The Geography of Invisibility Akiko Busch
Stories of an invisible population, known as the Huldufolk, have long proliferated in Icelandic folklore and persist today in many areas of the country. Social creatures with lives much like our own, the Huldufolk eat what we eat, wear what we wear. Neither enchanted nor magical beings, they are thought to be like us, though just a bit better, with finer homes, horses that run faster and more gracefully, cows that yield richer cream. At a time when the harsh realities of everyday life threatened human survival, the hidden people offered an alternative solace; their lives resonated with order, civility decency, prosperity. This essay is drawn from How to Disappear: Notes on Invisibility in a Time of Transparency by Akiko Busch, Penguin Press, 2019.
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he comparative isolation of any island can result in what Oliver Sacks calls geographic singularity, a kind of separateness that allows not only for the evolution of animal and plant species that can be found now here else, but also for systems of thinking and belief that dev elop with limited external influence and intrusion; islands cultivate what is unique on this earth. All of which may be why stories of the Huldufolk, Iceland’s invisible population, have been absorbed so seamlessly into the country’s contemporary culture. Oli Gunnarsson, a farmer in the south, points out for me an old turf hut adjacent to his barn. Today, its roofline is neatly folded into the sod beneath it, but it is generations old and was inhabited by a family of hidden people when his grandparents were alive, he tells me. After a winter blizzard had damaged the hut, the family moved into the adjacent farmhouse with his grandpare nts. His grandmother, inclined to enjoy a glass of sherry in the evenings, noticed the level Creative Nonfiction 45