Elf Story
An autonomous zone in Minneapolis is probably the last place I expected to hear of an encounter with Icelandic elves, but that’s the world we live in now. The Uprising has brought people together from wildly different walks of life, and as we get to know each other we hear each other’s stories. This one just happened to involve the elves.
So, Boom…
“So, who wants to hear my elf story?” my comrade asked… a sentence I was not expecting to hear. We were sitting next to each other in an autonomous zone, a neighborhood in Minneapolis that has not been policed since the early days of the Uprising. My thoughts were on the possibility of an attack on the neighborhood, either by the police or by white supremacists. Elves were not exactly at the top of my mind.
I turned my face away from the street and raised one eyebrow. “You have an elf story?”
He nodded. “Yeah. It happened in Iceland when I was a little boy.”
Now I was intrigued. “You spent time in Iceland? I spent a day in Reykjavik once.”
“I’m half Icelandic,” he replied. “Hell, I can speak Icelandic.”
He proceeded to demonstrate… not that I understood a word he said.
I had to chuckle. What would a Folkish Heathen think of this? A half-Icelandic Black Lives Matter protester, telling a story of an elf encounter to his comrades in the Uprising.
“Hell yeah,” I said, “I want to hear your elf story.”
The others did too. We all gathered around, and he proceeded to open with two unexpected words.
“So, boom! Here’s my elf story…”
We all burst out laughing. One of the other guys turned away, trying to get his laughter under control. “Did you really just say, so, boom, here’s my elf story?”
“What? I start every story like that. What can I say? I was a Black kid in Iceland.”
“Okay, go on.”
He shook his head. “So, here’s my elf story. I was in Iceland for the summer, staying with my grandparents. There’s pretty much no crime in Iceland, so I could do anything I wanted. Stay out all night – of course the sun was up – and just do whatever. Well, I was playing at this place they call the Elf City; it’s like this area of volcanic rock. They say that’s where the elves live. You know, Icelandic elves, they’re not like little garden gnomes. They’re like Lord of the Rings, you know? Serious.
“Anyway, my grandparents warned me: whatever you do, don’t pick any flowers from the Elf City. The elves will punish you. Well, you know where I’m from. By that time in my life I’d already seen some terrifying shit. The last thing I was gonna do is worry about a bunch of elves that don’t even exist! So, I decided to pick a flower…”
I shook my head, getting a sense of where this story was heading. The storyteller continued.
“I was up in the Elf City. It was the middle of the night, but it was still bright out anyway. I picked a flower and turned around, and as soon as I did that I got hit by this wind! That wind was so strong it just about knocked me over! And I was terrified! I ran all the way back home, holding on to that flower the whole way! When I got into my room, I put the flower up on a windowsill and threw myself into bed, wrapped myself in all my covers, and just tried to hide! And the rest of the night, I had the weirdest dreams. Well, I think they were dreams…”
I shuddered a little, having had my share of dreams that may not have been dreams. The man telling the story was staring at the ground, as if lost in his memories. At last, he looked up. “When I woke up in the morning, the flower was gone.”
A Powerful Wind
An autonomous zone in Minneapolis is probably the last place I expected to hear of an encounter with Icelandic elves, but that’s the world we live in now. The Uprising has brought people together from wildly different walks of life, and as we get to know each other we hear each other’s stories. This one just happened to involve the elves.
As the Uprising continues, people continue to die. Two Black Lives Matter protesters in Kenosha, WI, including one who heroically attempted to disarm the shooter. A member of Patriot Prayer in Portland, Oregon, after he had come to town to terrorize the protesters. The man who shot him to keep him from killing others, gunned down on the street by law enforcement officers.
Things will keep getting worse, at least for now. No one knows how bad it might get. All of us who have participated in this will have to live with a certain amount of fear, which was exactly the point of shooting protesters in the first place.
As they do their best to make us too afraid to fight back, it’s worth remembering why we’re doing this. A few weeks after I heard the elf story, I took a walk in the autonomous zone. I walked past the cemetery of homemade gravestones, each one in honor of a Black person murdered by the police. I stood in front of the memorial, an upraised fist surrounded by a flower garden. The people who live here call this neighborhood a sacred space, and people come here at all hours as if on pilgrimage.
I talked with some of the locals, who are currently engaged in negotiations with the city. If the city meets their demands for justice, the barricades will come down. If the city refuses, the neighborhood intends to maintain its autonomy whether the city likes it or not.
The people who live in this neighborhood are fighting for a future, for the right to live without fear of being murdered by the police. If the city can respect that, then they won’t object to letting the streets be opened up again.
But if the city tries to pull out the barricades without their consent, it should expect a powerful wind.
Christopher Scott Thompson
Photo by Tam Hutchison.
is an anarchist, martial arts instructor, and devotee of Brighid and Macha.
