Review: Hidden Folk, by Eleanor Arnason

Review: Hidden Folk, by Eleanor Arnason

by Rich Horton

Eleanor Arnason is one of my favorite writers. She's been publishing excellent short fiction for over 50 years, including early highlights such as "The Warlord of Saturn's Moons", brilliant middle period work like "The Lovers", "Dapple", and "Stellar Harvest", and wonderful late stories like "Mr. Catt". She has published six novels as well, including two in her Hwarhath series, A Woman of the Iron People and Ring of Swords.

Arnason is of Icelandic descent, and a number of recent stories draw on her ancestry. Hidden Folk, a 2014 collection from Many Worlds Press, collects five of these, along with an absorbing introduction telling a bit about Iceland and its history, and also about Arnason's own ancestry. There is also an afterword giving "Notes on the Stories". Hidden Folk is available now (as of August 2025) for only $14 here. 

The five stories are all good reading, set at multiple times in the last millennium or so. They are characterized by a forthright presentation, with humorous undertones, taking the weird events and strange creatures completely at face value. They are variously clever, sweet, scary, violent, and simply odd. I'll quite briefly describe the stories:

"Kormak the Lucky" is an outstanding novella about an Irishman taken into slavery by Norwegian raiders. He ends up in Iceland, eventually in the household of the "Marsh Men", until the crazy grandfather of the family, scheming against his son, forces him to flee to an underground land of "light elves". This doesn't save him from slavery, but eventually he agrees to help a beautiful elf-woman escape --  first to the dark elves, then to the Irish fey. Arnason blends Scandinavian and Irish traditions with her own imagination -- the technological nature of some of the elves is particularly well thought out. The elves are unsympathetically and realistically presented, and the people much the same. The telling is deadpan, with Arnason's wit simmering underneath. Just an absorbing and original story. 

"Glam's Story" is essentially a reimagination of an episode from the sagas about a violent outlaw and great fighter called Grettir Asmundarson. Here he is engaged to battle the ghost of Glam, a slave owned by Thorhall Grimson. Grimson had murdered him, perhaps because he (Grimson) was a worthless husband and his wife seemed to like Glam a bit. The story is narrated by the wife in a very matter of fact tone, and in the end it's a much about her unhappy marriage and how that works out as it is about the somewhat epic battle of hero and ghost.

"The Black School" is about Saemundur Siguffson, a young man from Iceland, and his two companions, who go to Paris to attend the university there, in the 11th Century. Alas, they speak no French, and instead of the university they find themselves at the title school, and underground (literally) institution run by a sinisiter figure whom they learn is the devil. The school does offer instruction, which takes at least three years ... and at the graduation ceremony, the slowest graduate to leave is taken by the devil. The others seem likely to become black magicians. But Saemundur holds on to his faith and his principles, and works out a way to escape.

The first three stories, based on sagas and folktales, are set early in the second millennium, but the last two are set in the 20th Century. "The Puffin Hunter" concerns Harold, a divorced man living in rural Iceland, who hunts puffins and gathers their eggs. One day a puffin speaks to him, asking him not to wring its neck, but Harold wrings it anyway. And then is haunted by the puffin's ghost. It turns out the ghost puffin was an elf woman, who had changed into a puffin and now was stuck. The elves have found Gudrun, a human folklorist, who is helping them recover their lost one, and who works with Harold to that end. The story proceeds nicely on more or less the expected path. Their are comic bits such as the effects of a ghost puffin haunting you -- lots of guano -- and I also like the deadpan descriptions of elves in Iceland in more or less the present day.

"My Husband Stein" is a bit of a romance, about a Finnish journalist who takes a house in the remote East Fjords of Iceland, and finds herself the object of unwanted advances from a troll. Arnason's wrily humorous, poker-faced telling makes the story go -- but it's not just whimsy, there's an ecological subplot, and strong believable characters.

All in all, this is a first-rate collection. Arnason's stories are a treasure, wherever you find them, and not nearly as many of them have been collected in book form as should be. Snap this book up!