Monks at sea

The phenomenally silly song "St. Brendan's Fair Isle," by the Arkansas folk singer and songwriter Jimmy Driftwood, tells the wild tale of St. Brendan of Clonfert, sometimes called "Brendan the Navigator:"

We'd been on the ocean for ninety-four days,
And came to a spot where the seas were ablaze;
Those demons from Hades were dancin' with glee
And burnin' the sailors alive on the sea.
Well, St. Brendan walked on the blistering waves,
He drove all those demons right back to their caves,
And all of the saints wore a heavenly smile
As we sailed for St. Brendan's fair isle, fair isle
We sailed for St. Brendan's fair isle.

St. Brendan himself is something of a historical mystery.  He lived from around 484 to 577 C.E., although the first extant mention of him isn't until a hundred years after his death (in Adomnán of Iona's Vita Sancti Columbae), and the earliest account of him as an explorer is a hundred years after that, in the ninth century Martyrology of Tallaght.

The story is that St. Brendan and some of his fellow monks took off into the Atlantic Ocean in a leather-bound coracle in search of an enchanted island he'd heard was "somewhere in the western ocean."  Sources differ as to whether he found it, but upon his return he told (amongst other claims) of a place where "great demons threw down lumps of fiery slag from an island with rivers of gold fire" -- considered by some to be an indication that he reached the volcanic island of Iceland.

While St. Brendan's voyages might well be mythology -- no one, for example, gives much credit to his boat spending time riding on the back of a giant enchanted fish -- the idea of Irish and Scottish monks making it across the north Atlantic actually has some basis in fact.

A medieval illustration of St. Brendan of Clonfert and his fellow explorers (ca. 1460) [Image is in the Public Domain]

The twelfth century Íslendingabók (The Book of the Icelanders) by Icelandic historian Ari Þorgilsson describes the arrival of the first Norse settlers in around 874 C. E., and states that they found some settlements already there -- small clusters of buildings inhabited by "holy men" called Papar (from the Old Irish word papa meaning "monk").  Þorgilsson said that the Papar were Christian ascetics, and when they found out the island was being taken over by pagan Norsemen, they basically said "there goes the neighborhood," upped stakes, and left.  The Landnámabók (The Book of Settlements), which in general is considered pretty reliable as a historical document, concurs, and said that when the Papar took off they left behind items that confirmed their Christian faith, including books, bells, crucifixes, and crosiers.

Some historians believe that the place names Papey (which seems to mean "island of the Papar") and the Vestmannaeyjar (the "islands of the western men") hearken back to Irish and Scottish inhabitants who actually predated the Norse settlements, perhaps by as much as two centuries.

While all this is intriguing, it bears mention that despite extensive archaeological investigation of the locations of alleged settlements by the Papar, there have been no unequivocally Celtic artifacts located in Iceland yet.  So right now we're left with a couple of moderately-plausible historical documents and a highly mythologized account of a saint whose exploits include some highly questionable events such as an island inhabited by bow-and-arrow wielding pig-headed people and a place where Judas Iscariot is tortured by being frozen on one side and burned on the other.

I might believe that St. Brendan sailed to Iceland, but that bit is a little more than I'm willing to swallow.

A statue commemorating St. Brendan's voyage, in Bantry, County Cork, Ireland [Image is in the Public Domain\

Anyhow, that's our historical curiosity of the day.  Whatever the truth of the Brendan story, I find it incredible that back in the days before reliable maps anyone was willing to launch off into the ocean.  I have my adventurous side, but that's way beyond anything I'd ever consider doing.  And that goes double if I thought there was a chance that demons from Hades might burn me alive if my faith wasn't sufficiently strong.

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When the volcano blows

It's a point I've made here more than once; if you're trying to convince someone of something, your argument is not made stronger by lying about it.

The reason this comes up today is the horrible situation in Iceland, where (at the time of this writing) the people of the little village of Grindavík on the south coast of the Reykjanes Peninsula, due south of the capital city of Reykjavík, have been evacuated and are waiting for a volcanic eruption that stands a good chance of destroying the town completely.  The buildings and roads in the town have already sustained heavy damage from nearly continuous earthquakes, and the latest estimate is that there are places where the magma is only five hundred meters below the surface.  An eruption is nearly certain -- how extensive it will be is unknown.  (The village is only a few kilometers away from Fagradallsfjall, the volcano I got to see erupting when I visited Iceland in 2022.)

A photograph I took in August 2022

This is certainly awful.  But the whole situation is made worse because every time there's a volcanic eruption, it brings the climate change deniers howling from the dark corners where they hide, claiming that (as one of them put it) "the Climate Scammers conveniently ignore that a single volcanic eruption puts hundreds of times more carbon dioxide into the atmosphere than cars do.  Climate ups and downs happen all the time, and natural processes account for nearly all of it.  Wake up!"

Which would be a good argument if anything about it was true.

The "hundreds of times more" statistic is about the right factor -- but the inequality points the other direction.  Here's the actual situation, as per the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration:

You might not spot the volcanic carbon dioxide output on this graph right away, because it's the light blue line hugging the x-axis.  In fact, as Mark Gongloff points out, writing for Bloomberg, the 1980 eruption of Mount Saint Helens spewed ten million tons of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere, which seems like a lot until you find out that our burning of fossil fuels does that every two and a half hours.  Geologists estimate that even a cataclysmic eruption like the Yellowstone Supervolcano emitted on the order of thirty gigatons of carbon dioxide -- about what our fossil fuel use accomplishes every single year.

So not only are the climate change deniers coldly and callously capitalizing on the horrible situation unfolding in Iceland, they're doing so by crafting outrageous lies about it.

