In the Western world today, we associate Christmas with two main stories. The more
important of these, upon which the holiday is based, is the Nativity of
Christ, which appears in the Gospels of Matthew and Luke.
The second major story that we associate with Christmas is that of Santa Claus,
the jolly, white bearded, semi-magical embodiment of Christmas who appears
every Christmas Eve to deliver presents to good girls and boys. Like gingerbread
houses and the Christmas tree, the Santa Claus story as we know it probably has
its roots in the 16th Century Holy Roman Empire, in regions that now comprise the
states of Germany and Holland. One particular set of characters who have
populated the Santa Claus story for at least a century and a half are Christmas
elves- Santa's little magical helpers. According to a relatively modern
tradition, these tiny people live in the North Pole, where they make toys in
Santa's workshop. Although elves have been a mainstay of
Germanic folklore for millennia, Christmas elves
first appeared in writing in 1855, in American novelist Louisa May Alcott's
unpublished book ,Christmas Elves'. Many Westerners might be surprised to learn
that despite their relatively recent addition to the Santa Claus story, little
magical people from a North Pole have featured in Western folklore for more
than a thousand years. And, believe it or not, rather than hailing from
northernmost Norway, Russia, or some other old-world abode, these creatures were
said to live in Northern Canada. The following stories are excerpts from my
book 'Legends of the Nahanni Valley', which
details the history and folklore of a mysterious region in Northern Canada
popularly known as the "Headless Valley". If you'd like to get a copy of this book,
please check out the link in the description. The first written accounts
of Arctic elves are the Viking sagas- texts written by medieval Norseman on
ancient Nordic and Germanic history. Among the most famous of these is the
'Saga of Erik the Red'. Erik the Red was a red-bearded Norse
farmer who lived in Iceland in the late 10th Century. In 982 A.D., he was banished
from Iceland for committing manslaughter. Accompanied by a handful of loyal
friends and relatives, he left his longhouse and headed out to
sea, bound for a mysterious land to the west which had been spotted by Icelandic
sailors blown off course. Erik the Red and his crew spent three
years exploring this new land and discovered that it had areas which were
suitable for farming. In 985, he returned to Iceland and regaled his fellow
Vikings with tales of what he attractive lee dubbed "Greenland". Having convinced a
number of Norseman to help him settle this new territory, Erik the Red returned
to Greenland that year and established a colony there. In 999 A.D., one of Erik the
Red's sons, called Leif Erikson, traveled to Norway, his father's birthplace, where
he converted from Norse paganism to Christianity. Determined to bring the
Christian religion to Greenland, he headed out into the North Atlantic.
During his westward voyage, he was blown off course and landed on strange shores
were wild grapes grew in abundance. He called this new world "Vinland", or "Wine
Land", and later returned there to establish a colony of his own. Some
historians believe that Leif Erikson's Vinlandic colony was what we know
today as L'Anse aux Meadows, a cluster of Viking ruins discovered on the northern
tip of Newfoundland. For centuries, Icelanders told stories of Erik the
Red and Leif Erikson's New World adventures around smoky longhouse fires.
Medieval storytellers eventually put these tales to parchment, writing what
are known today as the Icelandic sagas. Many of the sagas spoke of natives whom
Norse explorers encountered in the New World, in both Vinland and Greenland. The
Vikings called these people "Skraeling". According to the 13th Century 'Saga of
Erik the Red', the Skraeling were "short in height, with threatening features and
tangled hair on their heads. Their eyes were large and their cheeks broad".
Although their relationship with these aboriginals was initially a friendly one,
the Vikings eventually engaged in a number of savage skirmishes
with these diminutive New World natives. Many historians believe that the Skraeling
were the Thule people- the ancestors of the modern Inuit. Indeed, Inuit folklore
contains references to bearded, sword-wielding giants, believed by some to be
Viking explorers. Others claimed that the Skraeling were the ancient Dorset people,
whom the Inuit eventually displaced. Others still, however, maintained that the
Saga's references to Skraeling constitute the first written records
describing a lost tribe of Arctic dwarfs, remnants of which, some say, still
inhabit the Northland to this very day. Norwegian-American historian Kirsten A.
