The Little Book of the Hidden People by Alda Sigmundsdóttir

Author:Alda Sigmundsdóttir [Sigmundsdóttir, Alda]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Enska textasmidjan
Published: 2015-03-14T22:00:00+00:00

In The Little Book of the Icelanders in the Old Days I wrote about the ljúflingar, a term for hidden men who became lovers of mortal women (and that has gained a somewhat different meaning today). Those women were very often the keepers of the “mountain dairy,” or sel in Icelandic. The sel was a rudimentary structure that was located quite a distance from the farm, near the mountain pastures where livestock was kept during the summer. There were usually only two people who spent the summers at the sel - the female keeper of the dairy, and the shepherd who looked after the livestock. The shepherd was often a child of around ten, but could be as young as five or six. He or she was responsible for driving the sheep to the pastures, watching over them, and then driving them back home in the evening so that the ewes could be milked. The dairy-keeper, called matselja (“sel food woman”) would then make butter or skyr (an Icelandic dairy product, somewhere between yogurt and cream cheese) out of the milk, which would be fetched by someone from the farm every few days. In this story there are more people in the sel, which indicates that the minister was relatively wealthy, like many people who were affiliated with the church in those days were.

Obviously the matseljur spent many days alone in the sel. Sometimes they came back pregnant at the end of the summer, and stories circulated that they had been involved in love affairs with hidden men. As I discussed in the introduction those stories probably reflected a deep longing for love, sex and romance that was denied to much of the population at that time, and might also have been used to explain away an unexpected pregnancy. Sometimes those women might have been raped. Or they might simply have been involved in an illicit love affair - as pretty much all love affairs were at that time. And, in keeping with Reverend Guðmundur’s comments in “The ways of the hidden people,” this romance between a hidden man and mortal woman ended tragically, as such entanglements (according to the stories) almost always did.

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