The fact that this claim is wildly wrong has not stopped it from being circulated all over the place by people who would very much like it if we didn't have to face head-on what we're currently doing to the planet we live on.  I get it; it's a hard conversation to have.  I have an electric car and solar panels and solar hot water, but even so, I very much live an affluent First-World lifestyle, with all that comes along with it.  I'm better situated than most if it came to a serious cutback in fossil fuel use, and it still would force me and my family into some difficult changes.

But we can't keep going as we are.  If this past year's insane weather didn't convince you of that fact, you're being willfully blind.

And the whole thing is not helped by circulating wildly wrong information whose sole intent is to lull everyone into further inaction.  I have no doubt that at least some of the people who are posting this stuff don't know it's wrong, and are guilty of the rather common sin of neglecting to fact-check.  But the ones who write these posts and create these memes -- they know it's a lie, and they do it anyway.

Which is somewhere beyond reprehensible.

So please, please, please... if you see someone posting this claim, tell them they're wrong.  Link this blog post if you like, or (better still) send them to the NOAA and USGS sites that lay the data out in unarguable form.  Because this is a falsehood with serious repercussions -- like endangering the long-term habitability of our own home world.

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The origins of Thule

There's a logical fallacy called appeal to authority, and it's trickier than it sounds at first.

Appeal to authority occurs when you state that a claim is correct solely because it was made by someone who has credentials, prestige, or fame.  Authorities are, of course, only human, and make mistakes just like the rest of us, so the difficulty lies in part with the word "solely."  If someone with "M.S., Ph.D." after their name makes a declaration, those letters alone aren't any kind of argument that what they've said is correct, unless they have some hard evidence to back them up.

There's a subtler piece of this, though, and it comes in two parts.  The first is that because scientific research has become increasingly technical, jargon-dense, and specialized, laypeople sometimes are simply unqualified to evaluate whether a claim within a field is justified.  If Kip Thorne, Lee Smolin, or Steven Weinberg were to tell me about some new discovery in theoretical physics, I would be in well over my head (despite my B.S. in physics) and ridiculously out of line to say, "No, that's not right."  At that point, I don't have much of a choice but to accept what they say for the time -- and hope that if it is incorrect, further research and the peer-review process will demonstrate that.  This isn't so much avoiding appeal to authority as it is accepting that bias as an inevitable outcome of my own incomplete knowledge.

The second problem is that sometimes, people who are experts in one field will make statements in another, cashing in on their fame and name recognition to give unwarranted credence to a claim they are unqualified to make.  A good, if disquieting, example of this is the famous molecular geneticist James Watson.  As the co-discoverer of both the double-helical structure of the DNA molecule and the genetic code, anything he had to say about genetic biochemistry should carry considerable gravitas.  On the other hand, he's moved on to making pronouncements about (for example) race that are nothing short of repellent -- including, "I am inherently gloomy about the prospect of Africa [because] all our social policies are based on the fact that their intelligence is the same as ours, whereas all the testing says not really."  Believing this statement "because James Watson said it, and he's a famous scientist" is appeal to authority at its worst.  In fact, he is wildly unqualified to make any such assessment, and the statement reveals little more than the fact that he's an asshole.  (In fact, in 2019 that statement and others like it, including ones reflecting blatant sexism, resulted in Watson being stripped of all his honorary titles by Cold Springs Harbor Laboratory.)

My point here is that appeal to authority is sometimes difficult to pin down, which is why we have to rely on knowledgeable people policing each other.  Which brings us to philologist Andrew Charles Breeze.

Breeze has been a professor of philology at the University of Navarra for thirty-five years, and is a noted scholar of the classics.  His knowledge of Celtic languages, especially as used in ancient Celtic literature, is superb.  But he's also, unfortunately, known for his adherence to hypotheses based on evidence that is slim at best.  One example is his claim that the beautiful Welsh legend cycle The Mabinogion was written by a woman, Gwenllian ferch Gruffydd, daughter of Gruffydd ap Cynan, Prince of Gwynedd.  This claim has proven controversial to say the least.  He also has championed the idea that King Arthur et al. lived, fought, and died in Strathclyde rather than in southwestern England, a claim that has been roundly scoffed at.  Even Arthur's existence is questionable, given that his earliest mention in extant literature is Nennius's Historia Brittonum, which was written in 830 C.E., four hundred years after Arthur was allegedly King of the Britons.  As far as where he lived -- well, it seems to me that establishing if he lived is the first order of business.  

But even making the rather hefty assumption that the accounts of Nennius are true, we still have a problem with Breeze's claim.  Arthur's enemies the Saxons didn't really make any serious incursions into Strathclyde until the early seventh century, so an Arthur in Strathclyde would be in the position of fighting the Battle of Badon Hill against an enemy who wasn't there at the time. 

Awkward.

Anyhow, my point is that Breeze kind of has a reputation for putting himself out on the edge.  Nothing wrong with that; that's why we have peer review.  But I also have to wonder about people who keep making claims with flimsy evidence.  You'd think they'd become at least a little more cautious.

Why this comes up is that Breeze just made yet another claim, and this one is on a topic about which I'm honestly qualified to comment in more detail.  It has to do with the origin of the word "Thule."  You probably know that Thule is the name given in classical Greek and Roman literature to the "most northern place."  It was written in Greek as Θούλη, and has been identified variously as the Faeroe Islands, the Shetland Islands, northern Scotland, Greenland, Iceland, Norway, Finnish Lapland, an "area north of Scythia," the island of Saaremaa (off the coast of Estonia), and about a dozen other places.  The problem is -- well, one of many problems is -- there's no archaeological or linguistic evidence that the Greeks ever went to any of those places.  In the absence of hard evidence, you could claim that Thule was on Mars and your statement would carry equivalent weight.

