Reykjavík Grapevine - 31.07.2015, Blaðsíða 30

30 The Reykjavík GrapevineIssue 11 — 2015ART
It might well have stayed there as a ne-
glected historical curiosity but for the
work of present-day painter and some-
time cryptozoologist Arngrímur Sig-
urðsson. His recently released art book
‘Duldýrasafnið’—roughly translated:
“The Hidden Being Museum”—compiles
accounts of 32 such supernatural en-
counters, each one sitting alongside a
painting of the subject. Taken from old
books, folk stories, eyewitness accounts
and modern-day sightings, the paint-
ings and stories in Dúldýrasafnið offer
a glimpse into a particularly rich and
fascinating corner of Iceland’s literary
history.
The idea came when Arngrímur was
an exchange student in Vienna. Consid-
ering what subject an Icelandic painter
might address, he decided to veer off
the beaten path of landscapes and wa-
terfalls into the murkier territory of his
homeland’s folklore. “Iceland’s stories
are a remarkable thing that this country
has produced,” says the mild-mannered
but enthusiastic Arngrímur, sipping cof-
fee in a downtown cafe. “In fact, it was
our biggest cultural output ever, until the
music of the last few years.”
The roots of Iceland’s modern-day
literary culture lie in folk tales, spread
through word of mouth and passed
down through generations. “They’re
often highly superstitious tales,” admits
Arngrímur, “but as soon as you start
reading them, you notice what a cool
world it is—a complex fantasy world
that people have created over centu-
ries. New people are always adding on
to the whole collection of creatures.
And I wanted to add something to it,
too.”
Inner thigh wart feeding
Iceland’s ”duldýr” take a wide range
of forms, from deadly seahorses to air
creatures, weird reptiles to megafauna,
deadly living sea-stacks to mythical
islands. Arngrímur leafs through the
book, settling on a particular favou-
rite—a coiled, worm-like creature.
"This one is the ‘Tilberi,’” he says. “It
kind of looks just like an earthworm, but
it’s actually a milk fetcher. It can only be
conjured by women. First they have to
steal the rib of a man from a cemetery,
then take it home, then wrap it up in
wool and stuff, then take it to church.
There, they take the wine that the priest
gives them, and spit it on the rib. After
that, the Tilberi comes and starts going
through the fields stealing milk from
sheep, bringing it back to its mother,
and emptying it into a container. She
grows a wart on her inner thigh that the
creature would feed from." He pauses,
grimly. "There have actually been two
women executed in Iceland for conjur-
ing a milk fetcher.”
But from the brutal superstitions
of 19th century Iceland through to
the modern day, reports of mysterious
encounters have been constant over
the years. The most recent creature
sighting in the book was reported in
the 1980s, not far from Reykjavík, at
a beautiful and somewhat eerie lake
called Kleifarvatn on the Reykjanes
peninsula.
Shell monsters and sad blimps
“This one is the ‘Skeljaskrímsli,’” says
Arngrímur, pointing out a chunky-look-
ing scaled beast. “He’s the shell mon-
ster, because he makes a sound like a
bag full of shells—a crunching sound.
Two guys were out hunting for grouse
in 1987, and they reported seeing a pair
of weird creatures swimming in the
lake, then coming ashore and resting.
They watched them for a while.”
Skeljaskrímsli isn’t the only creature
seen in a modern context. One of the
most striking images in Duldýrasaf-
nið is the air spirit, also used as the
book’s cover image. It’s interpreted
by Arngrímur as a blimp-like creature
with a sad, wizened human face, float-
ing in a modern landscape dotted with
electricity pylons. It’s a haunting scene
somehow, with the spirit observing the
human constructions as if confused by
these man-made interventions in the
natural landscape.
“The creatures’ place is not re-
ally in the same world that we live in,”
says Arngrímur. “They are from their
own place. It’s like the world of our
dreams—we humans spend a lot of
time in dreams. We have all these ex-
periences there, sometimes waking up
with the feeling that those events were
as real as memories.
These creatures might
seem kind of far out—
but our dreams are far
out, too."
