In exploring how Icelanders interact with nature―and their idea that elves live among us―Nancy Marie Brown shows us how altering our perceptions of the environment can be a crucial first step toward saving it.Icelanders believe in elves. Why does that make you laugh?, asks Nancy Marie Brown, in this wonderfully quirky exploration of our interaction with nature. Looking for answers in history, science, religion, and art―from ancient times to today―Brown finds that each discipline defines what is real and unreal, natural and supernatural, demonstrated and theoretical, alive and inert. Each has its own way of perceiving and valuing the world around us. And each discipline defines what an Icelander might call an elf.Illuminated by her own encounters with Iceland’s Otherworld―in ancient lava fields, on a holy mountain, beside a glacier or an erupting volcano, crossing the cold desert at the island’s heart on horseback―Looking for the Hidden Folk offers an intimate conversation about how we
