Tales for Sleep: A Guest from the Hidden People
Tonight's tale is "Una, the Elfwoman," from Icelandic Legends, collected by Jón Árnason and translated by George E. J. Powell and Eiríkur Magnússon. Settle in, and listen.
Disclosure: this performance is narrated by AI-generated voices.
On the Hlid farmstead in Iceland, a labourer named Una is taken one night to a hidden farm in the middle of a lake, where she spends three days among a people few ever see — quietly laying out a silver tray for meals that are never quite eaten — and when her master finds her again and asks why she left, she answers, "I did not, but was forced." She will not talk about it. And that is the measure of this gentle tale: no one is harmed, nothing is threatened, and the hidden people ask almost nothing of anyone; the one small liberty of the telling is Una's short-term disappearance, reported and resolved. Listen now, and rest.
The tale:
00:15 — Una, the Elfwoman
Source: Jón Árnason (1819–1888), collector; George E. J. Powell (1842–1882) & Eiríkur Magnússon (1833–1913), translators, Icelandic Legends, Collected by Jón Árnason, vol. I (London: Richard Bentley, 1864), pp. 68 ff. (Books VIII–XIII on Google Books; scan hunt logged in catalogue/iceland-canon.md) — public domain; performed in the translators' printed English. Gate record: catalogue/iceland-canon.md.
Narrated by Magnolia
A dry-voice telling — no music, by the Sleep Season's design.
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