The Treatise on elves by Olafur of Purkey : cosmology and folk belief in nineteenth-century Iceland

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In the years around 1830, the lcelandic farmer, fisherman, and scribe Òlafur Sveinsson (1761-1845) set out to prove the existence of the ‘hidden people’ (huldufólk) or ‘elves’ (álfar), which he experienced as an everyday part of his life as a man working the land and the sea. ln order to achieve his aim, he collected memorates, traditional tales, poems, and literary references, focusing on his extended family, neighbours, and acquaintances especially in the fjord of Breiðafjöður in Western lceland. ln doing so, he compiled an ethnography of local traditions about elves, which stands out through its remarkable richness of detail and an attention to context that makes it a testimony not only to Ólafur’s personal beliefs, but also to attitudes towards the ‘hidden people’ in his wider local community. The resulting Treatise on Elves is perhaps the single most detailed account of living folk belief as seen from the inside perspective of a tradition bearer and believer to survive from the whole of pre-industrial Europe. This book presents the first edition and translation of Ólafur Sveinsson’s treatise on elves that makes its text accessible in the way how it was laid out by Ólafur himself. The text is accompanied by an analysis of its social, literary, and economic context that shows the rich contributions which Ólafur’s unique testimony can make to our understanding of the workings of pre-industrial folk belief in a sparsely settled North Atlantic landscape.