstitions surrounding pregnancy and childbirth at that time than there are today.

  11 A child makes it into the world!

  If a woman managed to get to the actual birth of her child without a serious calamity taking place, a midwife was commonly called on to assist. Prior to 1760, every church parish in the country had one appointed midwife, and it was the role of the local minister to “train” her. Effectively this meant that he taught her a bunch of prayers to recite over the childbearing woman, depending on the condition of mother and child in any given instance.

  When the baby had successfully been ejected into the world it was wrapped in a blanket and something stuck into its mouth. That “something” was generally not its mother’s nipple, as Icelanders were not big on breastfeeding in those days. Instead it was usually a piece of cloth wrapped around some food-related matter that could easily be inserted into the baby’s mouth for it to suck on, and from which it was to gather its nourishment. This might be, say, dried fish that an adult person had chewed and then spat into the cloth.

  (And they wonder why half of the children died.)

  After the birth, the mother stayed in bed for about a week. (None of this hustling her out of the hospital within twenty-four hours back then.) The local women would then come visit and bring something for the new mother - often some type of food, like meat, bread, butter, sausage, or smoked sheep belly.

  Not that the birth meant an end to all superstitions. Goodness, no. The placenta still needed to be disposed of. It was considered holy, and folks believed that it contained a part of the child’s soul. Obviously, then, you couldn’t just toss it out the door, because bad spirits could get a hold of it. Neither could you give it to the dog, because if an animal ate the placenta, that animal would follow the child around forevermore (and though children tend to like dogs, you probably wouldn’t want one shadowing you until you died). Even if you buried the placenta, animals could still dig it out of the ground and eat it. If that option was selected (and occasionally it was), people would usually put a heavy stone on top of the burial place so no animal could get at it.

  The most auspicious thing was to burn the placenta. If you did that, a light or a star would follow the child around for the rest of its life. Which was infinitely preferable to, say, the black dog with the fleas.

  When a woman got out of bed after giving birth, she had to put on new shoes. If she put on old shoes, she would get worse again and have to spend more time in bed. And in cases where the placenta had been buried, when she first got out of bed she had to step on the stone that had been placed on top of it, for some inexplicable reason.

  Naturally no sex-related act (which pregnancy indisputably is) could be without its two bits of shame, courtesy of the church. After she gave birth, a woman was considered unclean, and ideally should not leave the farm until she had been “led to church”, as it was called. (Though how exactly she was supposed to be led to church without first leaving the farm is a bit nebulous.) For that she was supposed to put on her best clothes and jewellery (if she had any - jewellery, that is) and go and stand in front of the church door. The minister would come to the door, recite a little sermon over the woman, presumably in the most magnanimous fashion, and then lead her personally to her seat. When that was done, she was “cleansed” and could begin to attend church again in a regular manner.

  12 Naming jinx

  By law, children had to be baptised in a church, except if someone’s life was at risk. If the baptism didn’t take place within seven days, the parents of the child were levied a fine. Complying with this rule could obviously be difficult, particularly in winter when the weather was frequently crazy and roads and mountain routes impassable. Even so, people were pretty conscientious about this, packing up their infants and heading out on the sometimes lengthy journey to the church - even if it meant putting the life of the child in danger. Indeed, infants often didn’t make it to the church, as they had died along the way.

  Icelandic parents have a tendency to name their children after someone - whether it is a relative, a good friend, or someone who has appeared to them in a dream að vitja nafns (explained in the first Little Book). They call this að skíra í höfuðið á einhverjum, literally “to baptise into the head of someone”. So let’s say the parents named their child Ljótur into the head of its grandfather, and it was a name they treasured. If Ljótur died, it might be tempting for the parents to pass on the name to the next son that was born to them. But! This was strictly inadvisable. If they did (the superstition went), that child would most likely die, too.

  However, if they were really, really hung up on that name, all was not lost ... the best thing in that case was to let two or three children be born in between, before attempting the name again. For added safety it was considered best to throw another name into the mix. Like, say, Ljótur Ormur Illugason. That would likely be enough to break the jinx (or so they believed).

