(bright music) (wind noise) (pensive music) - It's just so hard to describe magic.

It's so hard to describe the hidden world because it's hidden for a reason.

(gentle bright music) When I was growing up, every time we were driving where there was like a hole in the land, like there's a hole there, my mom would always tell us, "Now we can make a wish."

So, you look into the hole, close your eyes and you make a wish.

But don't tell anyone (laughs).

- My name is Júlía Óttarsdóttir.

So, I'm the daughter of Óttar.

That's my last name.

I am born and raised in Iceland.

Iceland is an island in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean.

We have both erupting volcanoes and then we have one of the biggest glaciers in Europe.

So, we have the diversity from ice and fire.

We have a lot of light in the summertime and we have a lot of darkness in the winter.

So, it's a very magical place in that sense of contrast and of diversity.

In Iceland, there are people that live outside of Reykjavík, and there are the people that live in the Reykjavík.

So, we have like the city people, and then we have the farmers.

Every summer, we would go to my grandmother in the countrysides and my grandmother opened up one of the first horse rentals in Iceland.

My grandma had summer houses and I remember this kind of property or an area behind the summer houses, and there were like all these pieces of lands.

But then always there was this one piece that was no house.

And I was like, "Why?

Why do you don't build there?

This is like a perfect spot."

"No, no, the elves are there."

The elves or the hidden people, they are these small beings.

And we have a rule in Iceland that you cannot build everywhere if there are a certain type of elves stones.

If you move the stones out of the land, you just get rid of the stones and, "Oh, I'm gonna build my house," the elves will probably burn your house or they will make your life miserable because you didn't ask for permission in the first place.

So I grew up with my mother and my grandmother on a farm, taking care of horses, riding horses, bringing people on tours.

Yeah, and the horses have always been like the best friends of my mother.

- Ah.

His name is Oddviti and Oddviti means assistant policeman or something.

So, Oddviti is a really good name, but it's not popular.

But he's a very kind horse.

Very kind horse.

- The cat and the horse.

- And this cat is owned by the neighbors, but he always want to be with us.

I don't know why.

(Julia laughs) He's come with me every day when I take the horses out and I always have to send her home.

She was with me in the morning also.

- Aww (laughs).

Maybe she's an elf.

Mom, do you believe in elves?

- What?

Elf or whatever it is, you always believe in something.

The horses have a healing.

Very much healing power in horses.

[Julia] Yeah.

- They help me to heal anyway.

I always go to the stable.

I've been in the stable from my August, September, October, November, December January, February, March, April, May, July, every day, every morning.

So in the morning, I go about seven o'clock, feed all the horses.

My horses are all the horses, about 4 to 5.

And then I do that for two, three hours.

And then, I go back home and then I do this, knitting.

I always thought knitting was for older people.

So, I don't know if you heard about it.

I had accident in April last year.

Have you not told them?

Okay, I was riding horses, and then the horse fell and I broke my neck four places.

Uh-huh, and then I start to knit.

So, I was knitting like this, and I don't have the patience to knit, but just after the accident, then I start to do it.

So be my guest and try them on if you want.

And yeah.

I don't know what you want from me.

(Julia laughs) - Where my grandmother lived at the farm, you wake up at seven in the morning, you have breakfast, you go outside even though there's rain or storm or whatever and you just have to figure out a way to survive in a way.

And then you're like, "Oh, I'm cold, can I come in?"

And she's like, "No, you keep playing outside.

Just find something to do."

I would find ways.

I would play in the lava and they were mice sometimes in the lava and I was trying to catch them.

When you are a child, you haven't been pushed down or my imagination wasn't made wrong.

Like I would be playing with the elves and the fairies and the trolls and just all the nature spirits and it was just so natural to me.

Some people say that they can see elves.

I don't remember myself seeing them as that, but I know truthfully in my heart and my being that they are always with us.

They are always here.

We just have to kind of tap into it.

The reason why in Iceland we basically believe in the elves, we believe in these magical things is because we are so close to it.

If you are raised in nature, if you are connected to nature, you always feel it.

(wind whooshing) Yeah, it's been an interesting journey for me especially here in Iceland because I am somewhat of a pioneer of my art.