Another difficulty is that even in classical times, the first source material mentioning Thule, written by Pytheas of Massalia, was looked at with a dubious eye.  The historian Polybius, writing only a century and a half after Pytheas's time, scathingly commented, "Pytheas... has led many people into error by saying that he traversed the whole of Britain on foot, giving the island a circumference of forty thousand stadia, and telling us also about Thule, those regions in which there was no longer any proper land nor sea nor air, but a sort of mixture of all three of the consistency of a jellyfish in which one can neither walk nor sail, holding everything together, so to speak."

Well, Breeze begs to differ.  In a recent paper, he said that (1) Thule is for sure Iceland, and (2) the Greeks (specifically Pytheas and his pals) got to Iceland first, preceding the Vikings by a thousand years.

[Image is in the Public Domain]

Bold claim, but there are a number of problems with it.

First, he seems to be making this claim based on one thing -- that the Greek word for Thule (Θούλη) is similar to the Greek word for altar (θῠμέλη), and that the whole thing was a transcription error in which the vowel was changed (ού substituted for ῠ) and the middle syllable (μέ) dropped.  Well, this is exactly the kind of thing I specialized in during my graduate studies, and I can say unequivocally that's not how historical linguistics works.  You can'd just jigger around syllables in a couple of words and say "now they're the same, q.e.d."  

He says his idea is supported by the fact that from the sea, the southern coast of Iceland looks kind of like an altar:

The term Thymele may have arisen from the orographic features of the south of the island, with high cliffs of volcanic rock, similar to that of Greek temple altars.  Probably, when Pytheas and his men sighted Iceland, with abundant fog, and perhaps with columns of smoke and ashes from volcanoes like Hekla, he thought of the altar of a temple.

This is what one of my professors used to call "waving your hands around in the hopes of distracting the audience into thinking you have evidence."  Also, the geologists have found evidence of only one major eruption in Iceland during Pytheas's lifetime -- the Mývatn eruption in around 300 B.C.E. -- and it occurred in the north part of Iceland, over three hundred kilometers from the southern coast of the island.

Oops.

Another thing that makes me raise an eyebrow is where the paper is published -- the Housman Society Journal, which is devoted to the study of the works of British classicist and poet A. E. Housman.  If Breeze's claim was all that and a bag of crisps, why hasn't it been published in a peer-reviewed journal devoted to historical linguistics?

Third, there's another classical reference to Thule that puts Breeze's claim on even thinner ice, which is from Strabo's Geographica, and states that when Pytheas got to Thule, he found it already thickly inhabited.  There is zero evidence that Iceland had any inhabitants prior to the Vikings -- it may be that the Inuit had summer camps in coastal western Iceland, but that is pure speculation without any hard evidential support.  The earliest Norse writings about Iceland describe it as "a barren and empty land, devoid of people."  Despite all this, Strabo writes:

The people [of Thule] live on millet and other herbs, and on fruits and roots; and where there are grain and honey, the people get their beverage, also, from them.  As for the grain, he says, since they have no pure sunshine, they pound it out in large storehouses, after first gathering in the ears thither; for the threshing floors become useless because of this lack of sunshine and because of the rains.

Oops again.

I can say from experience that establishing linguistic evidence for contact between two cultures is difficult, requires rigorous evidence, and can easily be confounded by chance similarities between words.  My own work, which involved trying to figure out the extent to which Old Norse infiltrated regional dialects of Old English and Archaic Gaelic, was no easy task (and was made even more difficult by the fact that two of the languages, Old Norse and Old English, share relatively recent a common root language -- Proto-Germanic -- so if you see similarities, are they due to borrowing or parallel descent?  Sometimes it's mighty hard to tell).

I'm not in academia and I'm in no position to write a formal refutation of Breeze's claim, but I sure as hell hope someone does.  Historical linguistics is not some kind of bastard child of free association and the game of Telephone.  I've no doubt that Breeze's expertise in the realm of ancient Celtic literature is far greater than mine -- but maybe he should stick to that subject.

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The dynamic Earth

The highlight of my trip to Iceland this past August was seeing the newly-erupting volcano of Fagradalsfjall, southwest of the capital city of Reykjavík.

Fagradalsfjall is Icelandic for "mountain of the beautiful valley."  I'm not sure I'd use the word "beautiful," which to me carries connotations of "benevolent."  When we were there, you could feel the eruption before you heard or saw it; the entire floor of the valley was vibrating, a subsonic rumble that I felt in my gut.  Then you hear the roar, a guttural, low-pitched thunderous booming.  Then you smell it -- the characteristic sulfurous, rotten-egg smell of an active volcano.  Then you crest the top of a low hill, and see it for the first time.

We were close enough that we could feel the warmth radiated from the lava.  Much closer, and the combination of the heat and the sulfur gases would have been overwhelming.  Orange-hot plumes of molten rock exploded out of the fissure and splattered onto the sides of the cinder cone, almost instantly turning to shattered, jagged chunks of black basalt as it cooled and hardened.

It was one of the most spectacular things I've ever witnessed.  In the presence of this kind of power, you truly feel tiny and very, very fragile. 

We were really extraordinarily lucky to see what we did; we were there on the 15th of August, and -- for reasons unknown -- the eruption abruptly ceased on the 21st.  Fagradalsfjall is still very much an active volcano, though.  Just last week it started up again, and this cycle looks like it may actually be even more dramatic.

