📜 LEGEND · EXP. Nº3657 ACTIVE

The Hidden People of Álfhóll

The Hidden People of Álfhóll is a legend from Álfhóll, Kópavogur, IS — a folk story passed down over generations. This file collects its origins, its meaning and how it has been retold.

Where does the legend of The Hidden People of Álfhóll come from?

Location: Álfhóll, Kópavogur, IS
Kind of legend: Creature legend
Coordinates: 64.111, -21.87
Testimonies: 0
Last updated: 2026-08-31

LOCATION

What is the legend of The Hidden People of Álfhóll?

Álfhóll, Elf Hill, is a glacially smoothed rock knoll about three metres high on the south side of Álfhólsvegur in Kópavogur, just outside Reykjavík. The street is named after the hill, and the road bends around it. Kópavogur's own information panel beside the rock gives the reason: four times, it says, elves have interfered with work here. The money ran out in the late 1930s; machines broke down and tools vanished in 1947, after which the road was laid in a curve past the north side of the hill; a rock drill snapped twice at the end of the 1980s, and the plan became the narrowing and speed bump still in place; and the owner of the building plot next door handed it back without laying a brick. The oldest printed account that could be dated, on the front page of Alþýðublaðið of 1 June 1974, tells it differently: the British occupying garrison laid the road and went round the hill after being told the local stories, with no breakdowns at all. Both versions are set out here with their dates, along with who is said to live inside: three elves, one old and two young.

What is the history of The Hidden People of Álfhóll?

Álfhóll means "Elf Hill", and there are many of them in Iceland: the name attaches to knolls and outcrops all over the country, and a full-text sweep of the digitised Icelandic press returns it in contexts that have nothing to do with this one — a paint shop that traded at Álfhólsvegur 9 in the 1960s, the Icelandic title of Heiberg's Danish play Elverhøj, and the Norwegian cartoon Flåklypa Grand Prix, released here as Álfhóll. The one this file is about is a single glacially smoothed rock knoll, about three metres high measured from the road, on the south side of Álfhólsvegur in the Digranes district of Kópavogur, immediately south of Reykjavík. The street is named after the hill, not the other way round, and the road visibly swings out around it. What happened at that bend is told in two incompatible ways, and the difference is the most interesting thing about the file. The oldest printed account that could be dated for this rewrite is on the front page of the newspaper Alþýðublaðið of 1 June 1974. It says that an old belief holds there to be an elf settlement in the hill and that the people of Kópavogur have long held it in some reverence — and then it says who built the road: "Það var breska setuliðið, sem upphaflega lagði Álfhólsveginn, og sneiddu þeir framhjá hólnum þar sem þeim hafði verið sagt frá munnmælasögunum um hann" — it was the British occupying garrison that originally laid Álfhólsvegur, and they went round the hill because they had been told the oral tales about it. The hill, the paper adds, has stuck out into the street ever since. In that version there is no accident, no broken machine and no missing tool: soldiers were told a story and moved their line. The same article notes that Álfhóll is not the only álagablettur — enchanted spot — in Kópavogur, and that two years earlier there had been much talk about rocks blasted at the junction of Nýbýlavegur and Þverbrekka. The version everybody now repeats is a four-episode narrative fixed in a local book. In July 1996 the newspaper Tíminn announced that the Rotary Club of Kópavogur had published Þjóðsögur og sagnir úr Kópavogi, collected among older residents of the town by Anna Hedvig Þorsteinsdóttir and Inga Þóra Þórisdóttir, who also borrowed tapes from the Árni Magnússon Institute of interviews Hallfreður Örn Eiríksson recorded with older Kópavogur people in 1967. Two named women and one named interviewer: the collectors of this legend are on the record, and no version of the story in English mentions any of them. Fréttablaðið printed the resulting account on 9 February 2005 and credited that book by name; Morgunblaðið printed it again on 30 October 2006 under the headline "Various mysterious events have taken place at Álfhólsvegur 102"; and it is the text that now stands on Kópavogur's own information panel beside the hill. Its four episodes are these. First, late in the 1930s, work began on Álfhólsvegur from Hafnarfjarðarvegur eastwards along the Digranes ridge towards Álfabrekka, to join Nýbýlavegur; the hill was to be levelled; when the moment came to blast it, the money allocated for the road ran out, and — the panel's own wording — "it is claimed that the elves had got into the town's accounts". Second, in 1947 the job was restarted and the hill was to be cleared away; machines broke down and tools were damaged or vanished, and the road was finally laid in a curve past the north side of the hill instead of through it. Third, at the end of the 1980s the road was to be upgraded and part of the hill removed with a heavy rock drill on a compressor; the drill broke, a second drill was fetched and, eyewitnesses said, simply snapped in two; the workmen then refused to bring machinery near the hill, and the plan was changed to the narrowing, speed bump and pedestrian crossing that are there today, serving the children of what was then Digranesskóli. Fourth, when the plots east of the hill were allotted in the 1980s, the owner of number 102 — the one nearest the rock — never began work and handed the plot back, saying only that he did not like it. The address register carried in OpenStreetMap shows the houses immediately east of the hill, numbers 104 and 106, both dated 1986, and number 98 to the west dated 1975, with the frontage between them empty. The hill has also been given a census. In 1988 the magazine Heima er bezt reported that there were now only one old man and two youngsters left in Álfhóll and that they were said to be about to move out shortly. The three of them are still on the municipal panel — one old elf and two teenage elves, "or so it was when last heard", as Morgunblaðið put it in 2006. In May 1993 DV reported that the Kópavogur authorities had decided to map the town's elf dwellings alongside the new district plan for the east of town, and quoted the official Birgir to the effect that Kópavogur people were famous for believing in hidden beings, the bend at Álfhóll being the standing example. In March 1998 DV listed Álfhóll among the sites where the Icelandic road authority had had to take elves and hidden people into account. By 23 November 2013 Morgunblaðið could describe it flatly as a glacially scoured rock knoll "which enjoys protection as an elf dwelling"; the panel says the plot and the hill together now fall under municipal protection, bæjarvernd.

