"There was formerly on the lands of Haga a nobleman named Sigvard Fostre, who had to do with a Hill-woman. He promised her faithfully that he would take care to have the child received into the bosom of the church. In due time the woman came with her child and laid it on the churchyard wall, and along with it a gilded cup and a holy robe (presents she intended making to the church for the baptism of her child), and then retired a little way. The pastor inquired who acknowledged himself the father of the child. Sigvard, perhaps, out of shame, did not venture to acknowledge himself. The clerk now asked him if it should be baptised or not. Sigvard said 'No,' lest by assenting he should be proved to be the father. The infant then was left where it was, untouched and unbaptised. The mother, filled with rage, snatched up her babe and the cup, but left the vestment, the remains of which may still be seen in Haga. That woman foretold and inflicted a singular disease on Sigvard and his posterity till the ninth generation, and several of his descendants are to this day afflicted with it. Andrew Gudmund (from which I am the seventh in descent) had an affair of the same kind. He also refused to have the child baptised, and he and his posterity have suffered a remarkable disease, of which very many of them have died; but some, by the interposition of good men, have escaped the deserved punishment." The fullest account we have of the Icelandic Elves or Dwarfs is contained in the following passage of the Ecclesiastical History of Iceland of the learned Finnus Johannæus. "As we have not as yet," says he, "spoken a single word about the very ancient, and I know not whether more ridiculous or perverse, persuasion of our forefathers about semigods, this seems the proper place for saying a few words about this so celebrated figment, as it was chiefly in this period it attained its acmè, and it was believed as a true and necessary article of faith, that there are genii or semigods, called in our language Alfa and Alfa-folk. "Authors vary respecting their essence and origin. Some hold that they have been created by God immediately and without the intervention of parents, like some kinds of spirits: others maintain that they are sprung from Adam, but before the creation of Eve:[218] lastly, some refer them to another race of men, or to a stock of præ-Adamites. Some bestow on them not merely a human body, but an immortal soul: others assign them merely mortal breath (_spiritum_) instead of a soul, whence a certain blockhead,[219] in an essay written by him respecting them, calls them our half-kin (_half-kyn_).