Yes, that’s a house between the white one and the grey one, eh.
Casseroles for the neighbours are optional in Hellissandur.
The Elves Next Door
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Category Archives: Huldúfolk
Of Dwarves and Men
Dwarf city in the West Fjords…
Frost spirits at the Glacial Lagoon, in the South …
A buried elf city in þingvellir.
The patterning is consistent. This is flocking, the rubbing of loose knots of fabric out of a woven cloth. Sheep, birds and cheese follow the same energy to come together in groups, and clots, as does, yes, blood. Yes, you’re looking at blood, not the red stuff in your veins so much as something more general, part of an old conception of spirit that predates Iceland by untold millennia and is remembered there as a living world.
The principle is universal. Where today’s civilization, the civilization of “nature” sees one form of energy, the old one is scarcely hidden, a kind of edge effect…
… a kind of way of seeing transformation rather than durability.
We call that life.
What Do You Get When You Cross A Sheep With a Raven?
The angelic sheep of Skogarkot!
Pahoe-hoe lava in Þingvellir National Park
When you can read it you know you have begun to spend enough time alone with the earth. This is the natural enlightenment.
Christmas Between the Worlds
On the woman’s hill on Viðey, it is possible to walk between worlds.
It is here the stones speak a language that is neither Icelandic nor English. It is an eruption of physical presence.
Whatever words we who are human speak, it is no less and no more than this ability to walk through bodies lifted into the air until they become it, and then to breathe them in the same moment as our walking.
This breathing is our way of talking to our ancestors, who the living call the dead. They’re hardly dead.
Not as long as we keep walking among them.
Not as long as we continue to honour them with devotion to each other.
Let us listen with all that we are.
Let us trust the old paths of care.
Let us honour the conversation and the giving forth and the point at which we become the earth at the point that it becomes us.
For it either goes on without us or with us, and we can so be there.
Let us go give thanks by being there.
Let us be honourable children. Let us be there.
Let us give praise, however we can.
However you can, let us find the silence at the heart of speech. Let us stand aside. Let us give each other that much honour.
Let us be the speech at the heart of silence. Let us be gathered in.
For we are all the living.
We have much to talk about. 
We have much to walk together through the stillness that gives us movement and stills us at the same moment.
Let us rejoice.
The Ogre of Dritvik is Still Waiting
The sun goes up and down, we’ve had a sandwich or two, storms have come in and out, but the Ogre of Dritvik is still out there. She never stops waiting.
This energy that has been frozen in stone has more than human endurance, even though it is human observation that gives it bodily life. Here are the bits of her that time has worn away:
That is pure Ogre, that is. It squeaks under your feet, calling out its name: “Pebble.” You can pick it up in your hand. Suddenly you are holding stillness. The whole energy of the volcano that made this coast is in your hand. Will you throw it out to sea? Will you hold it? Will you set it down? In this moment of stillness you become the world. The question all of us who have touched her ask is: What then?
It’s a good thing we’re not alone in the rain as we try to figure it out, because that might, ultimately, be the answer.
Don’t be alone in the rain.
What are we waiting for?
The Harbour Master of Dritvik
For almost four hundred years, hundreds of men camped at Dritvik, on the extreme west coast of Iceland, for the spring fishery, and set out in tiny wooden boats into the open North Atlantic. On a ferocious, rough coast, this troll sat in the sea and made a safe harbour. For hundreds of years he looked out to them at sea and when the men came home they came in on the beams of his gaze.
He is still watching, still making the harbour, still waiting, and whatever is out there on the Atlantic is still coming in — just not men, and fish. He’s not alone. Trolls rarely are. They are herdsmen, after all. Turn around slowly. You are being watched.
Who Feasts at Iceland’s Waterfalls?
Trolls!
It’s not the safest spot for sheep.
Berserk Lava Field Falls at Dusk
Who Defends Iceland’s Coastline?
Elves.
I spotted this Icelandic coast guard lookout on duty on November 9, scouring the Atlantic shore for debris coming in from Florida, and perhaps New York.