Timeline: the documented record of The Hidden People of Álfhóll

Late 1930s (no exact year in the sources) Work begins on Álfhólsvegur from Hafnarfjarðarvegur eastwards along the Digranes ridge. The hill is to be levelled; when the moment comes to blast it, the money allocated for the road runs out. The municipal panel records the elf explanation as a claim: it is said that the elves had got into the town's accounts.
1940-41, as reported in 1974 According to Alþýðublaðið of 1 June 1974, it was the British occupying garrison that originally laid Álfhólsvegur, and it went round the hill because the local oral tales about it had been told to the soldiers. No breakdown or accident appears in this account.
10 August 1946 Earliest occurrence of the street name in the digitised Icelandic press located for this file: a classified advertisement in Morgunblaðið offering the house at Álfhólsvegur 33 for sale. The road exists and is named by then.
1947 Work restarts and the hill is to be cleared. Machines break down and tools are damaged or vanish, and the road is finally laid in a curve past the north side of the hill instead of through it. This is the episode that produced the bend, forty years before the one usually credited with it.
1 January 1948 Kópavogur separates from Seltjarnarneshreppur and becomes a district in its own right, as Morgunblaðið recalled in March 1955 while the place was petitioning for town status. Until then there was no municipality of Kópavogur to have the accounts the first episode blames the elves for raiding.
1 June 1974 Alþýðublaðið devotes front-page space to the hill: an old belief holds there to be an elf settlement inside it, the people of Kópavogur have long held it in some reverence, and it is not the only enchanted spot in town. This is the oldest printed account of the site that could be dated for this rewrite.
1986 The houses immediately east of the hill, Álfhólsvegur 104 and 106, are built, according to the national address data carried in OpenStreetMap. Number 98 to the west dates from 1975. The frontage between them, where number 102 would be, stays empty, which is the documentary trace of the fourth episode.
1988 The magazine Heima er bezt reports that only one old man and two youngsters are now left in Álfhóll, and that these people are said to be about to move out shortly. It is the earliest dated appearance of the census of three that the municipal panel still gives.
End of the 1980s The road is to be upgraded and part of the hill removed with a heavy rock drill on a compressor. The drill breaks; a second is fetched and, eyewitnesses say, snaps in two. The workmen refuse to bring machinery near the hill and the plan is changed to the narrowing, speed bump and pedestrian crossing that are there today.
13 May 1993 DV reports that Kópavogur's authorities have decided to map the town's elf dwellings alongside the new district plan for the east of town, and quotes the official Birgir saying that Kópavogur people are famous for believing in hidden beings, the bend at Álfhóll being the standing example.
13 July 1996 Tíminn announces that the Rotary Club of Kópavogur has published Þjóðsögur og sagnir úr Kópavogi, collected among older residents by Anna Hedvig Þorsteinsdóttir and Inga Þóra Þórisdóttir, who also used tapes of Hallfreður Örn Eiríksson's 1967 interviews held at the Árni Magnússon Institute. This is the book every later version descends from.
31 March 1998 DV publishes a list of works altered because of elves and hidden people, with Álfhóll at Álfhólsvegur at its head, noting that staff at the Icelandic road authority have often had to take such objections into account when laying roads.
9 February 2005 Fréttablaðið prints the four-episode account in full and credits its source by name: Þjóðsögur og sagnir úr Kópavogi. The same issue carries a photograph of Álfhólsvegur captioned 1961-1963, showing the bend and stating that people did not want to annoy the elves.
30 October 2006 Morgunblaðið reprints the account under the headline "Various mysterious events have taken place at Álfhólsvegur 102", adding the hedge that the three elves were there "or so it was when last heard".
23 November 2013 Morgunblaðið describes Álfhóll plainly as a glacially scoured rock knoll which enjoys protection as an elf dwelling, in a feature on the town's supernatural geography.
4 July 2024 FERLIR publishes photographs of the site and a transcription of Kópavogur's information panel, the text on which this file's account of the four episodes is checked. The hill is intact, unfenced and signposted.

Is there a rational explanation for The Hidden People of Álfhóll?

