Elf

From New World Encyclopedia
Revision as of 20:09, 14 March 2007 by Nick Perez (talk | contribs)



An elf is a mythical creature of Norse mythology/paganism which still survives in northern European folklore. There is great diversity in how elves have been portrayed; depending on the culture, elves can be depicted as youthful-seeming men and women of great beauty living in forests and other natural places, or small trickster creatures. Following the success of J. R. R. Tolkien's epic work The Lord of the Rings they have become staple characters of modern fantasy.

Etymology

Some linguists believe that elf, álf and related words derive from the Proto-Indo-European root *albh meaning "white", but the Oxford English Dictionary lists the earliest rendition of the name as originating from Old High German, before being transmitted into Middle High German, West Saxon and then finally arriving in English in its current form. [1] Though the exact etymology may be a contention amoung linguists, it is clear that nearly every culture in European history has had its own name for the similar representation of the creatures commonly called elves. Elf can be pluralized both as elves and elfs. Something associated with elves or the qualities of elves is described by the adjectives elven, elvish, elfin or elfish.

Cultural Variations

Norse

The earliest preserved description of elves comes from Norse mythology. In Old Norse they are called álfar (singular, nominative case: álfr). Although the concept itself is not entirely clear in surviving texts and records, elves appear to have been understood as powerful and beautiful human-sized beings. They are commonly referred to collectively as semi-divine beings associated with fertility as well as the cult of the ancestors. As such, elves appear similar to the animistic belief in spirits of nature and of the deceased, common to nearly all human religions; something that, on a side note, is true also for the Old Norse belief in fylgjur and vörðar ("follower" and "warden" spirits, respectively).

The god Freyr, the lord of the light-elves

The earliest references come from Skaldic poetry, the Poetic Edda and legendary sagas. Here elves are linked with the Æsir, particularly through the common phrase "Æsir and the elves", which presumably means "all the gods". The elves have been compared or identified with the Vanir (fertility gods) by some scholars.[2] However, in the Alvíssmál ("The Sayings of All-Wise"), the elves are considered distinct from both the Vanir and the Æsir, as revealed by a series of comparative names in which Æsir, Vanir, and elves are given their own versions for various words in a reflection of their individual racial preferences. Possibly, the words designate a difference in status between the major fertility gods (the Vanir) and the minor ones (the elves). Grímnismál relates that the Van Freyr was the lord of Álfheimr (meaning "elf-world"), the home of the light-elves. Lokasenna relates that a large group of Æsir and elves had assembled at Ægir's court for a banquet. Several minor forces, the servants of gods, are presented such as Byggvir and Beyla, who belonged to Freyr, the lord of the elves, and they were probably elves, since they were not counted among the gods. Two other mentioned servants were Fimafeng (who was murdered by Loki) and Eldir.

Some speculate that Vanir and elves belong to an earlier Nordic Bronze Age religion of Scandinavia, and were later replaced by the Æsir as main gods. Others (most notably Georges Dumézil) argue that the Vanir were the gods of the common Norsemen, and the Æsir those of the priest and warrior castes (see also Nerthus).

Scandinavian elves

Little älvor, playing with Tomtebobarnen. From Children of the Forest (1910) by Swedish author and illustrator Elsa Beskow.

In Scandinavian folklore, which is a later blend of Norse mythology and elements of Christian mythology, an elf is called elver in Danish, alv in Norwegian, and alv or älva in Swedish (the first is masculine, the second feminine).

In Denmark and Sweden, the elves appear as beings distinct from the vetter, even though the border between them is diffuse. The alf found in the fairy tale The Elf of the Rose by Danish author H. C. Andersen is so tiny that he can have a rose blossom for his home, and has "wings that reached from his shoulders to his feet". Yet, Andersen also wrote about elvere in The Elfin Hill, which were more alike those of traditional Danish folklore, who were beautiful females, living in hills and boulders, capable of dancing a man to death. Like the huldra in Norway and Sweden, they are hollow when seen from the back.