The Art of Haying
This is about a book, that has come out of this blog, and Iceland. In Iceland, I learned that one of the ancient arts, older than poetry but as old as the art of knitting, is the art of haying. Here are a couple of Icelandic sweaters in their natural form outside of Stykkishólmur, hard at work turning hay into yarns. I was picking bilberries for lunch. They seem kindly, I think.
And here is the cover of my new book, The Art of Haying: A Journey to iceland (Ekstasis Editions, 2015), which is all about that, and the future of books, and a lot more. No bilberries. That will have to wait until my next Iceland book. A few bilberries on a Stykkishólmur park bench, a tub of Skyr, and thou. That kind of thing.
This is a love story, for a country, for a woman, and for a way of life in which the old is new and the new is old and a man frees himself from the walls that books have made in his mind — walls that he previously didn’t know were there. It’s a scary thing, to have been kept by books my whole life, and then, one day, to step outside their pastures, but that’s what happened. The Art of Haying, is about drawing a line through grass and making a new beginning from it, not just for me but for culture on the northern shoulder of the world. Here’s a glimpse of one of the books I talk about in The Art of Haying.
The book is gorgeous, and contains over 200 photographs from three seasons around all of Iceland. It has the mare of the sun on the Reykjanes Peninsula..
… and a Keltie in Kopasker, luring Icelandic fishermen in to the books’ pastures.
It has so much more. Don Quixote of Reykjavik, for example.
Sometimes it’s worth getting up before dawn! The veils of the world are lifted and pushed aside! The Icelandic imagination was formed from life in houses such as the turf house at Hólar below, and the scripts of darkness and light they wrote for the body and the mind that followed it like a hand.
The Art of Haying is a travel book, a book of gentle, playful philosophy and wit, a love story, and a story of spirit. Horses are human souls here, like this one in its bookish pastures in Reykjahlíð.
If you’ve never met an Icelandic horse, that might seem merely a poetic device, but if you have, well, I’ll let this horse at Hófstaðir in the Skagafjörður show you how to drink at that trough.
And, of course, it’s a real book, told in the play between words and photographs, so it has a back cover too…
There is a unique form of creativity on Iceland, that in my three visits I had the privilege of glimpsing and at times even walking within. It’s a kind of playfulness within things giving their full dignity, not as objects of commerce, but as presences with which one shares the world, and which have within them creative energy, always ready for release, if one leads them to the right pastures, or out of them. Here’s the god Oðin’s horse Sleipnir, for example, waiting for his master on the Hverfisgata in Reykjavik.
What is a world beyond books like? Well, I think you’ve guessed it: much like the one with books but completely different. Books are not going away. The Art of Haying is one, after all, but it is a different sort of book, one which escapes the barbed wire fences of textual dominance and does what the horses of Iceland do. All summer men work round the clock to put up hay for them, such as here, out the back of the Víðimyri sod church …
… and all winter the horses live in societies of their own, fed by men and women. This is considered by all a solid foundation for an economy. Here’s a group of Icelandic literary critics up to their own business on a spring day by Sóleyjarbotnar Farm in the Sturlufljöt, for example.
And here’s what Theresa Kishkan, the author of some of the most exquisite essays and lyrical novels in English or any other language, has to say about the dance that is this book:
There are prose works married to image that redefine the way we think of language and its visual correlatives. Bento’s Sketchbook, by John Berger; Kathleen Jamie’s Frissures, with Brigid Collins — windows thrown open to unexpected places. The Art of Haying is one of these books. Its windows look out to Iceland, its farms, its trolls and horses, and the curve of its hayfields created out of craters and rain. Read it for its weather and its lyrical attentions. “Words, words, words, words, words. You may, if you want, listen. You may, if you wish, hear yourself think. You may, if you go out into the dark, hear the crackle of the Aurora over Husavik when the sun has gone down behind the hill.” Every page is memorable, even in the dark.
Ah, yes, there are trolls here, in a place where the human imagination is not bound but is out on the land itself and is read there. Here’s one at Klausturhamrar early on Easter morning.
