Le Petit Livre du Peuple Caché

Icelandic folklore tales are swarming with elves and hidden beings that live in the hills and rocks of the island. They have a lot to teach us about Iceland and the Icelanders of old. In this book, Alda Sigmundsdóttir offers a selection of twenty stories that she has drawn from this folklore, each of which is accompanied by fascinating comments on the context in which it is rooted. The international media have shown such enthusiasm for the Icelanders' belief in the existence of elves that they have largely fueled the myth of the "frosty" Icelander. Yet what the reader will find at the heart of Elvish folklore is the ordeal of a nation that lived in extreme poverty on the threshold of the habitable world and struggled heroically to survive physically, emotionally and spiritually. This is what the stories of the hidden people are really about. there was a world parallel to theirs. It was the world of the hidden people, which in many ways was a projection of the populace's most fervent dreams and desires. The hidden beings lived in hills, cliffs or rocks, very close to humans. Their homes were lavishly furnished and decorated. Their clothes were luxurious, their jewelry magnificent. Their cattle were finer and fatter, their sheep gave more wool than ordinary sheep, their harvests were more abundant. They even had supernatural powers. They could make themselves visible or invisible at will and they foresaw the future. For Icelanders the stories of elves and hidden people are an integral part of the cultural and psychological construction of their nation. They are constitutive of their identity, they reflect the struggles, the hopes, the resistances and the endurance of their people. This is the real object of what is developed in this book.