Hidden Folk: Icelandic Fantasies

by Eleanor Arnason

Secreted away in Iceland’s meadows and mountain crags dwell the Hidden Folk — magical beings from the age of the Vikings. In this new collection, Eleanor Arnason has crafted five original tales both fantastical and contemporary, where ordinary folk cross paths with elves and trolls, heroes and magicians, vengeful ghosts, a were-puffin, and even the devil himself. With the same clean, laconic style and quiet sense of humor beloved to readers of her previous award-winning novels and stories, she weaves together the rich imaginative tradition of the Norse sagas and folktales with persistent concerns of our own time: social and environmental justice, the rights of women and underrepresented peoples, and the desire of working people everywhere for freedom and self-determination. In the words of National Book Award winner Will Alexander, “Eleanor Arnason is wise, and everyone who reads Hidden Folk will become the wiser for it. They’ll have too much fun to notice, though.”

About the Author

Eleanor Arnason is the author of six novels and more than fifty works of shorter fiction. Her novel Ring of Swords, acclaimed by the New York Review of Science Fiction as one of the best s.f. novels of the 1990s, won a Minnesota Book Award. Her novel A Woman of the Iron People won the Tiptree and Mythopoeic Society Awards. Other works have been shortlisted for both the Nebula and the Hugo. She has been called “the acknowledged heir to the feminist legacy of Joanna Russ and Ursula Le Guin,” and Andrea Hairston has called her “a treasure.” Ms. Arnason lives in the Twin Cities Metro Area.

Praise for Eleanor Arnason and Hidden Folk

Like Kelly Link, Arnason twists traditional narratives into striking new forms. ... [Hidden Folk] is a terrific collection that will appeal to readers of contemporary Nordic fiction as well as to Arnason’s many longtime fans.

—The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction

The five stories in Hidden Folk offer both grit and wit in their treatments of ... the elves, trolls, and other supernatural entities of Icelandic myth. ... There are plenty of voices worth listening to in s.f. and fantasy, but few as distinctive and persuasive as Eleanor Arnason’s.

—Locus Magazine

These Icelandic tales are not to be trusted, filled as they are with elves and trolls, but every word of them is true. This is Arnason’s gift, placing right words in right order. It is of such tender care that magic is made.

—Terry Bisson, author of Any Day Now and Bears Discover Fire

The stories in Hidden Folk have the deep power of folktales crafted by an expert storyteller. I start reading and I lose myself as I travel through wonderfully strange places in the company of poets and ghosts, were-creatures and trolls. Fantastic tales woven of magic and dreams from the Norse tradition — what could be better?

—Pat Murphy, Nebula Award–winning author of The Falling Woman

 We treasure diamonds, and if we know what’s what, we also treasure Eleanor Arnason’s gleaming, gemlike stories. These repurposed thousand-year-old myths and tales of railroad-running dark elves are strange yet homey, grim yet gorgeous. Hidden Folk may be a slender volume, but as a collection of waking dreams, it’s immensely deep.

—Nisi Shawl, Tiptree Award–winning author of Filter House

Q&A with Eleanor Arnason

In this interview from December 2014, Eleanor talks about the huldufolk and heroism, the Bardarbunga eruption and Iceland’s banking crash, and gives us the morning’s marmalade report.

Who are the Hidden Folk? And why are they hiding?

“Hidden folk” (huldufolk) is the Icelandic name for elves. According to an Icelandic folktale, God came to visit Adam and Eve. Eve wasn’t able to tidy up all the children, so she hid the ones who were still dirty and uncombed and only showed the washed children to God. God looked at the children and said, “These look promising. But are there any other children?” Adam and Eve said no. God knew there were, of course. He said, “Since you have hidden your other children from me, they will always be hidden from ordinary people.” Iceland’s elves are the descendants of those hidden children.

What inspired you to write about Iceland?

An easy question to answer. My father’s parents were from Iceland, and I have always been interested in Iceland. I’ve read many of the medieval Icelandic sagas in English, along with as many folktales as I could find in English. I took medieval Icelandic in graduate school and read some of the literature in the original. The stories influenced me a lot.

In these Icelandic tales, have you found yourself exploring similar themes and concerns as in your other stories and novels?

This is not an easy question. I try to write about ordinary people and to challenge the idea of heroes. There are heroes in my stories—Egill Skallagrimsson and Grettir Asmundarson are the heroes of two famous sagas—but the viewpoint characters are a farm wife and a slave. Volund the Smith, who appears in “Kormak the Lucky,” is a figure out a myth. I stick pretty close to the myth in my story, but the viewpoint character is a slave.

I value hard work, loyalty, and decency, and these are the values I try to write about; also the courage that keeps people going through strange and difficult times. It’s not an epic, dragon-killing courage, but a steady, one-foot-after-another courage.

Will you be writing more stories about Iceland?

I have started a story about the Laki eruption in the late eighteenth century, which killed most of the farm animals in Iceland and about a quarter of the people. Now is a good time to write about Laki, since the current Bardarbunga eruption shares traits with the eighteenth-century eruption. Laki killed animals and people with toxic ash and gas, and Bardarbunga is generating a lot of poisonous gas. People have to stay indoors with the windows closed when the wind blows in their direction. Children, the elderly, and people with respiratory problems are at risk.

Beyond the sagas and folktales, have you read any contemporary Icelandic literature?

I don’t read as much as I should. I have read several novels by the great twentieth-century novelist Halldor Laxness, and have more books by him in the house. My favorite so far is Under the Glacier, though I have of course read his greatest book, Independent People. I also like the contemporary detective novels by Yrsa Sigurdardottir. She manages to write Nordic detective stories without the horrible, black depression of most of her colleagues.

In the tales collected in Hidden Folk, modern Iceland and Icelanders are always coming into unexpected, and uneasy, contact with mythological Iceland and its elves, trolls, and other beings of lore and legend. Are there current events in real-life Iceland today that might form the basis for future stories?

The Bardarbunga eruption. And Iceland is dealing with the aftermath of the banking bubble of the early twenty-first century. When the bubble burst, serious damage was done to the Icelandic economy. Similar banking bubbles harmed the economies of the United States and the European Union, and none (so far as I know) of the bankers responsible have served time, though much of what they did was crooked. Part of the background of “The Puffin Hunter” is crooked banking. The giant hydroelectric project in eastern Iceland, which shows up in “My Husband Stein,” is real and now completed.

Looking at the year ahead, what else besides Hidden Folk do we have to look forward to from you?

Aqueduct Press is bringing out e-book editions of three early novels, which are currently out of print. Aqueduct is also bringing out a collection of stories about the hwarhath, the aliens in my novel Ring of Swords. Beyond that, I have half a dozen stories that need to be finished or revised and sent out. I would like to produce two more collections, one of stories set in the Lydia Duluth universe and one of miscellaneous stories.

Can you tell us anything yet about the eagerly awaited sequel to Ring of Swords?

The title is Hearth World. I have a first draft done and plan to finish revising the novel in 2015.

Last but not least, what’s this morning’s marmalade report?

At the moment, I am eating Tiptree orange marmalade, but I need to go online and order different English marmalades. In my experience, English marmalade is always the best by far.