There’s a secret about the trolls in the book, but you’ll find that out when you read it. Here, though, I’d like to introduce you to the incident that sparked The Art of Haying. I joined my wife in Reykjavik on the second of two trips across the old Iron Curtain into the former East Germany. It was that experience, which broken down the walls that the Twentieth Century gave to me, and all of us who lived through it. When I arrived in Iceland, I was ready to see, and I did. A part of that two-way pilgrimage on the Northern Camino is in my new book of poems Two Minds, because it’s there I met Khezr, the Sufic Green Man, who graces the cover of my book.
The story of that remarkable encounter is here: http://haroldrhenisch.com/2015/10/06/khezr-the-hidden-prophet-and-my-two-minds/. So, there you have it, two journeys that become one, and two minds united, outside the walls, by attention to words and what is more than words.
A Crown of Rowan’s for St. Brigid’s Day
Today, I praise the rowan tree. This is her season, as ice breaks to the season of water and birds.
Rowans with Elf Stone, Eyjafjörðursveit, Ísland
She’s a tree, yes, but look how she wants to lie on the ground. None of the towering heights for her.
Rowan, Skriðuklaustur, Ísland
And when the light comes, ah, then she is a torch.
Good Friday Rowan, Valpjofstaður, Ísland
The Rowan is sacred to Brigid, Saint of Holy Ireland, and to Bride (or Brigid), who came before her (and was no saint), and to Mary, Mother of Christ, and to Thor, god of lightning and thunder. The gender crossover is no big thing. Don’t give it a second’s thought. There was a time on earth when all things that signified the earth’s power most strongly were considered hermaphroditic, neither male nor female, and, after all, don’t humans, who come in several genders, tend to unite and make unions that are neither but are one?
Male and Female Fruit From a Hermaphroditic Pacific Mountain Ash
Wells, British Columbia
Unlike those sly sumacs and gingkos, a rowan has neither male nor female trees.She knows where she is. Look at her, earth tree, reaching up for the spring moon, with her feet planted firmly on the ground.
Skjaldarvik, Ísland
Wherever a rowan is found, it signifies the presence of her deities, who might have many names but are also one.
Thor, Brigid, Bride
For all of you who are of an empirical bent, don’t worry. Gods are just names for powers of the earth. The powers are present, even without the names, although perhaps not yet empirically defined. It’s just a kind of short hand. For those of you who follow the stories of the gods and goddesses, you know what I don’t have to say.
Rowan in the Birthplace of the Gods, Ásbyrgi, Ísland
Much of (nearly treeless) Iceland was one treed like this: a few rowans, and a lot of willows and birches. Then people got cold.
There’s more to the story of the rowan than is written down in history books, but not more than meets the eye. A lot of it has to do with environmental sustainability. A lot of it has to do with her name: in English, rowan, for red; in German, Eberasche, or red ash, or, more precisely, “red spear”. More on the spears in a sec. First, here she is, surprising us and all.
Pacific Mountain Ash, Quesnel Forks, British Columbia
Mountain Ash, Rowan, Eberesche, Bird Berry, Thrush Berry, Sorbier, well, you get the idea: a rose all dressed up.
She is glorious in summer, but look at her in her winter time, just last week…
Rowan has a profound story. Don’t look for it on Google, though. This is one you have to learn from the birds.
Yes, Today the Cedar Waxwings Have Come Back Home to the Rowans! Yay!
The story of rowans is a story of sacrifice, androgyny, magic, Christianity, nationalism, survival, life and hope — always hope. It is also one of the oldest stories of all. It begins with a Himalayan god of the air, Thor. He’s known today as a Nordic god, from Iceland, Sweden, Norway, Denmark and Germany at the north of the world, but he started out far to the east and south, and migrated with his believers across the continent. Thor has a hammer, that’s sometimes an axe, and, as you can see below, blood spatter, a phallic spear, and a weird right hand, and, yes, he’s been repainted with good old-fashioned wheelbarrow paint. 
Thor at Lilla Flyhov, Sweden (c. 1000 – 1500 BC) Source
That blood spatter? Well, look:
Rowan Berries in the Snow
They don’t call these bird berries for nothing!
