Icelandic folklore heritage contains a wealth of tales about weird animals and ferocious monsters. These creatures terrified Icelanders in prior centuries but have hardly been noticed recently, at least for the most part.

The main folk legends and stories of these monsters from in or around Iceland are recounted in this book, from both oral and written sources. The monsters and their peculiarities are described in the text in a detailed, insightful manner, and the locations where they have been spotted are shown on a map. The illustrations accompanying the text shed additional light on this interesting part of Icelandic folklore.

The artist Jón Baldur Hlíðberg has long been famous for his animal drawings, which have adorned specialist books and a variety of other informative material in recent years. Now he has thrown himself into a new arena. Sigurður Ægisson is a folklorist and theologian by training and has written over the years on the subjects of natural history, folklore and theology. This is the fourth collaboration between the two men: their previous ones are a book on Icelandic birds from 1996 (not translated into English), Icelandic Whales: Past and Present from 1997 and Whales from 2010.