Reykjavik Folklore Walking Tour: Elves, Trolls & Ghost Stories

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1/12

Duration1h 30m

GroupUp to 999

LanguagesEN

Mobile ticketAccepted

The Creatures That Shaped Iceland's Winter Nights

You walk through Reykjavik's oldest neighborhoods and two historic cemeteries while a professional guide tells you about elves, trolls, ghosts and the Icelandic creatures that shaped the country's storytelling tradition. The guide covers specific folklore — the Deacon of Dark River, Grýla, the 13 Santas — and explains why these stories mattered during Iceland's long winters. You meet at Ingolfur Square and the whole walk takes around two hours in all weather.

1h 30m

Step-by-step itinerary

The Experience

There's something about a Reykjavik folklore walking tour that makes you want to look twice at shadows. Not because you believe in trolls — though after an hour of stories, you might — but because the guide knows how to make a graveyard feel less like a place where people died and more like a place where stories refused to. You start at Ingolfur Square, the oldest part of the city, and within minutes you're standing at an elfstone in the city center. It's just a rock, technically, but the guide explains why Icelanders have built around it for centuries, and suddenly it's not just a rock anymore.

The walk takes you through two of Reykjavik's oldest cemeteries — one dating back to around 900 — and the guide doesn't rush through them. Instead, you hear about specific ghosts: the Deacon of Dark River, who has a reputation that outlasted his actual life by centuries, and the 13 Santas, or Jólasveinar, who are nothing like the jolly figures you know. There's also Grýla, their mother, a child-eating troll who shows up in Icelandic folklore the way winter shows up in December — inevitable and a little terrifying. By the time you're walking past Reykjavik City Hall, where the guide sometimes stops to point out locations of trolls on the great map of Iceland, you've stopped thinking of this as a tourist activity and started thinking of it as something closer to a conversation with the place itself.

What makes this different from reading folklore online is the guide's tone — they're not performing spookiness, they're explaining why storytelling mattered so much in Iceland's long winter nights. Around 1 in 10 Icelanders writes a book in their lifetime, and that statistic makes sense after you've heard a few of these stories. The walk covers Icelandic magic, guardian spirits, and the strange relationship between the church and the creatures that came before it. You're out for about two hours, moving at a steady pace through the city, and the guide handles all weather — which in Reykjavik means you should dress in layers and expect wind.

What’s included

Your tour includes a professional guide who leads you through Reykjavik's oldest neighborhoods, two historic cemeteries dating back centuries, and stops at an elfstone in the city center and Reykjavik City Hall.
The guide shares stories about Icelandic folklore — elves, trolls, ghosts, the Deacon of Dark River, Grýla and the 13 Santas — and explains Icelandic magic and guardian spirits.
Live entertainment is part of the experience, and the whole walk takes around two hours in all weather conditions.

Good to know

Easy physical levelWheelchair accessibleAccessible transportStroller friendlyPets welcomePublic transport nearby

Operated by Your Friend In Reykjavik

Is this one for you?Right for travelers curious about Icelandic culture beyond the usual sights, or anyone who wants to understand why storytelling runs so deep in Iceland. Expect a steady two-hour walk through older parts of the city in all weather — that's what lets the guide move at a pace where the stories actually land.