That weird right hand? Here:
Rowan Berry Cluster After the Feast
And that axe? Well, Thor, remember, is a thunder god, from a time when thunder and lightning were the same thing. This is where he lives:
Dragon Tales in the Sky
People used to be able to read this language. It was a kind of writing not in words.
Thor used the axe to split that sky apart, so that out of its unity came lightning (on the one hand) and thunder (on the other). That is the moment in which consciousness is born. Into this air, that is all one (and out of which thunder and lightning come)…
… a spear …
Rowans Were Traditionally Used to Make Spear Shafts
… is thrust. It’s a curious kind of spear…
You wouldn’t want to thrust something like that at a wild boar or something. I mean, how pointless (literally). Sure, if you’re thinking of weapons being physical things, with pointy sharp bits, ya, but weapons are also extensions of the mind, and for Thor, and people who believe in him, this is mind, given body in the world…
You might want to have that magic and balance on your side when you go out to stick a wild pig that’s intent on sticking you (especially if you have the other kind of spear from the other, straighter, kind of ash (spear) tree. The darned things grow in thickets, ready made. You just need an axe to cut one from the ground and you have a weapon that extends your range and does your will at a safe distance from your body. A rowan spear, though? It’s both the thrust and the moment of reception, which is to say that it is a kind of symbolism or visioning, which practitioners call magic. Look how the boar’s blood and the spear are both present at once, and how the weight of the blood lowers the spear.
The tree is the embodiment of action. The mountain ash doesn’t make a great spear, but it certainly is a great way of focussing mind and body on the act of spearing.
There is, however, another angle to this story (as there always is in the world of indigenous thought and the language that speaks it best, poetry.) The red blood is the blood of a victim, the blood of a virgin, menstrual blood, and both life and death in one. Thor of Lilla Flyhov said it perhaps as simply as it needs to be said: the spear and a phallus are one. It thrusts upward, pierces the belly of the sky, and rains blood
Wells, British Columbia
Sacrifice and birth, male and female, action and reaction, in one representation: this is Thor’s presence, the concept of creating action out of stillness and seeing in stillness the potential for action. It is consciousness, for sure, but it’s also the body. Look again at that weird right hand. 
It’s a placenta.
The tree has many of them. It bursts out into them all over. 
The rowan is drenched in the blood of life and death. It is Bride and Groom, or Thor, in one. He cleaves unity to bring it together in a different form. This is the ladder one climbs to the stars.
I hope those of you reading this post for science aren’t scratching your heads at all this poetry and wondering when the science is coming. It’s coming. It’s just that this poetry thing, well, that was science once. I don’t mean bad science, full of childish explanations of the root of physical processes, the ones that science has done such an amazing job of parsing, or cutting part, after Thor. I mean, poetry’s way of finding correlations and moments of doubling, uniting seeming opposites or creating them out of thin air, applied to the world, is a powerful tool for understanding it and for manipulating it — not through manipulating its physical stuff, as contemporary applied science does, but through manipulating the minds of the people acting and living within it, and changing the earth through that energy. I know so many scientists with such deep concern for the earth, all looking for a way to bring their message across and effect meaningful change. Poetry, written out of the earth and with the language of the earth and human bodies, has always been able to do that. The other kind of poetry, the one written with words on a page, can do it among people highly trained to cast their selves within books and to bring back, so to speak, the fish of thought, but it’s not completely the same thing, and might just be the reaction to a passing technology. The thing about these sky gods, though, like Thor, is that they are embodiments of a central knot within hunting, butchering, and its ritual form, sacrifice: the act of killing in order to bring life. Thor’s not the only one. Christ stands in this tradition. The god Mithras, who also came from the East, and whose cult very nearly won Rome over in place of Christianity, was one. With his dagger, he slayed the sacred bull and created the universe. We are sprung from the drops of the bull’s blood.
And, like Thor, he had an axe (and a dagger, which is kind of a short spear, but does the trick.)
