About Arctic Story House
Arctic Story House is a small, independent project that retells Icelandic folklore through knitted, hand-crafted-looking art — trolls, vikings, witches, and huldufólk, all stitched from wool. It grew out of a simple idea: take the þjóðsögur passed down for generations and give them a warm, tactile new look, alongside an original story of our own.
Two people, one story
Arctic Story House is built by two people in Iceland, telling one story, with the tools two people actually have. We use AI throughout — for art, for the site, for translation — because without it, a project this size simply wouldn't exist. We say that plainly, because we believe what matters is how a tool gets used, not whether it was used at all. The story, the world, the choices — that's ours. AI is a tool we use to build it, not a substitute for having something to say.
What we're reaching for is sometimes called slow content: the opposite of the feed. Not built to be scrolled past in a second, optimized for outrage, or engineered to keep you tapping for one more moment. Slow content is made to be sat with — a story you come back to, a poster you actually hang and look at, folklore that took generations to shape and was never meant to be consumed in five seconds.
Our vision is simple: the same technology usually pointed at grabbing your attention can be pointed the other way instead — toward something calmer, made for a person rather than a metric. We're not claiming to have that fully figured out. We're two creators, in Iceland, using the tools available to us as carefully as we know how, trying to make something slower and safer to spend time with than most of what's competing for your attention right now.
Who makes it
Einar is the project's creator, building the world, the site, and the visuals. Katrin Hólm writes the Icelandic-language retellings of the traditional folktales and is the author of Unraveled — The Nornavefur Trilogy, the studio's flagship original story. The "actors" you meet on the Characters page are the real people of Gufubær who play the movie roles in our world's own internal mythology.
What you'll find here
Ninety Icelandic folktales retold so far, a growing gallery of songs and videos, crochet and knitting patterns for the characters, and Unraveled — The Nornavefur Trilogy, our flagship original story about a girl, a dog, and an island quietly coming apart at the seams. Everything traditional here is public-domain 19th-century Icelandic material, freshly retold; everything original is ours.
Questions, corrections, or just want to say hello? Reach us at info@arcticstoryhouse.com, or see the Contact page.