The Elf church that moved

When you first arrive in Iceland, there is an immediate sense that you have landed in a place quite different from anywhere else. Travellers often describe the feeling as having landed on a different planet. Partly that is due to the landscape, partly due to the light and the clean air which is filled with a heady mixture of heather, lava and the sea.

But, there is something else too; something that’s harder to put your finger on, a sense that there is more to the landscape than meets the eye.

From Keflavík airport the road to Reykjavík curves along a black shoreline of small peninsulas and inlets edged with breaking waves shimmering like a diamond necklace. On the other side, an eerie lunar landscape of ancient moss-covered lava in a muted palette of greys and browns is occasionally highlighted by a splash of bright acid-green moss. The sky stretches never-ending above, somehow bigger than anywhere else.

In the distance, otherworldly steam rises from the Svartsengi geothermal plant, of which the Blue Lagoon is its by-product, and beyond that lie Fagradalsfjall and Sundhnúksgígar, where the earth has ruptured repeatedly, wounding the village of Grindavík.

In my childhood home, a crack ran through the floor on the landing. It opened during an earthquake and remained ever since, a daily reminder that the earth was alive.

When Icelanders speak of land as alive, it is not metaphorical or poetic language. The earth is alive geologically, visibly, and physically. Earthquakes shake the ground, volcanos spew molten lava, rivers flood, glaciers melt and retreat.

But the land is alive in another sense too, because for generations the landscape has been understood as inhabited by more-than-human presences: huldufólk, álfar, and landvættir; beings who dwell in rocks, hills, lava fields, cliffs and hidden places.

The belief that there is a more-than-human presence embedded in the land is not a quirky notion made up for tourists, but a living remnant of when people lived in closer relationship with nature and everything within it.

Nearing Reykjavík, I always glance towards Álftanes peninsula, where Bessastaðir, the presidential residence, sits low in the landscape: a cluster of beautifully simple whitewashed buildings with cheerful red roofs and a red-roofed church.

But Bessastaðakirkja is not the only church on Álftanes.

There is another church in the lava.

Ófeigskirkja; the elf church.

In 2015 Ófeigskirkja, a 70 tonne rock formation stood in the in the path of a new road developement. The rock was understood to be a sacred place of the huldufólk, sometimes called elves, a church or a chapel. Protests were undertaken, tot he extent that some of the protesters were arrested and charged. The conflict was not only about conservation, though it was certainly that. It was also about whether a place can be understood as inhabited by beings who do not appear on ordinary maps.

The seer Ragnhildur Jónsdóttir, often described as a spokesperson for the elves, was brought in to negotiate between the Highways authority and the elves, and eventually the elves agreed to the rock being moved to a place of their choosing.

Ófeigskirkja moved. image from Morgunblaðið

The road went ahead, but the rock was not treated as dead matter. Its belonging was recognised. Its relationship with the place was recognised. People stood there on behalf of the unseen and insisted that the hidden life of the land should be acknowledged.

That is not a small thing.

Icelandic hidden people are not tiny winged fairies. They are not decorative creatures from children’s stories or made for tourist souveneers. . The huldufólk, or elves, of Icelandic folk belief are close to human, but hidden. They live within the landscape, in rocks, hills, cliffs and lava fields. They have homes and churches, families and animals, pride and temper. They belong to place.

Their presence changes the way a place is approached.

This is why the usual question ´do Icelanders believe in elves?´ feels too small. It turns a living relationship with land into a yes-or-no opinion. The huldufolk are not only a matter of belief. They are part of a deeper way of understanding that the land is not passive. It is not merely scenery, property, building site or resource. It is inhabited, storied and alive with presence.

That understanding has real consequences. A rock is not disturbed; a patch of land is left untouched; a seer is called.

This is where hidden people and the modern nature-rights movement begin to meet.

Rights of nature asks us to recognise that rivers, mountains, forests, glaciers and ecosystems are not simply things for human use, but living entities with their own integrity and value. Icelandic folk belief has carried a version of that understanding for centuries, not in legal language, but in story, caution and relationship. The hidden people give the land personhood. They give it neighbours. They give it boundaries. They make it harder to pretend that a place is empty just because humans want to build over it.

That is the power of these stories. They make the invisible claim of the land visible.

A lava field becomes more than lava. A rock becomes more than rock. A hill becomes more than a hill. It may be a dwelling, a church, a protected place, a threshold between worlds. The moment we allow that possibility, we no longer stand outside nature looking in. We are inside a relationship, and relationship asks something of us.

For me, this is deep listening.

Deep listening is not only listening with the ears. It is listening with the body, memory, instinct, imagination and respect. It is opening oneself to the possibility that the landscape has a voice. Not necessarily a human voice, not something that speaks in tidy sentences, but a voice carried through weather, water, rock, bird flight, unease, beauty, warning, dream and story.

In Iceland, this has always made sense to me. The land does not shout, but neither is it silent.

To grow up in Iceland is to know that the ground beneath your feet is never entirely still. Earthquakes shake the house. Lava has flowed and may flow again. Snow thaws and rivers swell. Avalanches fall. Mudslides come down mountainsides. Storms arrive quickly and leave their mark. Roads close without warning. Weather turns within hours, sometimes within minutes, and plans are always provisional.

Of course, Icelanders have not always lived gently with the land. No people have. But the stories remain as a counterweight to the human habit of assuming the world is arranged only around us. They remind us that there are other presences, other claims, other forms of belonging.

This is one of the threads I follow in the writing of my book Remembering the Way Home: the old Icelandic understanding that land is not empty, water is not mute, and the seen world is not the whole world.

And Ófeigskirkja reminds us that the hidden world is not somewhere far away in mountains or old stories. It is here, beside roads and houses and modern life, asking us to widen our understanding of what a place is. It asks us to pause before we disturb, to listen before we decide, and to remember that the land may already be speaking long before we learn how to hear it.