Seaver, in her article 'Pygmies of the Far North', published in the March 2008
edition of the 'Journal of World History', argued that the word "Skraeling' was an
Old Norse translation of "Pygmy"- in this context, a race of dwarfs from India
which feature in ancient Greek mythology, with which classically-educated Vikings
would have been familiar. Seaver suspected that Dark Age Norse explorers, knowing
that the earth was round, believed they had stumbled upon the eastern coast of
India when they trudged on to the foamy shores of the New World. Much as 15th
Century Spanish conquistadors called the natives of the Americas "indios", or
"Indians", in the mistaken belief that they had reached the Orient, the Vikings
Seaver argued, named the tiny northern natives they encountered after the
legendary dwarves said to inhabit the Eastern continent. Seavers' case is
bolstered by a footnote which Flemish cartographer Gerardus Mercator included
in his 1569 map of the world. On an island near the North Pole, Mercator
wrote, in Latin, "Here lived the Pygmies, at most four feet tall, like unto those they
call Skraelings in Greenland." Another explorer to uncover potential evidence
of a race of pygmies living in the Arctic was Captain Luke Foxe, a 17th
Century English adventurer who followed in the footsteps of Martin
Frobisher and Henry Hudson, sailing the frigid waters of Northern Canada in
search of the Northwest Passage. Foxe set out on his first and only Arctic
expedition in the spring of 1631. Setting out from Kirkwall, Orkney, he and
his crew sailed west across the Atlantic to Frobisher Bay, situated near the
northern lip of Hudson's Bay. The Englishmen sailed through the Hudson
Strait. and, after visiting the crew of Welsh captain Thomas James, who was
similarly searching for the Northwest Passage, headed west. On July 27th ,1631,
Captain Foxe and his crew disembarked at Southampton Island, a large island
located at the northern end of Hudson's Bay. There, they discovered a peculiar
above-ground cemetery consisting of a number of little coffins made from wood
and stone. Inside these coffins were, as cryptozoologist Ivan Sanderson put it in
his 1963 article 'Traditions of Submen in Arctic and Subarctic North America',
"tiny human skeletons, only four feet in length,
surrounded by bows, arrows, and bone lances. They were all adults, and there is
some implication that not all of them were skeletons but might have been whole
frozen bodies". The first part of Foxe's report, which he included in his
personal journal, went as follows: "The newes from land was that this island
was a Sepulchre, for the Svages had laid their dead (I cannot say interred), for it
is all stone, as they cannot dig therein, but lay the Corpses on the stones and
wall them about with the same, coffining them also by laying the sides of old sleddes
about, which have been artificially made. The boards are some 9 or 10 foot long,
4inches thicke. In what manner the tree they have been made out of was
cloven or sawen, it was so smooth that we could not discern, the burials had bin
so old. And, as in other places in these countries, the berry' all their Utensils,
as bows, arrows, strings, darts, lances, and other implements
carved in bone. The longest Corpses was not above 4 foot long, with their
heads laid to the West. It may be that they travell, as the Tartars and the
Samoides; for, if they had remained here, there would have been some newer burials.
There was one place walled 4 square, and seated within the earth. Each side
was 4 or 5 yards in length. In the middle was three stones, laid one above
the other, man's height. We took this to be some place of Ceremony at the buriall
of the dead". In a footnote, Foxe added, "They seem to be people of small stature. God
sent me better for my adventures than these". When white men began to establish
themselves in what is now Canada's Northwest Territories in the late 18th
and early 19th Centuries, they learned that the local Dene Indians had a
strong tradition that the Mackenzie Mountains were home to a race of
mystical dwarves. In a letter to a friend, a fur trader named Poole Field described
these creatures as "little men of the mountain that are supposed to be
about four feet high at the most, and have fine living places in the heart of
the mountain, and are exceptionally strong and wise, who come out
occasionally and capture their women for wives, in some cases making the father of
the girl they have taken a medicine man in return for the girl." In his 1964 book
"The Kaska Indians: An Ethnographic Reconstruction", ethnologist John J. Honigmann
recounted an old Kaska legend about the "Klunetene"-
literally "Little Men"- "who lived on mice which they secured with small bows
and arrows in the fall grass" and sometimes "befriended men. They also
enjoyed a reputation for their making fun."
These dwarves, despite their being constantly menaced by wild animals,
were said to be a powerful people with shamanic abilities. "In warfare," Honigmann
wrote, "these small beings helped to bring up wind and cold that paralyze the enemy.
In size, a dwarf reached about the height of a caribou jaw. One such being could
pack only about half a pound. Despite the tendency of the dwarves to
steal women, people laughed when they spoke of the antics of the little people."
