Miðgarðr, the pasture set aside for human people, is also called “Middle Earth.” The forces that set its bound, as can be seen here at Þingveillir, the Meeting Place, are huge. This is creation. This too: click.
So, like, you want to see trolls, eh. Well, there’s the troll park at Fossátun.
Cartoon trolls. Fibreglass shells. 3D graffiti.
If you carefully turn around, you’ll find the real thing.
Sure, laugh.
Beautiful script!
Translation: Gleðileg jól!
First the beam, then the body, then the man. First the birch, and then the bone.
Like these birches in Hvalfjörður, we are not metaphors. We are all the original Huldufolk, the people of the earth. The lovely stories of elves are memories startling us awake out of sleep.
Here’s one of the Trolls of Harnarfjall, on its annual pilgrimage to feed on the sea.
Slathering at the mouth in a field of old bones, as trolls will. There’s a whole herd of then where the foot of this fell turns into the flat of the sea. You can find them on cold days this time of year. In the summer they’ve gone to ground in the hills.
Hey, welcome to Alfaborg, the mystical city of the elves in Borgarfjörðar Estri. The Borg in the west, was the city of men. Here, completely across the country, live the elves, in their own Borg.
East
Except, until the twelfth century, there were no álfar, or elves. That was an idea imported from France, which was laid on folk experience of all the varied people who came to Iceland and made up its founding lines. This would have been home to the bergbúar, the rock dwellers. 
East
Not dwarves, exactly. That is a different folk lineage, into which several lines were folded over time, under the effects of European modernization and a half millenium of the consolidation of folk tale into unified stories onto which national narratives could be written. What became known as elves, in a process of consolidation, also originally held the landvættir, or nature spirits. They lived on the land itself. So, this is likely a home of rock dwellers.
East
This too, most likely.
East
And this. 
East
And here?
South
Why, landvættir. And here. 
West
And here, a mixed population, perhaps. No doubt, a host of others who tagged along in the heads of people in the long boats. 
West
No doubt, a lot from Ireland. Experiences of what was later solidified, in the same nationalizing process, as nature. 
North
Luckily, there is more to history than the history of nationalism, and more to living on earth than the consolidation of diverse encounters and traditions with abstraction and consolidation.
North
We are still bodies on earth.
North
We are still the earth dreaming.
The cows of Alfaborg, the City of the Elves of East Iceland, demonstrate how to move between the waves of the worlds.
Good to know.
Sure they do.
Mysteriously, mind you, and in slow motion. You’re not in a hurry, are you?
Don’t let the dragon in the canyon bottom worry you. He’s in slow motion, too
~
Hengifossá Canyon
Iceland is a “settlement” culture, not a “colonial” culture. This orientation continues today. There are times the Earth reminds the human body of its own birth.
Skriðuklaustur
At those moments, the human mind and body unite to give birth to a new self at one with the earth. That is settlement. It’s like taming a horse.
In Iceland, you could still learn to read.
Lichen Below Hengifoss
Books pale in comparison.
A Farm in Iceland 