Iceland review - 2014, Síða 12

10 ICELAND REVIEW
FoLKLore
THe liTTle BooK oF THe iCelanDerS
in THe olD DayS
This essay is one of 50 in the new book The Little Book of the
Icelanders in the Old Days by Alda sigmundsdóttir, writer,
journalist, blogger and expert on all things icelandic.
“i’ve never been particularly interested in history, but i found
myself absolutely fascinated with the various facets of my ances-
tors’ lives,” she told IR freelancer Edward Hancox about her
book. “i was absolutely in awe of how they managed to survive
on this island ... how they found ways to cope with everything.
Some of those ways are heartbreaking, and others are absolutely
hilarious. So i wrote a book in the style of the first Little Book:
fifty miniature essays about different aspects of life, in a light and
humorous style.” *
Any farm that relied on sheep for its survival (read: every single
farm in the country) had a special structure located some distance
from the farm itself, called a sel, or mountain dairy, where the
sheep and sometimes cows were kept during the summer.
At least two people from the farm were routinely sent to spend
the summer at the sel. One of those was a shepherd - very often
a child or adolescent, who was responsible for watching over the
sheep and herding them into a pen at least once a day for milking.
The other was the matselja, or “sel food woman” (those prosaic
Icelanders!), who was responsible for milking the sheep and pro-
ducing food from the milk.
Now, we might be forgiven for thinking that life in the sel was
excruciatingly dull, but ... well, maybe not. Thing is, the matseljur
(that’s the plural of matselja) sometimes got pregnant up there.
Obviously the shepherds were not to blame (one would hope -
given their age), so the question was: who?
Answer: the ljúflingar, lovers of mortal women from among the
hidden folk population.
Apparently, these sensitive men - ljúflingur means “a gentle
man”, not to be confused with “a gentleman” - not only made
love to the mortal women and got them pregnant, but were also
there in the sel to assist during the child’s delivery. Still, it was a
doomed kind of love, what with the man being hidden and every-
thing, so the woman generally returned to the farm with the child
and carried on with her life. However, the ljúflingur (according to
the stories) would be unable to forget his mortal woman from the
sel, and typically returned many years later, hoping to revive the
romance, by which time the child was grown and the sel woman
married. This, however, tended to end badly for the ljúflingur, as
he would generally wind up dying in the process.
(And you thought trashy Harlequin romances were invented in
the 20th century? Ha, NO.)
In our day and age, it is easy to dismiss those stories as fantasies
conjured up by women who craved love, tenderness and romance
in a world starkly devoid of all those. But it might be more sinister
than that. We know that there were harsh punishments doled out
for having children out of wedlock. It is highly probable, there-
fore, that tales of the gentle lovers from the hidden world were
made up to avoid punishment in the very real physical one.
Incidentally, the word “ljúflingur” is still very much a part of
the Icelandic lexicon, but these days it is used to describe (mortal)
men who are kind, gentle, and liked by most people.
(Edited for length.)
Mountain dairy
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