Although the dwarves were said to have delighted in helping humans, the Attawapiskat
Cree of North Ontario were reportedly afraid of these little men
"who inhabited the rocky cliffs along rivers." In 1996, Northern
writer Ed Ferrell published a book called "Strange Stories of Alaska and the
Yukon"- a collection of old Northern newspaper articles about ghosts, lost
mines, forgotten civilizations, and other weird tales of the Northland. Ferrell
dedicated one chapter of his book to stories of strange tribes which
prospectors and trappers are said to have discovered during the course of
their boreal wanderings. Farrell found one of these articles, entitled "Pygmies
of the North Pole", in the September 13th, 1930 issue of "The Stroller's Weekly", a
newspaper based out of Juneau, Alaska. It tells of a party of scientists, one of
them named John Weizl, who participated in an Arctic expedition in
June, 1911, led by a Russian explorer named Captain Yvolnoff. Inuit guides led
the scientists to an impossible location "about 730 miles northwest of the
North Pole", where they found tiny footprints in the snow. They followed the
footprints to an underground burrow into which they sent one of their dogs. The
dog quickly returned to the surface "seeming not to like what he had
discovered". After some time, a little man came out of the burrow
speaking a language the Inuit did not understand in a shrill, frightened tone.
He was about three and a half feet tall and extremely thin, and was estimated to
weigh around 35 to 40 pounds. His head, complete with enormous ears, was
"almost triangular shaped, coming to a peak with a small tuft of hair at the
top". When the scientists pacified the pygmy with soothing words, he called
for his kinsmen to come out with the burrow. Slowly, 27 people emerged from the
hole in the ground, all of them "clad in very fine
skins". The expedition party spent a day with these little natives. They
observed that these tiny people lived on small fish, which they caught with their
bare hands. For some reason, they only ate the backs
of the fish and threw the rest away. Believe it or not, sightings of Arctic
dwarves still occur from time to time in the desolate wilds of the Northland. One
man who may have come face to face with one of these little people is Anthony
Roche, a native of the Northland who generously allowed me to include several
of his own strange experiences in the Arctic wilderness in my book 'Legends of
the Nahanni Valley'. In August, 2017, Roche paid a visit to his girlfriend's
grandmother, who lived in a cabin about ten kilometres west of Cambridge Bay,
Nunavut. Cambridge Bay is a hamlet of about 1,500
people, located on the southern shore of Victoria Island. Despite being the second
largest island in the Arctic Archipelago, Victoria Island is only home to about
1,900 people, making it one of the most sparsely populated places on earth.
During their visit, Roche and his girlfriend stayed in her parents' cabin,
which was vacant at the time. This cottage, situated about 80 yards away
from the grandmother's cabin, constituted the only other residence in that remote
corner of the Arctic at that time. One day, while his girlfriend went for tea at
her grandmother's cabin, Roche went out to inspect her parents' fish net. "I got three
fish in the net," Roche told me, "filetted them and hung them to dry". That
accomplished, he and his girlfriend, who had returned from her grandmother's
cabin, both decided to take a nap in her parents cabin. Just as they were drifting
off to sleep, the couple heard an unexpected sound. "We both woke up to
footsteps on the deck," said Roche. They heard the creaking of the cabins outer
door. Several seconds later, the inside door swung open. Roche, who was lying on
the upper level of a bunk bed, glanced over at the open door, expecting to see
his girlfriend's grandmother, as she was the only other person in the area at
that time. There was no one there. Roche craned his
neck to get a better view,. "And there," said Roche, "was the smallest human being I've
ever seen, wearing a ragged old orange-coloured coat and caribou skin pants".
Suddenly, both doors shut in unison,
"as if they were one. My girlfriend screamed, 'Someone tried to get in!' I
jumped up to see who it was. Looked out every window and didn't see
anyone. I walked out the door and didn't see anyone. I thought to myself 'Grandma
can't move that fast; her cabin is 80 yards away'."
Later, Roche and his girlfriend met up with her parents and told them of
their experience. "They told us a 'little person' visited us. An 'inuk', they
called them- 'Inuagulik', in our language. They were supposed to be folk stories
for children, and one walked into our cabin. Thanks for watching! If you would
like to learn more about the many strange stories and legends endemic to
Northern Canada, please check out my book 'Legends of the Nahanni Valley', which you
can find by clicking the link in the description.