  13 Battle over the young soul

  It was absolutely essential to keep a vigilant watch over the children when they were small, and not just because otherwise they might bump their heads or fall into a river. No, it was essential because there were enemies lurking in the shadows, just waiting for their chance to snatch the child away. And when I say “enemies” I am thinking of two in particular: the dreaded Lucifer himself, and those dastardly hidden people.

  The Lucifer thing was a no-brainer. Everybody knew that he was always skulking
around waiting for a chance to possess children and turn them into horrible apparitions. This was supposedly pretty easy to do before the child was baptised and the evil spirit with which it was born was still living inside of it. You see, the folks of old believed that a child was born inherently evil, and if that child died before it was baptised, it would get no rest in heaven. Similarly, if a child was borið út - a compound verb meaning “left outside somewhere to die” (apparently this was common enough in the Iceland of old to warrant its own verb), an evil spirit would inevitably enter it (... wait, wasn’t the child supposed to have been born with one of those already?), after which it would proceed to wail and moan incessantly and generally wreak havoc and misery on its immediate surroundings.

  That was Lucifer and his minions. Then there were the hidden folk, who had slightly different objectives. They were constantly trying to get a hold of human children so they could replace them with decrepit old people, whom they would “knead together” as Jónas Jónasson puts it in his book Íslenzkir þjóðhættir, until they were the size of infants. They would make the old fogeys look like infants, too, but the problem was that they never grew, just became mentally, um, challenged and were generally a pain in the posterior in every respect.

  One way to help keep the children safe from these heinous predators was to make the sign of the cross over them. Yet this wasn’t entirely foolproof because some hidden people were also Christians, so it didn’t bother them in the least. A better strategy was to douse the infants’ heads so well with holy water during the baptism that some of it went into their eyes. This is because people believed that children were born clairvoyant (and evil ... an alarming combination), and the holy water removed their ability to see the hidden people. Consequently it became more difficult for the hidden folk to lure the children away, since they weren’t visible to them. If they nevertheless did manage to lure a child away, it was considered to be the fault of the minister, who clearly had not done a proper job with the baptism.

  14 A brief lecture about elves

  I hope you’ll allow me a momentary digression here. We’ll return to our regular programming in a minute.

  I’m sure you’ve heard the stories: Icelanders believe in elves, won’t build anything without first checking whether there are elves living there, go around knocking on boulders to say hello to the elves, make whole maps of elf colonies, and blah-de-blah.

  The international media loves to chew on this stuff, and the Icelandic tourist industry loves to feed it to them.

  Well, I’m here to tell you: it’s a crock of poo.

  “But!” I hear you say breathlessly. “There was this study that showed that Icelanders most definitely do believe in elves. I read about it in Vanity Fair [or insert name of other sophisticated media outlet here].”

  Sure, ok. I will grant that there was a study. And allegedly, in this study, some amazingly high proportion of respondents said they believed in elves. However, and this is important: nobody ever tells you how the question was worded. The question was not: “Do you believe in elves?” The question was: “Would you be prepared to absolutely rule out the existence of elves?”

  And some really high proportion said that they would absolutely not be prepared to rule out the existence of elves. Because, well, we don’t know, right? I mean, if I was asked “Would you absolutely rule out that the Kardashian family is a pack of zombies?” I would probably answer, “No, I would not absolutely rule it out”. Because what the hell do I know about zombies and the way they might choose to infiltrate mainstream media? Not a thing.

  That doesn’t mean I believe zombies are real, though. (In fact, what it probably means is that I have no freaking idea what makes the Kardashians so incredibly appealing ... but that’s not the point.)

  And please don’t get me started on those few Icelandic folks who run “elf schools” or offer elf tours to hapless tourists, who are led around the elf grounds and told where the elves live, where they go to church, where they do their grocery shopping, where they work out, and where they do whatever “elves” get up to in their daily lives. Sometimes the guides even have conversations with elves, which the poor tourists don’t see because THEY’RE NOT FREAKING THERE.

  Run a poll asking, “Do you think the people who offer elf tours to tourists are weirdos who may or may not believe in elves but definitely believe in making money off tourists?”, and I’m willing to bet that at least ninety-four percent of Icelanders would offer a resounding yes. If they were asked why they thought that, they’d probably say: “Because there is no such thing as elves”.

