A Deep Dive into Icelandic Folklore: Trolls, Elves, and Hidden People

Ask an Icelander whether they believe in elves and you will usually get a smile and a carefully constructed non-answer. That evasiveness is the most honest thing about Icelandic folklore: it is neither a sincere religion nor a joke for tourists, but a cultural inheritance that most people neither practise nor quite dismiss. Understanding it changes how the landscape looks from the car window.

Trolls in the landscape

Icelandic trolls are creatures of the night, and the rule that governs them is simple: sunlight turns them to stone. This single motif explains a remarkable number of Icelandic place names and rock formations, because every strange basalt stack has an origin story attached.

The Reynisdrangar sea stacks off the black beach near Vík are, in the telling, two trolls who were hauling a three-masted ship to shore when dawn caught them. Hvítserkur, the arched sea rock in Húnaflói that looks convincingly like a drinking animal, is a troll petrified while trying to tear down the bells of a monastery. Along the Ring Road you will pass dozens of these.

Dimmuborgir near Lake Mývatn is the grandest example. Its name means "dark cities" or "dark castles", and the field of collapsed lava pillars, arches and caves genuinely does look built rather than erupted. It formed around 2,300 years ago when a lava lake drained away and left the hollow pillars standing. In folklore it is a troll settlement — specifically the home of Grýla, the ogress who eats badly behaved children, her idle husband Leppalúði, and the enormous Jólakötturinn, the Yule Cat that devours anyone who did not receive new clothes for Christmas.

The Yule Lads

Grýla’s thirteen sons are Iceland’s answer to Santa Claus, and considerably stranger. The Yule Lads come down from the mountains one at a time on the thirteen nights before Christmas, each with a name describing his particular petty crime: Stekkjarstaur the sheep-worrier, Þvörusleikir the spoon-licker, Pottaskefill the pot-scraper, Skyrgámur the skyr-glutton, Gluggagægir the window-peeper, Gáttaþefur the door-sniffer, and so on down to Kertasníkir the candle-beggar, who arrives on Christmas Eve.

Children leave a shoe on the windowsill each night; well-behaved ones receive a small gift, and the rest get a raw potato. They then depart one per day through to Þrettándinn, the thirteenth day of Christmas on 6 January. It is a living tradition, not a museum piece — Icelandic children today genuinely do the shoe.

The huldufólk

The hidden people are distinct from trolls and, in many tellings, from elves as well — though the terms álfar and huldufólk are used interchangeably by most people now. The huldufólk are described as roughly human-sized, living in rocks, hillocks and lava outcrops, farming and fishing in a parallel society that becomes visible only when they choose. They are not whimsical: the folklore is full of stories of people who disrupted a rock and suffered accidents, illness or ruined machinery afterwards.

The frequently repeated claim that "most Icelanders believe in elves" is a misreading of the survey data. What studies at the University of Iceland have actually found, repeatedly, is that only a small minority firmly assert their existence, a similarly small minority flatly deny it, and the large middle says something closer to "I would not rule it out." That is a statement about cultural humility and a reluctance to be presumptuous about the land, not about literal belief.

Roads that bend around rocks

This is where the folklore becomes visible infrastructure. The best-documented case is Álfhóll in Kópavogur, just south of Reykjavík, where road-building plans were altered more than once across several decades — the road was eventually narrowed and routed around the rock, and it is now a protected site with a plaque.

More recently, the construction of a road through the Gálgahraun lava field near Álftanes in 2013 drew protests that combined conservation arguments with objections about an elf church in the lava. The road was built; the disputed rock, Ófeigskirkja, was moved rather than destroyed.

It is worth being precise about what is happening here. Icelandic authorities do not have an official elf policy, and engineers do not consult seers as a matter of course. What happens is that a proposal meets local opposition in which folklore, environmental protection and attachment to a specific landscape are tangled together, and the cheapest resolution is often to move the road a few metres. The elves function as a language for defending a place.

Why it persists

For a thousand years Icelanders lived in a landscape that could kill them without warning — eruptions, glacial floods, storms, famine — and which they could not control. A body of stories in which the land is inhabited, has interests, and punishes carelessness is a reasonable response to that. The medieval sagas, written down in the 13th and 14th centuries, hardened the whole tradition into literature, and Iceland has taken its written heritage seriously ever since.

Today the folklore does quieter work: it marks the landscape as meaningful, it gives communities a vocabulary for resisting development, and it reminds a modern, thoroughly secular, heavily online society that the rocks were here first. When your guide says "we don’t really believe it, but we don’t disturb the rock either," they mean exactly that.