The elves are typically pictured as fair-haired, white-clad and like most creatures in Scandinavian folklore can be really nasty when offended. In the stories, they often play the role of disease-spirits. The most common, though also most harmless case was various irritating skin rashes, which were called älvablåst (elven blow) and could be cured by a forceful counter-blow (a handy pair of bellows was most useful for this purpose). Skålgropar, a particular kind of petroglyph found in Scandinavia, were known in older times as älvkvarnar (elven mills), pointing to their believed usage. One could appease the elves by offering them a treat (preferably butter) placed into an elven mill – perhaps a custom with roots in the Old Norse álfablót.

The elves could be seen dancing over meadows, particularly at night and on misty mornings. They left a kind of circle where they had danced, which were called älvdanser (elf dances) or älvringar (elf circles), and to urinate in one was thought to cause venereal diseases. Typically, it consisted of a ring of small mushrooms, but there was also another kind of elf circle:

On lake shores, where the forest met the lake, you could find elf circles. They were round places where the grass had been flattened like a floor. Elves had danced there. By Lake Tisaren, I have seen one of those. It could be dangerous and one could become ill if one had trodden over such a place or if one destroyed anything there.[3]

If a human watched the dance of the elves, he would discover that even though only a few hours seemed to have passed, many years had passed in the real world, a remote parallel to the Irish sídhe.) In a song from the late Middle Ages about Olaf Liljekrans, the elven queen invites him to dance. He refuses, he knows what will happen if he joins the dance and he is on his way home to his own wedding. The queen offers him gifts, but he declines. She threatens to kill him if he does not join, but he rides off and dies of the disease she sent upon him, and his young bride dies of a broken heart.[4]

However, the elves were not exclusively young and beautiful. In the Swedish folktale Little Rosa and Long Leda, an elvish woman (älvakvinna) arrives in the end and saves the heroine, Little Rose, on condition that the king's cattle no longer graze on her hill. She is described as an old woman and by her aspect people saw that she belonged to the subterraneans.[5]

German elves

What remained of the belief in elves in German folklore was the idea that they were mischievous pranksters that could cause disease to cattle and people, and bring bad dreams to sleepers. The German word for nightmare, Albtraum, means "elf dream". The archaic form Albdruck means "elf pressure"; it was believed that nightmares were a result of an elf sitting on the dreamer's head. This aspect of German elf-belief largely corresponds to the Scandinavian belief in the mara. It is also similar to the legends regarding incubi and succubi.[6]

As noted above, an elven king occasionally appears among the predominantly female elves in Denmark and Sweden. In the German middle-age epic the Nibelungenlied, a dwarf named Alberich, which literally translates as "elf-sovereign", further contributing to the elf–dwarf confusion, plays an important role in the story.

The legend of Der Erlkönig appears to have originated in fairly recent times in Denmark and Goethe based his poem on "Erlkönigs Tochter" ("Erlkönig's Daughter"), a Danish work translated into German by Johann Gottfried Herder. The Erlkönig's nature has been the subject of some debate. The name translates literally from the German as "Alder King" rather than its common English translation, "Elf King" (which would be rendered as Elfenkönig in German). It has often been suggested that Erlkönig is a mistranslation from the original Danish elverkonge or elverkonge, which does mean "elf king".

According to German and Danish folklore, the Erlkönig appears as an omen of death, much like the banshee in Irish mythology. Unlike the banshee, however, the Erlkönig will appear only to the person about to die. His form and expression also tells the person what sort of death they will have: a pained expression means a painful death, a peaceful expression means a peaceful death. This aspect of the legend was immortalised by Goethe in his poem Der Erlkönig, later set to music by Schubert.

In the Brothers Grimm fairy tale Der Schuhmacher und die Heinzelmännchen, a group of naked, one foot tall beings called Heinzelmännchen help a shoemaker in his work. When he rewards their work with little clothes, they are so delighted, that they run away and are never seen again. Even though Heinzelmännchen are akin to beings such as kobolds and dwarves, the tale has been translated to English as The Shoemaker & the Elves, (probably due to the similarity of the henzelmannchen to Scottish brownies) and is echoed in J. K. Rowling's Harry Potter stories (see House-elf).