  Yes, there have been instances of roads being diverted around some big boulder or other because there were allegedly elves living in there and making the construction equipment break down. But as far as I’m aware no roads have been diverted for a good long while.

  And by the way there is no fundamental difference between the terms “elves” and “hidden people”. In Icelandic folklore they are basically the same phenomenon, and the terms are used pretty much interchangeably. Still, to me the term “elves” conjures up thoughts of diminutive green-clad persons with pointy hats. This is vastly different from the elves, or hidden people, of Icelandic lore, who were almost always tall, regal, self-possessed, and a lot better looking than the snivelling mortals all around them. Naturally. After all, what else would you expect from creatures that can knead old people into infants?

  15 Those crafty hidden folk and their opulent lives

  Don’t ask me why, but if old folk stories are any indication the hidden people very often had a bone to pick with the human folk. This was usually because the humans hadn’t deigned to do their bidding, which usually meant had not come to their aid in their hour of need. For instance a hidden woman would be giving birth, and a mortal woman would be needed immediately because things were going south at breakneck speed. Hidden women had birthing problems with alarming frequency, it seems ... though, on reflection, perhaps not with any more frequency than ordinary women at the time. Still, one thing is sure: they had a lot of faith in the mortal women’s abilities to steer things in the right direction.

  The hidden folk, according to legend, lived inside boulders or hillocks, sometimes very close to the abodes of humans. The deal was that they could see the humans, but the humans could only see the hidden people if they wanted to be seen. When they did want to be seen (for the reason above, for example) they usually appeared to the human in a dream. If the human complied with the hidden person’s request they were usually handsomely rewarded, for example with a consistently good harvest for the rest of their lives. If they did not, they incurred the wrath of the hidden person, and some great misfortune or other would befall them.

  Sometimes when hidden people abducted mortal children and brought them up as their own, those children would re-appear in the human world as adolescents or adults, and successfully continue on with their lives. Here it should be noted that the hidden people did not always leave a shrivelled-up changeling behind ... sometimes they just took the human children without leaving anything.

  Hundreds of stories of interactions between hidden people and humans exist, and it is not hard to conceive of the purpose they served. Stories about hidden people abducting children could easily have been a grief-stricken parent’s way of coping with a child’s unexpected and tragic disappearance. Stories of the ljúf- lingar, hidden men who became lovers of mortal women - more on them in a moment - no doubt reflected an intense longing for love and gentleness that most women lacked in their lives. These stories also provided an escape from a harsh and unforgiving

  reality. The hidden people always led vastly better lives than the humans did. They wore stunning clothes with delicate

  embroidery, made of opulent fabrics. Their homes were filled with tapestries, plush upholstery and precious metals. They inhabited a world of beauty and luxury that was almost close enough to touch, but which humans could not access - only

  escape to in their thought
s and dreams.

  16 Mountain dairy

  Any farm that relied on sheep for its survival (read: every single farm in the country) had a special structure located some distance from the farm itself, called a sel, or mountain dairy. These were small, rudimentary structures - little more than stone walls with a makeshift roof, really - located close to the mountain pastures, where the sheep and sometimes cows (if the farm was so prosperous as to have cows) were kept during the summer. These pastures were usually far more verdant and lush than the ones closer to home (besides the fact that the fields close to the farm had to be reserved for haymaking), so that’s where the livestock was herded.

  At least two people from the farm were routinely sent to spend the summer at the sel. One of those was a shepherd - very often a child or adolescent (you’ll recall that children became adults at fourteen, so an adolescent was more like our tweens) who was responsible for watching over the sheep and herding them into a pen at least once a day for milking. The other person was the matselja, or “sel food woman” (those prosaic Icelanders!), who was responsible for milking the sheep and producing food from the milk - generally butter and skyr (an Icelandic dairy product similar to a thick yoghurt). Someone would be sent every few days to fetch the produce and take it back to the farm, where it was either eaten or preserved for the winter.

  Now, we might be forgiven for thinking that life in the sel was excruciatingly dull, but ... well, maybe not. Thing is, the matseljur (that’s the plural of matselja) sometimes got pregnant up there. Obviously the shepherds were not to blame (one would hope - given their age), so the question was: who?