Tag Archives: Elves

Iceland’s 1000-Year-Long Balancing Act

Elf House, Church, School, Playground. Out of these pillars, the country is built.Þorgeir’s balance from the Þing (the parliament; Þorgeir was the speaker of the house, tasked with deciding the spiritual future of the country) in the winter of 999-1000, in which he decided that the country would be Christian, politically, and either pagan or Christian privately, continues to this day. Intriguingly, the Álfar, “the other people” of pagan tradition, remain hidden. One can see their homes (above, for example), as one could see pagan homes in the Christian Iceland of late 1000, but the pagan content is as hidden now as it was then. But it is OK for children to play there — children who are the foundation of the state. So, it’s not that hidden!

Believing in Elves is Weird

There are either elves or not. Belief in them is not the question.  The one above is in the elf city at Goðafoss. Here is another part of town watching the falls.

The point is not about perfect human-like creatures living in another realm, but about what the earth looks like when you know it so intimately you identify with it before you do so with  people, including yourself. The consequences of that are profound.

Of Dwarves and Men

Dwarf city in the West Fjords…p1040628

Frost spirits at the Glacial Lagoon, in the South …p1320454

A buried elf city in þingvellir.green

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.

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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…waterstuff

… a kind of way of seeing transformation rather than durability.pebbles

We call that life.

 

Christmas Between the Worlds

On the woman’s hill on Viðey, it is possible to walk between worlds.p1340121

It is here the stones speak a language that is neither Icelandic nor English. It is an eruption of physical presence.

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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.

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This breathing is our way of talking to our ancestors, who the living call the dead. They’re hardly dead.

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Not as long as we keep walking among them.

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Not as long as we continue to honour them with devotion to each other.

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Let us listen with all that we are.

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Let us trust the old paths of care.

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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.

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For it either goes on without us or with us, and we can so be there.

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Let us go give thanks by being there.p1310489

Let us be honourable children. Let us be there.

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Let us give praise, however we can.

p1310671However you can, let us find the silence at the heart of speech. Let us stand aside. Let us give each other that much honour.p1400536 Let us be the speech at the heart of silence. Let us be gathered in.

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For we are all the living.

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We have much to talk about. bright2

We have much to walk together through the stillness that gives us movement and stills us at the same moment.troll

 

Let us rejoice.