The Daily: 23 December 2023

In the Roman calendar, this day was Larentalia, a day to honor the household gods — the lares, spirits of place — as well as the mother of all lares and the adoptive mother of Romulus and Remus, Acca Larentia. Larentalia fell after Saturnalia and before the end of the year as a way to get right with the genii of your home. In Rome, the head of household would make sacrifices and pour libations. Because the lares are particularly associated with the hearth and the kitchen, the traditional meal was what I might call comfort food — beans and bread, fruits, nuts and olives. So tonight, I had a Roman meal… though in a chair. (No idea how they managed to eat supine on the floor…)

I have been reading an intriguing book on spirits of place — Looking for the Hidden Folk: How Iceland’s Elves Can Save the Earth by Nancy Marie Brown. I picked it up because it seemed whimsical and because I enjoyed Brown’s story of Gudrid, The Far Traveler, a Viking woman who crossed the Atlantic and made a life for herself in one of the most inhospitable parts of the world. Even with the tantalizing subtitle promising elven salvation, I wasn’t expecting much more than a light romp through Icelandic folklore. If I expected anything, it was history, since that is Brown’s specialty and Iceland is where some of the best preserved pagan stories live.

But this book is here and now.

And it’s not exactly about elves.

I would say this is a meditation on the spirit of place, on the animating core of non-human beings, including many that humans don’t normally believe to be sentient or even alive. Iceland is an island of raw geology. It is an island that is being made before our eyes, in human time scales. Iceland’s volcanoes and mountains and stones are very much alive and growing, forging complex communities with plants and animals — and us. Very little is inert. The landscape is not a backdrop to the story but the central character in the narrative of culture and interbeing of Iceland. It is not difficult to see how such a place would birth stories of ubiquitous, if hidden, sentience.

Brown admits to taking a long path to seeing these hidden folk. These are not her native stories. This is not her native place, no matter how much she loves the island. She had to learn to see Otherworlds. And so it began with belief.

This is not a cute story. Not a “just clap your hands and believe and everything will be rosy” fairy tale. There is little about Iceland or its elves that is cute and quite a lot that might rightfully cause terror. There are dragons and angry gods and hot lava and poisonous ash. The Elf Ladies who live in the stones can kill you. But if given a wide berth and a modicum of respect, they can also teach you about your place. They can show you how to see the unseen and understand the story of the land. They also prompt you to grapple with what it means to believe, to know, to see, to be.

“How do most Icelanders believe in gravity?”

Brown takes this question of belief in the unseen up and down mountains, through history and science and sudden mist, into homes and neighborly communities, across oceans and time and culture. She digs into the words we use lightly and reveals the hidden weight of their massive roots. We talk in icebergs, with tiny bright spots on the surface dragging enormous significance through dark waters. Sometimes elves decide to become our mirrors and help us see what we mean, help us see ourselves.

Fairy stories are how we comprehend the Others that don’t speak in our words, some that don’t seem to speak at all. In this revelation we also see ourselves in relation to Others. We see what we do to the land, to culture, to history. We see our place and ourselves in our place. Even as seeing elves helps us recognize that all that we see is only what we think we see — “…neural blips and fluxes of brain chemistry”.

Still, asks Brown, “Does that make love, or the chair I’m sitting on, less real? How, I ask again, do we decide if something is ‘real’?”

To deal with ontology-containing-elves, Brown deftly weaves together stories from fantasy writers to hardscrabble farmers, from quantum mechanics to civil engineering, from horse trekking to esoteric philosophy and neurochemistry. There is so much packed into this book that reading it will add mountains to the ToBeRead pile. But the core lesson is simple: the Earth is alive in all the ways that we are alive. Everything in the Earth is alive in all the ways that we are alive. Stories of the land are inevitably stories of the hidden spirits, the agency and will and dreams, of the Earth — elves. And once you see elves, it is very hard to lose your place in this Earth.

This is what Brown means by elf salvation. If we pay attention to the Others, if we notice the world and know it well enough to know its hidden folk, then we become incapable of the casual destruction inherent in modern life. A belief in the hidden, or perhaps an acceptance of the limits of our rational comprehension, brings both humility and wisdom. We see connections and effects through Other eyes. We see and we recoil from being the cause of harm. We also find that we are not alone, that we always have those connections. There is a beautiful web of sentience and story in the land, and we are woven into it. When we go looking for elves, we find this web — we find life.

In the end, Brown says, it doesn’t matter if you think all of it is imaginary. That may very well be everything we experience. Yet it is that experience. The interaction and exchange with what we don’t control, don’t own, don’t understand — but do know and love. That reciprocity of being is what makes a life. Whether you talk to elves in the stones or to the stones themselves, the point is to have that conversation and to learn that point of view.

I don’t know if I would call Them elves or fairies or lares. I certainly don’t see little homunculi nor terrible and majestic humanoid deities. I don’t know why any beings except humans would be like humans or have human impulses and needs. But I am certain that Others have thoughts and wishes. Others are alive in all the ways that I am alive — and we are all alive together. You can’t be lonely when you have this pagan relationship with the land. I like the way Gary Snyder calls these Others by their names — River, Bear, Eagle, Manzanita, Coyote. But even those words fall short of who they are. So maybe spirits of the land, elves, is as good a way of seeing as any.

And if we all see the elves… well, then… we all see the world.

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©Elizabeth Anker 2023