A king’s guide to
Iceland
In the distant past, the
kind of word-of-mouth
mythical creatures of
the Duldýrasafnið cir-
culated at the top of
society, amongst aca-
demics, cartographers,
merchants and royalty.
In the 12th century,
guidebooks for nobil-
ity mention human-
faced sea stacks—like
the ones standing off
the coast of Vík—that
might grab sailors, or
rain down rocks on
passing ships. But per-
haps the most persistent legend of the
time was Frisland, a “phantom country”
that was widely featured on maps for
most of the 15th and 16th centuries be-
fore people seemingly realised it wasn’t
actually there.
“Frisland was supposed to be just
south of Iceland, and about the same
size,” explains Arngrímur. “It had details
like place names, and cities that fea-
tured on maps. Texts of the time refer-
ence people who live there, and ‘sailors
from Frisland’ who visited this place or
that place. And then suddenly it didn’t
exist. It vanished from the maps.”
Some of the stories, like the Til-
beri, even entered the laws of the time,
showing just how deeply embedded in
culture these ideas were. “In the early
Icelandic law book Grágás,” notes
Arngrímur, “it’s actually made illegal
to summon some of these creatures. It
was in the law of the land.”
Life is but a dream
The modern world is more sceptical.
Many now consider such supernatural
encounters to be irrational—improbable
tales borne from superstition, misap-
prehension, a flair for
drama, or even undi-
agnosed psychosis. But
Arngrímur argues they
reveal an important as-
pect of human psychol-
ogy.
“I believe that
imagination plays a
huge part in our lives
and our experience,” he
says. “In our opinions
and our feelings there’s
always an element of
the imagined—noth-
ing is completely real.
For example, souls—
the idea of a soul is of
something not con-
nected to the body—it’s
like a hidden being. But
then, a lot of people
believe in the afterlife.
If you believe in God,
you’ll see miracles ev-
erywhere; but if you
believe in trolls and elves, you’ll see
evidence of them everywhere instead.
UFO sightings and alien abductions
bear a lot of resemblance to the elf sto-
ries."
As our long and engrossing conver-
sation draws close to its end, I finally
ask Arngrímur if he’s ever had a super-
natural encounter himself. He hesitates,
reluctant to answer. “I thought I saw a
ghost once, in my apartment,” he says,
finally. “I experienced it very clearly,
but in honesty I now think my mind
conjured it up. In fact, most people
have had some experience that could
be described as paranormal, whether a
weird vision, a premonition, a ghost en-
counter, or an out of body experience.
These are all very common paranormal
experiences."
With this in mind, it’s no wonder
that the project has captured the public
imagination. With an English language
version in the works for the summer, it
seems the odd mystical creatures of the
Duldýrasafnið have once more wriggled
free from non-existence, living on in the
minds of the book’s readers.
One night in 1846, a trader named Sigtryggur Sigurðsson
was walking his usual route home along the beach from
Húsavík, when he saw something strange approaching.
A large humanoid creature of a type he’d never seen was
sprinting towards him from the sea. Sigtryggur took fright
and ran to a nearby hillock, picking up a branch to fend
off the creature, which was quickly upon him, attacking
him viciously. After a long and bloody struggle that saw his
clothes torn to tatters, he finally landed a heavy blow on
its arm, breaking it at the elbow. The creature howled and
relented, turning and running back into the surf. Sigtryggur
escaped badly injured, but lived to tell the tale, naming the
beast the Sea Troll. His tale was so vivid that it entered lo-
cal legend, and was published decades later in a book of
Icelandic folklore called ‘Þjóðtrú og þjóðsagnir’.
Words John Rogers
Photo Anna Domnick
The Museum
Of Hidden Beings
Arngrímur Sigurðsson’s paintings
reach into the mists of Iceland’s
mythological history
Duldýrasafnið
in numbers
32
Creatures in the
Duldýrasafnið book
100
Number of years the “phantom
island” of Frisland appeared on
maps
1000
Copies of the first edition printed
1846
The year of Sigtryggur Sigurðs-
son’s sea troll sighting
1987
Most recent creature sighting
(the shell monster)
€3000
Original target of Duldýrasafnið
campaign
€9956
Total funding