The story of is about freedom and oppression. Set in Iceland in the dark eighteenth-century, it relates the adventures of a young farmer whose horses - symbols of his independence - are missing. In his search for the horses and his freedom, he journeys across the uninhabited wastelands of the mountainous interior of the country. Here he encounters the legendary figures of folk tradition. The elf-maiden, , accompanies him on his way across the highlands. She is the incarnation of the dreams woven by the farmers of Iceland, poverty stricken and oppressed - dreams of a better and more humane way of life, envisaged as the lot of supernatural beings, concealed in the harsh, dramatic landscape of Iceland.