What brings all this up is a paper last week in Nature about some research out of the University of California - Santa Barbara that analyzed the lava from Fagradalsfjall and found that it ran counter to the conventional model of how volcanoes erupt.  The previous understanding was that magma chambers fill gradually, and undergo mixing from convection and the physical shaking from earthquakes; then, when the eruption happens, the chamber drains.  This would result in a relatively uniform chemistry of the rock produced from the beginning of the eruption to the end.

That's not what geologists saw with Fagradalsfjall.

"This is what we see at Mount Kilauea, in Hawaii," said Matthew Jackson, who co-authored the study.  "You'll have eruptions that go on for years, and there will be minor changes over time.  But in Iceland, there was more than a factor of 1,000 higher rates of change for key chemical indicators.  In a month, the Fagradalsfjall eruption showed more compositional variability than the Kilauea eruptions showed in decades.  The total range of chemical compositions that were sampled at this eruption over the course of the first month span the entire range that has ever erupted in southwest Iceland in the last 10,000 years."

Why this happened is uncertain.  It could be that Fagradalsfjall is being fed by blobs of liquid magma rising from much deeper in the mantle, where the chemistry is different; those much hotter blobs then rose to the surface without a lot of mixing, resulting in a dramatic alteration of the rock being produced over the course of the eruption.  This adds a significant complication to interpreting records of past eruptions, not only in Iceland, but with other volcanoes.

"So when I go out to sample an old lava flow, or when I read or write papers in the future," Jackson said, "it'll always be on my mind: This might not be the complete story of the eruption."

It's fascinating that as far as science has come, we still have a lot to work out -- not only out in the far depths of space (as yesterday's post about MoND described) but right beneath our feet on our own home world.  As eminent astrophysicist Neil de Grasse Tyson put it, "You can’t be a scientist if you’re uncomfortable with ignorance, because scientists live at the boundary between what is known and unknown in the cosmos.  This is very different from the way journalists portray us.  So many articles begin, "Scientists now have to go back to the drawing board."  It’s as though we’re sitting in our offices, feet up on our desks—masters of the universe—and suddenly say, "Oops, somebody discovered something!"  No.  We’re always at the drawing board.  If you’re not at the drawing board, you’re not making discoveries."

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Icelandic travelogue

Over the last ten days I took a hiking and camping trip in Iceland.  It's a fascinating country, and earns well its nickname of "The Land of Fire and Ice."

It's my second visit; the first time I went there was in 2000, when I had only dated my (then) girlfriend, (now) wife, for a few months.  I'd signed up to go that August with a group of friends for a trip mostly focused on birdwatching, and one day over dinner a few months prior I said to Carol, half jokingly, "Hey, I'm taking a trip to Iceland, you wanna come?"  My expectation was that her response to being asked to go on a trip to a remote island in the North Atlantic by a guy she hadn't known long was going to be, "Um, no thanks... you have fun.  Why the hell do you want to go to Iceland, of all places?"

What she said was, "When do we leave?"

That was one of many moments that convinced me this was a match made in heaven.

The trip took us along the Ring Road around the entire perimeter of the island, and we saw some great birds and generally had a wonderful time.  This time, I went with a group of men associated with Mannsvolk, a German-based men's mentorship and workshop group that I first became associated with through a weekend retreat I attended in 2019.  So two weeks ago I packed everything into a new trekking backpack (my old one having seen its best days about thirty years ago), and off I went to Reykjavik.

I had been lulled into a false sense of security by my first trip, during which the weather was amazingly sunny and warm.  The locals we spoke to said that such a stretch of beautiful weather was pretty well unheard-of, even in midsummer, but of course it was the weather itself and not their warnings about how bad it could be that stuck in my memory.  This time, though, was more typical, and we only had a couple of days of sunshine and anything like real warmth.

Me at Landmannalaugar, on the nicest day we had.  Of course I took the opportunity to run around shirtless, because that's kind of what I do.

Most of the weather was cloudy, cold, and intermittently spitting rain.  The wind varied from "breezy" to "stiff gale" to "holy fuck grab on to something heavy or you'll blow away."  But there's no doubt the scenery was well worth the discomfort.  You may have heard about the recent volcanic eruption of Fagradalsfjall, one of the dozens of active volcanoes in Iceland -- specifically the cinder cone eruption at Meradalir.  Well, we hiked in and saw it.  It's one of the most grueling hikes I've ever done, over loose, basketball-sized chunks of lava rock, but when we got there... wow.

You hear it before you see it; a low, powerful thrumming noise, like a giant heartbeat.  It makes your innards vibrate.  Then you can see the steam plumes over a low rise, and smell the sulfur.  Then you get to the top of a the hill, and...

It was jetting fountains of lava into the air, and the whole surface was undulating like a pot of oatmeal bubbling on the stove.  It's almost a cliché to say that sights like this make you realize the power of nature, but man, after being here, I felt very puny.

We also went near Hekla, one of the most active volcanoes in the world (although not erupting at the moment).  During various enormous outbursts over the last three thousand years, Hekla spewed out so much tephra (fragmented chunks of lava that look like coarse black sand) that it created a terrain that looks like a moonscape, where almost nothing grows but tufts of desiccated grass.

The Ash Desert of Hekla

Still, as Ian Malcolm famously put it, "Life... uh... finds a way."  Even in areas that had been hit hard by volcanism, we saw signs of the tenacity of living things.

Iceland owes its violent geology to the fact that it sits at the boundary of the North American and Eurasian Tectonic Plates, which are moving apart at a rate of about 9.7 centimeters a year.  This fairly extraordinary rate of stretch means that Iceland is getting larger, and as the island splits in two, subterranean magma comes to the surface to fill in the gap.