Mithras Killing and Creating
Relief from Heidelberg-Neuenheim, Germany, 2nd Century AD Source
These placentas, though. That’s where Bride comes in, the Goddess. If the spear is androgynous, and holds in time both the fertilizing thrust of a phallus and the blood quickening in a placenta, then this is as much the goddess’s tree as the god’s. It has that power of transporting one from one state to another, like the Roman god Janus, who was a doorway, that went both ways equally and transported you from one state to another every time you passed through him (and who, dear scientists, wasn’t a god in a simplistic sense but a way of remembering that cognitive power, and focussing it, for what could come from its development), and, more than Janus, of being both states, male and female, killer and victim, at once. 
It is also, as you can see, drawn to the sky, and bowed down to the earth as a consequence of this grasping, which always ends in feminine fruitfulness. That is a good lesson. Another is how this tree’s lightning bolt shape …
…ends in a flowing (quite the different thing), which is a hand, that has the capability of grasping. 
What does it grasp? The easy answer would be that the early church, needing to gain converts from celtic practitioners (the Celts, too, came from the East), simply replaced Bride (or Brigid) the goddess with Brigid, the Saint of Kildare.
Brigid, Saint of Kildare Source
St. Non’s Chapel, St. Davids, Wales
The better answer would be that the Christian shepherd’s staff, and the rowan were recognized as one …
The crook is there, with Christ’s blood, at the intersection of Earth and Heaven, life and death, and Christ cleaves them with his presence and the axe of his love, so to speak. This is no distance at all. The movement to Christianity wasn’t a conversion but an enlightenment, like the scientific Enlightenment of the 17th and 18th centuries, a kind of purification, extension, or manifestation of what was already known.
For this reason as well, rowans were considered an effective charm against witches — not against practitioners of the old arts, but against practitioners who hadn’t moved over to the new understandings of them, finding flower and fruit in the Christian story.
Rowan, Hólar, Ísland
I’ve shown you all these images of Iceland for a reason here, beyond my love of rowans and the beauty of the place. In Iceland, where the trees were all eaten and grazed away, independence from centuries of exploitation and misery under a regime of Danish traders came about through poetry, and the replanting of lost birches and rowans in Iceland. The attempt was to make the country a poem again, to rebuild, so to speak, the first moment of settlement, and reclaim that creative potential and independence. It worked, or at least it helped. Today, Reykjavik is still rich with these nationalist trees …
… that are kind of in the way, but no-one wants to cut down such magic.
They might try, but they just can’t go through with it. The trees have that much of a hold.
Reykjavik
The churchyards are rich with rowans, too. They signify not only the transfer of energy from pagan to Christian understandings of Thor’s axe and Christ’s Word …
Mårten Eskil Winge’s Thor (1872) Source
Note that cross that Thor is wielding there, the clever lad.
… but the balance struck between them …
Icelandic Stallion Grazing on an Elf Hill Under a Nationalist Agricultural School Churchyard Rowan (Laugar, Ísland)
In Iceland, you throw nothing away, because it is all alive in time. That is the balance, too.
The result is a way of being in balance in the world we live in and the world to come.
The Rowans of the Reykjavik Graveyard
Graveyards aren’t for the dead. They’re for the living. They focus the mind and so change the world. Every rowan does that …
… not just to those who know its stories, but to all who know how to read its language in the wild. By bringing that into our social structures, we become the world. We become changed, and the world we imagine becomes changed in turn, and so it comes to pass by the action of our hands. The ancients knew this, and worked hard to protect these relationships. For young men, Thor’s axe might have been there to gain advantage by cutting through the wisdom of the world and recreating it as action, but there were large social structures to guide that strength into productive and ultimately feminine forms.
In historical terms, it means that in the lands of the rowan, the Christian staff can be a magical one at the same time, with no contradiction. The rowan’s staff, or bloody spear, has led to such concrete social acts as the creation of states, science, and female power.
I hope you will find a rowan on Brigid’s Day and find your balance by being in its presence —for personal development, if you need that, for spiritual purposes, certainly, and for social development and renewal of the principles embodied in this tree and in the powerful, earth-altering symbolic life to which it has been dedicated.
A Farm in Iceland 
