"Allegorical figure of Iceland," from The Pilgrim of Scandinavia by Charles John Spencer George Canning, 1875.

"The giant rocks" from The Icelander's Sword by Sabine Baring-Gould, 1894.

Though few people believe in elves outside of Iceland (where the majority entertains the possibility that the "hidden people" exist), elfish mischief afflicts every high-tech society that has traded the Otherworld of folklore for the virual world of computers.  We call a sudden malfunction a "glitch," an acronym for "gremlins loose in the computer housing" (Nigel P. Cook, Practical Digital Electronics, 2003.  Similarly, Safire's Political Dictionary defines a glitch as "the mischief of a computerized gremlin").  Gremlins are, of course, troublemaking sprites, namesakes of those pesky unexplained characters that appear in text documents.  One might be tempted to posit that the folk of fairyland believe in themselves, even if non-Icelanders daren't allow for the possibility (all evidence to the contrary).  Meanwhile, let us recall this nuggest of wisdom from How to Believe in Your Elf: "Know the enemy and know your elf."