[Image is in the Public Domain courtesy of the USGS]

Interestingly, our path took us pretty much right along the plate margin (the purple line in the above map) the whole way, starting in Reykjavik in the southwest (Fagradalsfjall Volcano is the red triangle at the lower left), going up the left-hand branch of the forking split almost all the way to Krafla in the northeast.  One nice thing is that we didn't go to many of the same places I'd already seen on my first trip, but one unfortunate exception was Mývatn.

Mývatn is one of those places that fall into the "it makes a good story afterward" category.  We'd selected it as a destination on our first trip because it has a well-deserved reputation for being an outstanding site for birdwatching.  We only found out after we got there, though, that there's a reason for its popularity with birds.  It's also wildly popular with flying insects, particularly a species of midge which enjoys nothing more than flying into noses, ears, and mouths.  "Mývatn," in fact, is Icelandic for "lake of the flies," something we didn't find out until after we'd gotten there.  People in the nearby village of Reykjahlíð, in fact, wear head nets when they walk to the grocery store.  I distinctly recall talking to a local when I was there the first time, and he found out we'd come for birdwatching.  "It's the only reason you'd be here," he said, glumly.  "This is the worst place in Iceland."

Be that as it may, we stayed there a couple of days this time.  I'm happy to say that there was only one evening when the insects were truly gawdawful, but given that the reason for that was at other times the wind was howling so hard the flies couldn't find us, I'm not sure that's much of a consolation.

The various difficulties we experienced on this trip were worth it, though, to see places like Aldeyjarfoss Waterfall, with its bizarre columnar basalt formations:

And the harbor of the beautiful little village of Akureyri:

And I even got to see some birds, albeit familiar ones:

So all in all, it was a pretty cool trip.  I'm glad to be back in a place where I don't have to expend inordinate amounts of energy to (1) stay warm, and (2) avoid being blown into the next time zone, but like with most travel, the bad bits are already fading in my memory, to be replaced by the amazement of seeing volcanoes and glaciers and waterfalls, the likes of which exist nowhere else on Earth.

And I'd call that a fair exchange.

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Fire and ice

I am frequently confounded by the capacity for humans to be rational and irrational at the same time.

Take, for example, the Icelanders.  Iceland has a 99% adult literacy rate.  Same-sex marriage was legalized in Iceland in 2010 -- by a unanimous vote in parliament.  In polls regarding religious belief, they have one of the highest percentages of atheists in the world.  (31% of Icelanders identify as "non-religious.")  In response to the Charlie Hebdo attack, the Icelandic government just this month voted by an overwhelming majority to decriminalize blasphemy -- not because they (or I) think that ridiculing someone's beliefs is nice, but because protecting free speech is more important than making sure that religion has some kind of Get-Out-Of-Jail-Free card with respect to criticism.

"Freedom of expression is one of the cornerstones of democracy," a government spokesperson said.  "It is a fundamental point in a free society that people can express themselves without fear of punishment of any kind, whether on behalf of the authorities or others...  The Icelandic parliament has issued the important message that freedom will not bow to bloody attacks."

And yet... there are some odd things about the place.  There has been a resurgence in belief in the old Norse gods -- Odin, Thor, Njord, and the rest -- the Germanic neopagan belief system "Ásatrú" is amongst the fastest-growing religions in Iceland.  A poll, later verified by a thorough study, found that 54.4% of Icelanders believe in the huldufólk, which usually gets translated in English as "elves."  As I've mentioned before, there have been highway projects that have been stalled because someone decided that the proposed road was going to trespass on property owned by "the secret people."

But best of all, an Icelandic woman named Hallgerdur Hallgrímsdóttir has just published a book on how to have sex with elves.  And why you should want to.

Hallgrímsdóttir says her first sexual experience with an elf happened by accident.  "I was just wandering around," she says, "in Icelandic nature, alone in this beautiful situation, and he just came to me.  He whispered some things in my ear -- dirty talk, they're quite good at that, actually."

They're "tall and beautiful," she says.  "It almost looks like their skin emits light."

Hylas and the Nymphs by John William Waterhouse (1896) [image courtesy of the Wikimedia Commons]

As far as what hot elf-on-self action is like, she waxed rhapsodic.  "It's almost like they know what you want in bed.  They don't have to ask, they can read your mind, and know better what you want than you do...  They're very flexible, so they can use positions that would not be possible for humans."

She backs this up with a series of stick figure drawings that made me choke-snort an entire mouthful of coffee, especially the one of an extremely male elf with an arrow pointing to a body part labeled "geyser."

There are both male and female elves, she tells us, and they are a pretty open-minded lot.  "All elves are bisexual," Hallgrímsdóttir says, "but guys and girls not ready for some same sex action don’t worry, no elf will do anything you don’t want to."

Amongst other things that you don't have to worry about, elf-sex-wise, are STDs and pregnancy.  You can become pregnant by an elf (or make a female elf pregnant), but you both have to want to make a baby for this to happen.  Which is pretty convenient.  

Oh, and elf semen is "glittery and shimmery."  So there's that.  She includes an "artist's rendition" of the result of a male elfgasm, which is striking not only in colorfulness but in quantity, and in (as it were) a rather impressive trajectory.

There are various other details that are, shall we say, a little too salacious for me to include here, so if you're curious you'll just have to listen to the interview with her on the link I posted above.  Suffices to say that the Icelandic tourist industry might want to plan ahead for an influx of people who are, um, hopeful in the supernatural romance department.