English elves

Poor little birdie teased, by Victorian era illustrator Richard Doyle depicts the traditional view of an elf from later English folklore as a diminutive woodland humanoid.

The word elf came into English as the Old English word ælf (pl. ælfe, with regional and chronological variants such as ylfe and ælfen), and so came to Britain originally with the Anglo-Saxons.[7] Words for the nymphs of the Greek and Roman mythos were translated by Anglo-Saxon scholars with ælf and variants on it.[8]

Although our early English evidence is slight, there are reasons to think that Anglo-Saxon elves (ælfe) were similar to early elves in Norse mythology: human-like, human-sized supernatural beings, predominantly if not exclusively male, capable of helping or harming the people who encountered them. In particular, the pairing of æsir and álfar found in the Poetic Edda is mirrored in the Old English charm Wið færstice and in the distinctive occurrence of the cognate words os and ælf in Anglo-Saxon personal names (e.g. Oswald, Ælfric[9]).

In relation to the beauty of the Norse elves, some further evidence is given by old English words such as ælfsciene ("elf-beautiful"), used of seductively beautiful Biblical women in the Old English poems Judith and Genesis A.[10] Although elves could be considered to be beautiful and potentially helpful beings in some sections of English-speaking society throughout its history, Anglo-Saxon evidence also attests to alignments of elves with demons, as for example in line 112 of Beowulf. On the other hand, oaf is simply a variant of the word elf, presumably originally referring to a changeling or to someone stupefied by elvish enchantment.


Elf-shot (or elf-bolt or elf-arrow) is a word found in Scotland and Northern England, first attested in a manuscript of about the last quarter of the 16th century. Although first attested in the sense 'sharp pain caused by elves', it is later attested denoting Neolithic flint arrow-heads, which by the 17th century seem to have been attributed in Scotland to elvish folk, and which were used in healing rituals, and alleged to be used by witches (and perhaps elves) to injure people and cattle.[11] So too a tangle in the hair was called an elf-lock, as being caused by the mischief of the elves, and sudden paralysis was sometimes attributed to elf-stroke. Compare with the following excerpt from an 1750 ode by Willam Collins:

There every herd, by sad experience, knows
How, winged with fate, their elf-shot arrows fly,
When the sick ewe her summer food forgoes,
Or, stretched on earth, the heart-smit heifers lie.[12]

The elf makes many appearances in ballads of English and Scottish origin, as well as folk tales, many involving trips to Elphame or Elfland (the Álfheim of Norse mythology), a mystical realm which is sometimes an eerie and unpleasant place. The elf is occasionally portrayed in a positive light, such as the Queen of Elphame in the ballad Thomas the Rhymer, but many examples exist of elves of sinister character, frequently bent on rape and murder, as in the Tale of Childe Rowland, or the ballad Lady Isabel and the Elf-Knight, in which the Elf-Knight bears away Isabel to murder her. Most instances of elves in ballads are male; the only commonly encountered female elf is the Queen of Elfland, who appears in Thomas the Rhymer and The Queen of Elfland's Nourice, in which a woman is abducted to be a wet-nurse to the queen's baby, but promised that she may return home once the child is weaned. In none of these cases is the elf a spritely character with pixie-like qualities.

English folktales of the early modern period typically portray elves as small, elusive people with mischievous personalities. They are not evil but might annoy humans or interfere in their affairs. They are sometimes said to be invisible. In this tradition, elves became more or less synonymous with the fairies that originated from native British mythology, for example, the Welsh Ellyll (plural Ellyllon) and Y Dynon Bach Têg. Lompa Lompa the Gigantic Elf from Plemurian Forest.

