At least there wasn’t a taniwha

Michael Lewis reports for Vanity Fair from Reykjavík, “where men are men, and the women seem to have completely given up on them”, and tells how Alcoa, the biggest aluminium company in Iceland, wanted to build a giant smelting plant in 2004, but first:

it had to defer to a government expert to scour the enclosed plant site and certify that no elves were on or under it. It was a delicate corporate situation, an Alcoa spokesman told me, because they had to pay hard cash to declare the site elf-free but, as he put it, “we couldn’t as a company be in a position of acknowledging the existence of hidden people.”