I'm curious to know how many people actually take her seriously.  The article says that Hallgrímsdóttir gets "a lot of flack from her countrymen" for her beliefs -- but if over half of Icelanders believe that the Hidden People exist, what's stopping Legolas et al. from seeking out illicit liaisons with their human cohabitants?  Is it that the people who believe in elves aren't really all that serious about it, sort of in the way otherwise rational people will wear a lucky hat to a baseball game, or avoid walking under a ladder?  It certainly seems odd that a populace that is as literate, well educated, and generally rational as the Icelanders would subscribe to a belief that is (to put it bluntly) extremely wacky.

But maybe all humans are like that -- masses of contradictions, all thrown together under a thin veneer of logic and reason.  Maybe I am, too, for all of my talk of skepticism and science.  Go beneath the skin, and there might well be a little pagan in all of us, however we might want to consecrate it or else expunge it entirely.  As one of my favorite quotes from Walt Whitman goes, "Do I contradict myself?  Very well, then I contradict myself.  I am large, I contain multitudes."

Faith, belief, and agnosticism: a guest post by author Cly Boehs

My dear friend, the author and artist Cly Boehs, was inspired by one of my posts from two weeks ago to write an essay of her own responding to the points I brought up, and I have invited her to present it here.  You can (and should!) read Cly's short stories, posted on her wonderful blog Mind at Play, and I encourage you all to buy her brilliant collection of four novellas, The Most Intangible Thing, available at Amazon here.  I know you'll be as entertained and intrigued by Cly's writing as I am.

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On Skeptophilia on December 24^th, 2013, in an article entitled, "Elf highway blockade," you ask the question, “…how do specific counterfactual beliefs become so entrenched, despite a complete lack of evidence that entire cultures begin to buy in?” You state that you get how individuals can become superstitious but are perplexed by how cultures can do this—supposedly because more heads should be better than one? The underlying question seems to be—why wouldn’t there be enough dissenting voices in such groups to stop such ridiculous claims? How can so many be so wrong about something so outlandish? 

Since I’ve spent quite a bit of time researching, thinking and writing about why people (as individuals and groups) believe what they do, I’d like to take this question on, at least offering an opinion in brief form. Over time, I’ve come to two major conclusions (1) groups don’t use factual evidence any more than individuals to come to their beliefs; and (2) once individuals’ beliefs are strengthen by numbers, the believers take on a superior hue such that they disavow any other claims than their own—they are right and that’s that. You seem to be asking how this can happen when there is contrary factual evidence readily available for them to see. To a rationalist, a term like “factual evidence” is redundant because both “facts” and “evidence” imply objectivity. To a person basing evidence on faith or will-to-believe, “evidence” lies in subjective truth; and since that truth’s validity is based on personal experience, the more of those will-to-believers you can gather together, the greater the validation of truth (see below).  

I’d like to draw attention to two points about both individuals and groups that allow any belief (superstition or not) to become foundational to them. First, culture, the state, the church, all organizations and institutions are made up of individuals and studies have shown that what the individuals in the group believe becomes strengthen by numbers. Which brings me to my second notion: that belief(s) of the group are held together because they believe they are right, often the only right. The strength of belief gained in numbers produces a feeling of superiority such that the group forms an “us vs them” mentality and most often (depending on how significant the belief is to the group) takes it to battle against other beliefs. Lord knows we have enough examples of this throughout human history and in foreign affairs today. 

It is tremendously important that we remember that groups are made up of individuals—that in the most important way, groups do not exist in and of themselves. When we begin thinking that they do, we end up in extreme situations such as with the Nazi mentality of World War II, the mass execution of 1862 in Mankato, Minnesota and the Guantanamo Bay detention camp. The defendants at the Nuremberg trials (or any others for that matter) can claim immunity on the grounds of mass-think. Which leads me to this business of feeling superior and safe because of being right. 

I realize in your article you are talking specifically about superstitious group beliefs—beliefs way, way out there like believing that elves not only exist but have rights. But I ask you, how far off is this from the now institutionalized belief that our supreme court recently translated into the law of the land, that corporations are individuals with rights? And how far away from beliefs such as transmigration of souls and transubstantiation is the belief in elves? Or that Buddha’s mother, before his birth, was struck on her right side by a white bull elephant that held a lotus in its trunk, an elephant that then vanished into her— or as another story goes—the elephant entered her womb and shortly after disappeared? This is after the elephant walked around her three times—well, of course it was three times. Three is the magic number of fairy tales and religious triads, right?

We all know stories from sacred texts that defy objective evidence—water into wine, an ass speaking on the road to Damascus, parted water to expose dry land (Buddha performed this one before Moses), a Hindu holy man changing jackals into horses and back again at will and the list goes on and on. Miracles or superstitions as a foundational belief arises out of “faith,” as a belief not based on facts. In fact, such beliefs as miracles and superstition are a demonstration of faith. Actually, it’s why they are there. Faith of this kind produces massive power in individuals especially when socialized and politicized, which makes faith-based belief(s) concrete in ritual and activism. Superstition works in this way because when individuals, strengthened by groups, believe against “the odds,” e.g., the Anabaptists against the Catholics and Protestants; the American Revolutionaries against English and French militaries—such polarities only strengthens each in what they believe is right. [A study demonstrating this clearly showed up recently on the site politico.com in which two psychologists demonstrated that the more extreme a person’s views are the more they think they are right.] The most important component in any cultural or polarized situation is belief, not reasonableness, facts. And this is because facts change by necessity; while belief can remain consistent and constant if founded in faith, the will-to-believe. The validity of a belief is often expressed in this constancy down through time, e.g. the Vedas are 3500 years old and Christian time is counted since Christ and so forth. There is comfort in not only being right but being so with such consistency and constancy. 