The most sceptical text about Álfhóll is the one the municipality itself put beside it. The panel ends: "Hvort sem um er að ræða álfa, röð tilviljana eða ókunnug öfl" — whether it is a matter of elves, a run of coincidences or unknown forces — and marks the key claim of the first episode as hearsay, "it is claimed that the elves had got into the town's accounts". FERLIR's own account of the site is blunter still about the age of the belief: it is not clear how old the tales are, and there are no sources for any events until well into the twentieth century. That single sentence disposes of the "locals have long said" framing that this file used to carry. The two episodes usually offered as evidence come with mundane causes attached inside the sources themselves. In the late 1930s the road stopped because the appropriation ran out; the elves are an added gloss on a budget. And there is an arithmetical problem with that gloss: in the late 1930s there was no town of Kópavogur to have accounts. The settlement was still part of Seltjarnarneshreppur; Kópavogur separated from it only in 1948, as Morgunblaðið recalled in March 1955 while the district was petitioning for town status, which it received that year with some 3,800 inhabitants. The two accounts of the bend cannot both be right. Alþýðublaðið in 1974 credits it to the British garrison of the occupation, which was told the stories and went round; the 1996 book credits it to the failure of machinery in 1947. Whichever is true, the version that reached English does neither: it fuses the 1947 breakdowns with the 1980s drill and produces a single 1980s episode in which machines failed until the road was curved. The bend and the speed bump are two different events forty years apart. Two details in circulation have no support at all in the Icelandic record. There are no injured workmen: a search of the digitised Icelandic press for Álfhóll together with slys (accident) in Kópavogur returns zero, against 7,981 hits for Kópavogur and slys generally. And there is no elf church in this hill; the sources give a dwelling with three named-by-age elves. Searching Álfhóll with álfakirkja returns a single hit, and it is about a different Álfhóll at Siglufjörður, while álfakirkja by itself returns 122 hits from 1898 onwards and Ófeigskirkja — the elf church in the Gálgahraun lava at Garðabær, eight kilometres away, which was the centre of a famous road dispute reported from 2009 — returns 22. The elf church belongs to that case, not to this one. Finally, the belief itself is measurable and the numbers are more modest than the round figures usually quoted. In the survey Erlendur Haraldsson ran in 1974, as reported by Nancy Marie Brown, 7 per cent of Icelanders were certain elves existed, 15 per cent thought it likely and 33 per cent allowed the possibility without affirming or denying it; in the University of Iceland survey of 2006-2007, 5 per cent of a thousand respondents said they had seen an elf and rather more than half entertained the possibility. "Iceland believes in elves" is not what those figures say.

Can you visit The Hidden People of Álfhóll?

Álfhóll is a public roadside outcrop, free, always open and entirely unstaffed. It sits on the south side of Álfhólsvegur in the Digranes district of Kópavogur, on the stretch where the house numbers jump from 98 to 104, and it is roughly three metres high measured from the street. There is no fence, no gate, no ticket and no visitor centre: photographs taken at the site show grass and moss over grey glacially smoothed rock, with a kerb, a footpath and a black-and-yellow bollard directly against it. Kópavogur has put up an information panel beside the hill giving the four-episode story in Icelandic; there is no English text on it. Getting there is easy and undramatic. It is about eight kilometres from central Reykjavík, ten to fifteen minutes by car, and Strætó has two stops named Álfhóll on Álfhólsvegur itself, one on each side of the road, within 150 metres of the knoll. The junction beside the hill is signalised, and the narrowing, speed bump and pedestrian crossing that the 1980s episode is said to have produced are still in place; they serve schoolchildren, so drive and park accordingly. There is no dedicated parking. This is an ordinary residential street with people living in the houses on both sides, and the empty frontage next to the hill is a protected plot, not a car park. Two practical corrections to what circulates online. The school named on the panel, Digranesskóli, no longer exists under that name: it merged with Hjallaskóli in the summer of 2010 to form Álfhólsskóli, whose younger pupils use the former Digranesskóli building south-west of the hill. And Álfhóll is not the only such site in the town: the same local tradition attaches to Borgarholt, Víghólar, Latur and Þinghóll, all within a short walk or drive, so the hill is best visited as one stop on a walk through Digranes rather than as a destination in itself. Expect five minutes, a rock, a bend in a road and a sign.

Sources consulted

Reviewed by V. Serrano on 2026-08-16 · How we verify our content

📎 Source: Enigma Atlas

The Hidden People of Álfhóll

Where does the legend of The Hidden People of Álfhóll come from?

What is the legend of The Hidden People of Álfhóll?

What is the history of The Hidden People of Álfhóll?

Timeline: the documented record of The Hidden People of Álfhóll

Is there a rational explanation for The Hidden People of Álfhóll?

Can you visit The Hidden People of Álfhóll?

Sources consulted

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The Hidden People of Álfhóll

Where does the legend of The Hidden People of Álfhóll come from?

What is the legend of The Hidden People of Álfhóll?

What is the history of The Hidden People of Álfhóll?

Timeline: the documented record of The Hidden People of Álfhóll

Is there a rational explanation for The Hidden People of Álfhóll?

Can you visit The Hidden People of Álfhóll?

Sources consulted

💬 Field testimonies (0)

Add your testimony

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