Iceland is renowned for the persistence of belief in fairies/elves (huldufólk), but few are aware that Icelandic fairy belief differs from fairy belief elsewhere in northern Europe – so much that it challenges our very conception of what fairy belief is (thread) 
Fairy lore often clusters around enigmatic prehistoric remains – barrows, passage tombs, and stone arrowheads (‘elfshot’). None of these exist in Iceland because it was colonized by humans so late (at the end of the 9th century)
An influential strand of interpretation of fairy traditions sees the fairies as ‘the host of the dead’, a sort of attenuated memory of prehistoric ancestor worship. Thus fairy mounds (barrows) are associated with magical cups – perhaps pottery vessels from prehistoric burials
There are some pre-Christian barrows in Iceland, but folklore assigns them to named individuals (early settlers who are often mentioned in sagas). So Icelandic fairy lore is associated with landscape features instead
This makes Icelandic fairy lore very unusual. There are cases outside Iceland of fairy lore linked to natural features, but fairy landscape features are more usually manmade and prehistoric
Icelandic folklorists have tended to explain their fairy lore in terms of people trying to make sense of the hostility and unpredictability of Iceland’s remarkable volcanic landscape. But the idea that fairies are nature spirits linked to landscape is a modern one
So Icelandic fairy lore remains problematic. Was it simply carried over from the homelands of settlers in Iceland, and evolved in its own idiosyncratic way in Iceland? This seems likely; New World fairy lore is similar in this respect
But the fact that Icelandic fairy belief remained strong, even without the support of the prehistoric remains that often sustained fairy belief, challenges dependence on explanations of fairy belief that see it as explaining prehistoric relics
So were the Icelanders centuries ahead of everyone else in seeing fairies primarily as spirits of the land itself? Perhaps what matters is that Icelandic fairy belief is not typical of northern Europe, so should not be seen as normative
Even more than this, the case of Iceland should serve as a reminder of the futility of attempting to impose functional interpretations on fairy belief: ‘fairies explain prehistory’, ‘fairies explain fungus’, ‘fairies explain misfortune’, etc. Nope. Fairy belief just IS