So how does a group of people (note that a singular verb is used for the term “group”) end up believing that elves should be given rights to stop a highway through their sacred territory? By individuals comprising the group believing elves-are-individuals-with-rights. And these individuals find strength in this belief by numbers in the groups and by the outlandishness of the belief as proof of faith in that belief. According to this logic then, the crazier the idea, the greater the faith needed to believe it; therefore, the greater the proof of its validity. Trust of this sort and the will-to-believe—a trust to act in faith before any supporting evidence, one of William James’ terms for this is “confidence”—can be constant in a way reason based on facts cannot. And the stronger the faith of an individual or group is, the stronger the belief. And because of this, psychologist and philosophers of all kinds of stripes have opted for head over heart, reason over emotion-and-feeling, reason over will. And it’s easy to see why. When people fear that their faith or will-to-believe is taken from them, they know that what they regard as constant, permanent, is gone; living in a constantly ambiguous state-of-affairs leaves one too vulnerable. ‘Tis unsafe. 

But polarity is not the answer. An alternative to rightness-in-belief lies in the willingness (note the word) to believe conditionally—not to give up belief. We will believe (again, note the word). We have to believe in order to function, actually to literally live at all. We don’t have all the facts for what we believe, never will. But in order to develop more fully as individuals, our beliefs have to be founded with an open heart and mind. And in order for this to happen, individuals have to believe in the self over groups, have to understand how culture can be an obstacle to self-identity, and have to be willing to die because believing this is deeply threatening to those caught in the whole system of belief that states “being right” is all there can be, especially when it comes wrapped in the outrageous intentionality of religious fervor. 

And what about imagination and creativity in all of this? The human capacity for ambiguity is at the heart of creativity, true self-identity, justice and all human endeavors with inherent freedom for the individual in them. Ambiguity is not waffling between one held belief and another—it is remaining open to the possibility that states-of-affairs can be other than they are perceived to be. In other words, we can be wrong. And the human ability to be wrong is inherent in so much of what we learn. [Gordon pointed out to me recently Kathyrn Schulz’s TED talk, “On Being Wrong,” which is a beautiful declaration on why we seek solace in being right.]

My view is not that we should evolve to a state of rationalism over beliefs based on faith or will, but become individuals with an ability to suspend belief just as we suspend facts. By “suspended belief or facts,” I mean lift the total-rightness-of-belief, out of its foundational bedrock, i.e. hold what is known either as fact or belief-through-faith in regard, even respect, even act on it until something else replaces it. But when suspended belief of this kind is presented to individuals as a possibility, they usually become more radicalized in their position than before. They can’t give up the constancy of faith over the inconstancy of facts, when in order for all of us to live as fully as possible, we have to give up both so that we can embrace both. What’s interesting is that when suspended belief is presented to a rationalist, meaning they have to take the agnostic position over the atheistic one, there is just as much fluttering of feathers and great resistance. Since rationalism is based on evidence (observable facts) and without it, there can be no belief, they are just as adamant in their position as Faith-and-Will believers are in theirs. Suspended belief doesn’t mean no belief. It means not knowing or even not knowable—which is what agnosticism is.

So what to do with the Friends of Lava and the project detrimental to elf culture?

What would “suspended belief” look like for both sides in this dispute? Why not negotiate and do it while applying Gordon’s suggestion of critical thinking thrown into the mix…mess—the discussion being along the lines of how far traditions in culture should/could be allowed to influence progress of a practical nature. But also, discussion with some open-mindedness has to be there as well, lifting that desire to be right and listening to the other side, working together to meet some middle way in the situation. We have these negotiations going on all the time—the ten commandments monument in the Alabama Judicial Building and another one in Oklahoma on its state capitol grounds as examples. Is this really too terribly different from the Icelandic version of respecting the Little People and their territory? Unfortunately we haven’t found a way yet to discuss such disputes without the rush to polarities and the superiority of our views—so until such time, it is left to the settlements in the courts.

Elf highway blockade

One thing I would love to know is how groups of people end up being superstitious.  Not individuals; you can see how specific individuals could become superstitious about odd things, through a combination of classical conditioning and confirmation bias (you wear a specific t-shirt to a football game, and your team wins; you link the t-shirt to the win, and every time something good happens while you're wearing that shirt, it reinforces the belief.  Voilà -- "lucky t-shirt").

But how do specific counterfactual beliefs become so entrenched, despite a complete lack of evidence, that entire cultures begin to buy in?  I know that this is skating onto some seriously thin ice for some people, and I've no intention to skate any closer.  In any case, as you'll soon see, I'm not talking about what you probably think I'm talking about.

The reason this question comes up is because of a link sent to me by a frequent contributor to Skeptophilia, regarding a highway project in Iceland that has been blocked -- because the project will upset the elves.

Meadow Elves (Ängsälvor) by Nils Blommén (1850) [image courtesy of the Wikimedia Commons]

The project was designed to create a direct route from the Álftanes peninsula to the Gar∂abær suburb of Reykjavík.  But the highway was supposed to cut across a lava field inhabited by huldufólk, the Icelandic version of the Little People, and this got some people seriously up in arms.  A group calling themselves the "Friends of Lava" banded together with the intent of stopping the project, citing "detrimental effect on elf culture" -- and amazingly enough, it worked.

"(The highway project) would be a terrible loss and damaging both for the elf world and for us humans," said Ragnhildur Jónsdóttir, a folklorist and seer from Reykjavík who was instrumental in halting the project.  "If you ask an Icelander about elves, they might say they don't believe.  But we always have stories of them, if not from ourselves then from someone close like a family member. Of course, not everyone believes in the stories, but the stories and the elves are still there and being told."