"To make my small elves coats; and some keep back." One of Arthur Rackham's illustrations to William Shakespeare's A Midsummer Night's Dream.[13]

Successively, the word elf, as well as literary term fairy, evolved to a general denotation of various nature spirits like pwcca, hobgoblin, Robin Goodfellow, the Scots brownie, and so forth. These terms, like their relatives in other European languages, are no longer clearly distinguished in popular folklore.

Significant for the distancing of the concept of elves from its mythological origins was the influence from literature. In Elizabethan England, William Shakespeare imagined elves as little people. He apparently considered elves and fairies to be the same race. In Henry IV, part 1, act II, scene iv, he has Falstaff call Prince Henry, "you starveling, you elfskin!", and in his A Midsummer Night's Dream, his elves are almost as small as insects. On the other hand, Edmund Spenser applies elf to full-sized beings in The Faerie Queene.

The influence of Shakespeare and Michael Drayton made the use of elf and fairy for very small beings the norm. In Victorian literature, elves usually appeared in illustrations as tiny men and women with pointed ears and stocking caps. An example is Andrew Lang's fairy tale Princess Nobody (1884), illustrated by Richard Doyle, where fairies are tiny people with butterfly wings, whereas elves are tiny people with red stocking caps. There were exceptions to this rule however, such as the full-sized elves who appear in Lord Dunsany's The King of Elfland's Daughter.

There is a legend concerning the Buckthorn vows that if one sprinkles Buckthorn in a circle and then dances within it under a full Moon, an elf will appear. The dancer must notice the elf and say, 'Halt and grant my boon!' before the creature flees. The elf will then grant one wish.

Elves are sometimes seen as chubby little creatures who are very good and kind, and are hardly ever bad. They live in little places in the forest like in toadstools. They have lots of friends and help look after all the animals in the forest. These type of elves are sometimes known as other magical creatures too, such as pixies, gnomes, fairies and others. Only some people imagine elves like this, others imagine them in different ways. They are however sometimes seen as like humans, but with different features, and dress in clothing made out of natural materials and they live off things completely out of the forest.

Modern elves

Elves at Christmas

In the USA, Canada, and England, the modern children's folklore of Santa Claus typically includes diminutive, green-clad elves with pointy ears and long noses as Santa's assistants. They wrap Christmas gifts and make toys in a workshop located in the North Pole. In this portrayal, elves slightly resemble nimble and delicate versions of the dwarves of Norse mythology.

The vision of the small but crafty Christmas elf has come to influence modern popular conception of elves, and sits side by side with the fantasy elves following Tolkien's work (see below). The American cookie company Keebler has long advertised that its cookies are made by elves in a hollow tree, and Kellogg's, who happens to now be the owner of Keebler, uses the elves of Snap, Crackle, and Pop as mascots of Rice Krispies cereal, and the role of elves as Santa's helpers has continued to be popular, as evidenced by the success of the movie Elf. It should be noted that these elves are referred to as elfish, as apposed to elven.

Elves in modern fantasy

Modern fantasy literature has revived the elves as a race of semi-divine beings of human stature. Fantasy elves are different from Norse elves, but are more akin to that older mythology than to folktale elves – they are unlikely to sneak in at night and help a cobbler mend his shoes. The grim Norse-style elves of human size introduced Poul Anderson's fantasy novel The Broken Sword from 1954 are one of the first precursors to modern fantasy elves, although they are overshadowed (and preceded) by the Elves of the twentieth-century philologist and fantasy writer J. R. R. Tolkien. Though Tolkien originally conceived his Elves as more fairy-like than they afterwards became, he also based them on the god-like and human-sized ljósálfar of Norse mythology. His Elves were conceived as a race of beings similar in appearance to humans but fairer and wiser, with greater spiritual powers, keener senses, and a closer empathy with nature. They are great smiths and fierce warriors on the side of good. Tolkien's Elves of Middle-earth are immortal in the sense that they are not vulnerable to disease or the effects of old age. Although they can be killed in battle like humans and may alternately wither away from grief, their spirits only pass to the blessed land in the west called Valinor, whereas humans' souls leave the world entirely.

Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings (1954-1955) became astoundingly popular and was much imitated. In the 1960s and afterwards, elves similar to those in Tolkien's novels became staple non-human characters in high fantasy works and in fantasy role-playing games. Tolkien's Elves were enemies of goblins (orcs) and had a longstanding quarrel with the Dwarves; these motifs often reappear in Tolkien-inspired works. Tolkien is also responsible for reviving the older and less-used terms elven and elvish rather than Edmund Spenser's invented elfin and elfish. He probably preferred the word elf over fairy because elf is of Anglo-Saxon origin while fairy entered English from French.[citation needed]

Post-Tolkien fantasy elves (popularized by the Dungeons & Dragons role-playing game) tend to be more beautiful and wiser than humans, with sharper senses and perceptions. Often elves do not possess facial or body hair, and are consequently perceived to be androgynous. A hallmark of fantasy elves is also their long and pointed ears (a convention begun with a note of Tolkien's that the ears of elves were "leaf-shaped"). The length and shape of these ears varies depending on the artist or medium in question. For example, while most elves in Western fantasy have ears only slightly longer than humans', in various other areas of fantasy they are also depicted to have very long ears that stand out at dramatic angles from their heads. Half-elves and divergent races of elves, such as high elves and dark elves, were also popularized at this time; in particular, the evil drow of Dungeons & Dragons have inspired the dark elves of many other works of fantasy.

Fair elves of the Tolkien mold have become standardized staple characters of modern fantasy to such an extent that diverging from the established conceptions of how an elf is supposed to look and behave has become an end in itself for certain works of fantasy which aspire to innovation. For examples of the various ways modern fantasy writers have achieved this, see the main article. It is worth noting that those things described as being of or related to these fair elves are referred to as "elven", as opposed to "elfish" (a term more closely associated with the sprite-like elves of medieval conception).

References
ISBN links support NWE through referral fees

  1. "Elf" The Oxford English Dictionary. Oxford University Press: Oxford, 1971
  2. Hall, Alaric Timothy Peter. "The Meanings of Elf and Elves in Medieval England" Ph.D. Disertation, University of Glasgow, 2004, [[1]]
  3. Cite error: Invalid <ref> tag; no text was provided for refs named He-1
  4. Keightley, Thomas (1870). The Fairy Mythology.  provides two translated versions of the song: Sir Olof in Elve-Dance and The Elf-Woman and Sir Olof.
  5. (1984) "Lilla Rosa och Långa Leda", Svenska folksagor. Stockholm: Almquist & Wiksell Förlag AB, 158. 
  6. Hall 2004, pp 125-26
  7. Hall 2004, esp. pp. 212-16
  8. Hall 2004, pp. 81-92
  9. Hall 2004, esp. pp. 56-66
  10. Hall 2004, pp. 71-76, et passim
  11. Hall, Alaric. 2005. 'Getting Shot of Elves: Healing, Witchcraft and Fairies in the Scottish Witchcraft Trials', Folklore, 116 (2005), 19-36.
  12. Collins, Willam. 1775. An Ode On The Popular Superstitions Of The Highlands Of Scotland, Considered As The Subject Of Poetry.
  13. http://classics.freehomepage.com/midsummer/midsummer.html

Fairy tales with elves in them include:


Credits

New World Encyclopedia writers and editors rewrote and completed the Wikipedia article in accordance with New World Encyclopedia standards. This article abides by terms of the Creative Commons CC-by-sa 3.0 License (CC-by-sa), which may be used and disseminated with proper attribution. Credit is due under the terms of this license that can reference both the New World Encyclopedia contributors and the selfless volunteer contributors of the Wikimedia Foundation. To cite this article click here for a list of acceptable citing formats.The history of earlier contributions by wikipedians is accessible to researchers here:

The history of this article since it was imported to New World Encyclopedia:

Note: Some restrictions may apply to use of individual images which are separately licensed.