Okay, where are we?

Here, guitar tuner.

Sound check for you, angels (laughs).

When I started walking this path myself and I started connecting more and deeper to Iceland and to the magic here, then I started just attracting a lot of people.

They are people that started coming to my ceremonies and to my kind of journeys in nature and it just all became family today and my best friends and so on.

(wind whooshing) - There is just so much magic at this time.

Summer solstice is just the favorite, like I think most Icelanders' favorite time of the year because we have so much light.

We have light, oh, 24/7.

And there's so many, like the light changes so much through the day It's just almost good to go to sleep.

It's hard to sleep in this time.

- [Interviewer] The sun never sets, but the shadows do get long, don't they?

- Yeah, that's okay.

We all have the shadow.

(Steinunn laughs) - The elders and the stories, they tell us that if there is a lady's mantle that has water inside, and if you put the water in your eye when there's a summer solstice, then you are able to see to the other dimension, to the hidden people dimension.

- Icelandic people really, really believe in elves.

Yeah.

And hidden people.

Yeah.

- You say, do you believe?

It's not belief.

It is.

For me, it is because I'm brought up in the nature.

You have to connect to nature to get this energy, to hear hidden people.

You can't just look, you have to feel with the heart.

And then, then you realize you're not here alone.

We people are not here alone.

Try it.

When you are here in Iceland, sit by yourself, bathe in nature in Iceland then.

(Steinunn laughs) (gentle music) - [Interviewer] Is that an Icelandic instrument?

- No, it's not.

It's an African instrument.

- [Interviewer] Oh.

- Oh, I love the smell.

We have trees in Iceland.

(gentle music) - When you're around waterfalls, you are basically cleansing away all the negative energy.

You just come alive, you know?

Ah, I just love it so much.

Lick it.

(Julia laughs) I feel like many places in Iceland, I feel like I'm walking in somebody's living room, you know?

And it's not a human living room, it is the elves.

It is like nature spirits and to tramp on there on my shoes, I feel very disrespectful to do that.

I like to have my toes touch the earth and smell it and connect my senses because we kind of have to lose our mind in order to come into our senses.

(water rushing) It is always good to say hi to them.

Hello.

It's a house for the elves.

So, this is what Iceland, there's not everybody, but some that are connected to the land.

They can... Yeah, they create these places for the elves to basically honor them.

(bright music) The gods, they love music (giggles).

We must play.

(gentle bright music) - Okay, we talked about the elves and the rocks.

- [Interviewer] Do you believe in the hidden people today?

- No, I don't.

No.

- My father wasn't like that connected to nature in that sense, but he has always been this safe rock somehow.

If I ever needed someone to like speak about my emotions, it would be my father.

My father has been a writer for, I mean, I think before I was born.

- When I started journalism, 29 years old, I have actually been a journalist ever since.

- He's written 31 books.

- The publisher, he actually wrote a letter to "Rescue 911", to William Shatner.

- I'm William Shatner.

Tonight true stories of caring people who make a difference on "Rescue 911".

- This story was broadcast by "Rescue 911" in about 40 countries.

So, this was the start of my writing career and it went actually very well.

- Hi.

- Hi.

- If you want to meet a real elf, then this woman is... She's a real elf.

- [Interviewer] Do you think there's a magic in Iceland?

- Not really, no.

I'm not that.

- [Interviewer] Not even with the seismic activity and the earthquakes and the volcanoes?

- No, I don't believe that.

- [Interviewer] It's just science.

- Yes, that's just earth.

That's just mother earth.

In my life, I think that happened something like 40, 50 volcano eruptions.

So, it's just a thing that happens and it happens all around the world too.

So, that's no.

Actually I lost my sister when I was 35 years old.

She was 43.

She died in an accident in France.

I have believed that she would be near me ever since.

I believe that.

I have decided to believe that.

So, that's what I believe in.

- [Interviewer] So you believe in magic in some forms?

- Yes.

I do.

- So my mother or my parents, I can't talk with them about everything.

They aren't so evolved or they haven't really... They don't really want to go there maybe.

But with Jon, he's always willing just to have the conversations that are kind of beyond.

- I think it's really good to tell the stories and we can say, "Okay, this is what we have done.