So the project appears to have been scrapped.  "Some feel that the elf thing is a bit annoying," said Andri Snær Magnason, a prominent Icelandic environmentalist.  "However, I got married in a church with a god just as invisible as the elves, so what might seem irrational is actually quite common [with Icelanders]."

What I find interesting about these beliefs is that they run counter to the usual perception of superstition being more common amongst the poorly-educated.  Iceland has an amazing educational system, resulting in a citizenry with a near 100% adult literacy rate.  They have the world's highest percentage of their GNP (8%) used for supporting education.

So the whole idea of education and superstition being inversely correlated apparently isn't true -- if we can draw such a conclusion from a sample size of one.  You would think that as the population becomes better educated, the amount of adherence to odd cultural beliefs would diminish, but despite the dramatic advances in education in Iceland in the past century, the belief in the huldufólk remains strong enough in Iceland to generate a legal block to a highway project.

I still think that learning critical thinking is the best way to counter non-evidence-based ways of thinking, so it appears that something else must be going on here.  One thing that comes to mind is that Icelanders are, as a group, extremely proud of their heritage, language, and history, and this is bound to make them more culturally conservative.  Beliefs and practices can be powerful indicators of cultural identity -- witness the members of my wife's family, who are descended from Lithuanian Jews, and who still celebrate a lot of the Jewish holidays and rituals -- although they have, by and large, abandoned the religious underpinnings. 

So I still find the Icelandic elves a peculiar thing, but I'll have to leave it to someone with a better background in folklore and anthropology to answer the question in a more rigorous fashion.  I guess it's to be expected that certain vestiges of old beliefs persist, even if the rest of the system has gone by the wayside.  Now, y'all will have to excuse me, because I need to finish this up.  I've got Christmas presents to wrap.

Elf kidnapping

It's not often you get to be a witness to the birth of an urban legend.

Or not so urban, actually, as this one supposedly happened in rural Iceland.  Have you seen it?  It's making the rounds of social media -- a story about a Danish anthropologist, missing for seven years, who showed up last week, naked and confused, claiming that she'd been kidnapped and held hostage by elves.  As of now, I've been sent links to the story a total of six times, so chances are you've run across it, too.

The story is that an anthropologist, Kalena Søndergaard, went off in February of 2006, "seeking proof of elves," and vanished.  Searches for her, centered around the Álfarkirkjan -- the "Elf Church Rock" where she was last seen -- turned up no trace of the missing woman.  Then, last week, some hikers stumbled upon her, crouching on a rocky ledge, looking "more ape than human."  The article says:

Danish researcher Kalena Søndergaard was stark naked, covered by dust and babbling incoherently when rescuers found her outside a tiny opening in the famous Elf Rock, traditionally believed to house the underground dwelling place of mankind’s tiny cousins.

“She was crouching like an animal and spoke only in a language unrelated to any we know,” said Arnor Guðjohnsen of the National Rescue Service, which airlifted the 31-year-old survivor to a hospital by helicopter.

“The only word we could understand was ‘alfur,’ an old Icelandic word for elves. On her back were strange tattoos similar to those markings Viking explorers found on rock formations when they settled Iceland in 874, traditionally known as ‘elf writing.’ ”

When I hit the name of the gentleman from the National Rescue Service, I frowned a little, because "Guðjohnsen" isn't a properly formed Icelandic surname -- all surnames in Iceland, by mandate, are the father's first name, in genitive case, followed by "-son" if it's a boy and "-dottír" if it's a girl.  So Arnor should have been "Guðjohnsson," not "Guðjohnsen."  (A similar problem happened later in the story, with a "folklore expert" named "Eva Bryndísarson" -- she would have been "Eva Bryndísardottír.")

Those, of course, could have been typos or mistranscriptions, and in any case are minor compared to the other whoppers that occur in the story.  Let's start with the fact that Kalena Søndergaard apparently doesn't exist, at least by my attempts to research her name online in connection to any citations for anthropological research.  Then let's take the photograph that was posted to "prove" the claims in the story:

So, on the surface, it does seem to be a photograph of some guy rescuing a naked woman sitting on a rock, and how many situations like this can have happened?  Turns out, it only took one, and it had nothing to do with elves; in March of 2011 the Daily Mail reported on the story of a woman in San Diego who had gotten stranded on a rock ledge trying to climb down to a nude beach, and had to be rescued from above.  Besides the very photograph that was used for the elves-in-Iceland story, the Daily Mail article had a series of further photographs showing the hapless nude sunbather being lifted to safety.

Then, there's the photograph that's supposedly of Kalena Søndergaard, prior to her harrowing experience with the Little Folk:

The problem is, this girl isn't named Kalena Søndergaard, she's not Danish, and she isn't an anthropologist.  Sharon Hill of the wonderful site Doubtful News found out that the photograph was grabbed from a Russian dating site -- probably selected because the girl looks vaguely like the woman in the rescue photograph.

So, due to the wonders of the internet, the whole thing was debunked in short order.  But the problem is that with hoaxes like this, often people only see the first half -- the claim -- and never run into the story disproving it.  It's probably human nature, of course.  Crazy claims have much more cachet than dry-as-dust debunkings do; who is going to forward a link making the not-too-earthshattering claim, "Elves don't exist?"

Anyhow, that's the straight scoop regarding the kidnapped Danish anthropologist and her terrifying encounter with the huldufólk.  The story is no more legitimate than the Crystal Pyramids of Atlantis thing or the Alien Mass Burial in Uganda thing.  Not that I expect this will make it die down -- for apparently one of the characteristics of bullshit is that once created, it never, ever goes away.