Margit Sandemo is quite a remarkable old lady. When the precis of a profile in The Guardian starts like this you know you have to read on:

Margit Sandemo, the author of 172 novels, has sold nearly 40m books. But that's not the only extraordinary thing about her. Now 84, she still goes whitewater rafting and, she tells Emine Saner, she once killed a man who tried to rape her

You'd be right to read on, as that isn't the most remarkable par of her story, but we'll build up to that.

So what about these books and why have I never heard of her before? She is in the country to promote the release of the translation of the first book of her Legend of the Ice People saga, which is told over 47 books, and the translations will appear at the rate of one a month - just keeping up sounds like a heroic achievement. Most of her output seems to be historical fantasy, with a dash of "bonkbuster" about them:

Few people in this country have heard of Sandemo, but across Scandinavia she has sold nearly 40m books.

She was 40 when she wrote her first book (she had previously been an actor, painter and sculptor), and a publisher in Oslo suggested that she run it as a serial in a magazine. "At that time I was a snob - I thought weekly magazines were low. Then I thought, why not? I discovered a new world of people. They wrote letters to me - very bad spelling, but they had wonderful hearts." She has now written 172 novels, churning out four a year on an old typewriter. One year she wrote seven. "That was the year I also answered 10,000 letters. I was going senile! My doctor said, 'You are going to write no more than four books, and don't answer any more letters.'" She didn't listen. Is she ever worried she will run out of ideas? "That is a luxury problem for me - I have too many ideas. One book I wrote in 11 days - it was like I was in a trance. My husband had to put food in front of me and put me in bed [to stop me from writing through the night]."

Her books, it is fair to say - unlike those of her grandfather, the Norwegian dramatist Bjornstjerne Bjornson - will never win her a Nobel prize. She could be Scandinavia's answer to Barbara Cartland, just with more magic and monsters. And sex. "When I started to write this saga, the publisher said I must have sex in there," she says, her blue eyes glittering. "With the first book, I was blushing as I typed. Then, when I came to book number 25, they had to censor it! They had to take two pages away."

She laughs.

Her name automatically raises a lot of literary snobbery in Scandinavia - my Swedish friend, Helena, says that some libraries refused to stock Sandemo's books (according to Sandemo, this was because they were worried people would steal them). The critics are not kind, but Sandemo says she doesn't care. "Those people who think they know what taste people should have, they are difficult. 'This is not a good book,' they say. I don't care if there are people who say it is not good literature, because I just think of my many readers who are more important."

With 40 million books sold in Scandinavia, it does make you wonder.

She also sounds tough as nails:

More remarkably, Norwegian-born Sandemo survived childhood trauma, claiming that, when she was 11, she killed a man when he attempted to rape her. She is 84, but goes whitewater rafting every year in Iceland.

OK enough of this, what about the reason we are discussing her here? Well as the title says, she can see things that a lot of people can't:

She says she has a guardian angel called Virgil, whom she has seen on numerous occasions and I had read that she considers herself a psychic. "I'm not psychic, but I can see people from other dimensions," she says, gathering her English. "I see ghosts and I have seen little people." Like humans, she says, but about four feet high; pixies, I suppose. "Once, there were nine of us in the house and two dogs, and the dogs' hackles raised and the people were stopped in their tracks." She says a group of "little people" walked in. "Not everyone saw those people, but about half of us did. They went straight to a woman who was sitting on the sofa, and they told her, 'You must remember that this Earth is not only yours. It is ours too, and please don't destroy it.'" She sits back in her chair. "It was very wise of them." Sandemo, simply, is quite wonderful.

I'd have to agree.

It does raise some side issues. The skeptic could argue that she is clearly creative (and potentially fantasy prone?) and all the Little People do is turn up and spout the kind of meaningless platitudes we see coming from "aliens" all the time. On the flip-side it fits with all the fairy reports in Janet Bord's book, that we mentioned a while back, including a sighting of "little people" who slowly faded away as well as the numerous almost unbelievably stereotypical gnome sightings we have discussed before. I would like to think that some people are more sensitive to such things than others and that children (and Scandinavians?) are just less shy about discussing such matters that are completely counter to the consensus view of reality, but that would imply the little buggers are hiding from me (I must be a horrible cynic or been voted, by the fairyfolk, "Most likely to try and get an elf in a sack (and we ain't just talking Liv Tyler)"), which is not a pleasant prospect, although I would stick a gnome in a bag if I saw one, so I can't blame them I suppose.

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