Sunday, April 12, 2020

Little houses for you and me


Continuing with the curbside haul, here's a very random Polaroid of, well, I guess you could say it's a little house (or church) sitting in the corner of a room in a bigger house. What purpose did it serve? Was it purely decorative? Was it a playhouse for ferrets? Was it an architectural model of a human-sized facility? (If so, the doors seem way too big.) I don't reckon we'll ever know.

Speaking of little houses, Wendyvee of the Wendyvee's Roadside Wonders introduced me last week to a topic I was unaware of: Huldufólk houses. Huldufólk are the "little people" in the folklore of Iceland and the Faroe Islands. They are woven into the fabric of four separate holidays in Iceland, including Thirteenth Night and Midsummer Night. Their folklore is also interwined with the geography of Iceland, with its volcanic rocks and other awe-inspiring natural phenomena. It is believed those are the places where the little people live. Which can be a problem.

"The widespread belief that elves and huldufólk live within the rocks and mountainsides of Iceland sometimes complicates things for non-Icelandic organizations trying to set up shop," Michael Sallustio reported for The Portalist. "Sometimes, new construction will be halted by concerned Icelanders who wish to protect the habitats of elves and huldufólk."

There is another solution for making sure the huldufólk have proper habitats: making tiny dwellings for them. I don't want to post anything here that might violate copyright, but here's a gander at what you can find if you do your own Google image search:


So enjoy diving down the rabbit hole of huldufólk houses! I know I did.

But we need cozy homes for humans, too. I watched F.W. Murnau's Sunrise: A Song of Two Humans last night, and it featured a wonderful rural village full of cozy-looking dwellings. This screenshot doesn't do it justice, but you get the idea.


I bet one of those houses has something like my favorite movie bedroom ever, which was featured in a (very) different Murnau film.

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