The Holy Mountain: Guest Post by Nancy Brown post
Time for another guest post. This one is from American author and horsewoman Nancy Marie Brown . When I wrote a recent post on elves in Iceland, Nancy’s publishers sent me a copy of her upcoming book Looking for the Hidden Folk . Like me, Nancy has fallen in love with Iceland, and also like me she has quite a hard-headed, sceptical view of superstition. A rational person might ask how can so many people in a modern well-educated society like Iceland entertain the concept of hidden people or elves? This book is her answer, and it’s fascinating. It’s also a wonderful evocation of Iceland, its people and its countryside. Here is an excerpt, about an early visit to Helgafell, Iceland’s “Holy Mountain”, very close to where my detective Magnus’s grandfather’s farm at Bjarnarhöfn. I was a graduate student in medieval literature when I first went to Iceland in 1986. I wanted to see the farm of Helgafell, site of the Icelandic saga Eyrbyggja—a saga Michael Ridpath, my host on this blog, u...