What kind the world do we want to create now?"

- He is very unique in that sense of always going further.

And I was just so fascinated about a man like him that has walked that path of both spirituality and just super connected to nature.

- Storytelling.

That was a really like important part of me growing up.

An important part of who I am.

Like both my grandfather and his son, they were storytellers, and as a young boy, I would sit just astonished with them telling stories.

My grandfather was born in 1893, so he was telling me stories that his grandmother had told him.

Then, life was just about survival.

So a lot of the stories were about that, how they survived, pick up dead fish from the shore like in the morning before the birds could catch it just to survive.

- Yeah, so this is how we used to live in Iceland, in these dwarf houses oftentimes built with stone and earth.

- And my mother was actually born in a set house, a turf house here, maybe an hour away from here.

So yeah, that's a big part of my heritage.

- To keep the heat in the houses, they would have the sleeping area in the upper floor and the sheep and the cow in the below.

And then, the heat of the animals would warm the sleeping area.

It gets really cold in Iceland.

Woo!

So, this is more so like a storage shed for the food.

So in the summer, you would go out and harvest as much as you could and then usually the food would be fermented.

Yeah, I'm just very fond of my ancestry and these warriors, these people that just survived craziest winters.

- It was a tradition to tell stories and share about it.

And so, when we've been talking about like crisis in the world or COVID or financial crisis, it's so different from what they had before.

That is really helpful to look at it from a very different perspective.

- Huh.

(speaks in a foreign language) This is probably an elf.

They come in many forms.

Oh, my God, what an angel.

It's just an angel.

- From the stories of my ancestor, they often talked about like the hidden people, like the elf people, that they were usually in every farm.

There was somebody who they were connected to that kind of informed them of their life and how things would be.

They look mostly like humans.

And sometimes like when I see them, it's almost like through a gate or something with see-through curtains between them.

So like almost as you could go in there, but I haven't really.

I haven't done that yet.

They're used to be easy to travel with these kind of like star gates that we call them now through different dimensions.

And yeah, I don't know why they were closed, but they were... Yeah, I don't know how to describe it.

When we talk about that world, words are often difficult.

- Jon is living by the glaciers, Skaftafell, the national park.

He lives there right in front of the glaciers.

My own Mary Poppins bag (laughs).

(Julia yawns) (people chattering in the background) I mean, you can burn like pine, you can burn sage.

You can burn like any of the herbs and the like... Yeah, basically just the herbs that are from the land.

You just light it up and then you wait for it to get warm and then you can pray to connect with the spirits.

Thinking if I should play the bowls a little bit, but it's not like a Icelandic thing.

(plastic bag rustling) (gentle meditative music) In our modern day, we're so stimulated and it's such a hard time to find that silence and that space to really listen.

And when you are able to do that, then you're able to connect with the hidden world, to the elves, to the... You know.

Anything, whatever you want (laughs).

- Like the way I see, Julia often has that connection to nature and a lot of wisdom seems to be coming.

I don't know sometimes where the ideas come from.

Like from my view, she tells it.

She doesn't hesitate like many who say, "Okay, this must be a dream or something."

No, she knows it or feels like she knows it's right and passes it on.

- I was thinking about you were asking if I was proud?

I am very proud of Julia.

You have such a passion.

- (laughs) I love to kiss them on the lips.

- Careful, careful, careful.

Careful what you wish for.

Careful.

- When Julia was born, she was something different.

She was beautiful, but she was something different.

There was something in her that, here I am, something like this.

And she has chosen her own path and she will follow it and that's what making me proud of her.

Absolutely.

- So here, people would come to... They would ride on their horses.

They would walk from the west, from the east, from the north, all to gather in this place in Iceland called Thingvellir in order to get married, be killed, or any of these things that are decided in the parliament.

So, this is like the most historical place in Iceland and this is really one of the most magical places for the hidden people to connect with.

- There's just this silence here.

When you're in the silence, you might hear something.

It's somebody's home.

I can try to knock on the door, see if somebody's home.

(laughs) Hello.

Coo-coo!

I'm moving in (laughs).

Thank you for allowing us to be here.

(gentle music) This program is brought to by Margaret A. Cargill Philanthropies