I walk through Vitruvian Park and see new chalk art. It has been quite a while since I have seen much chalk art, so it is refreshing to see it return. This time it is a rendition of the actor Will Ferrell as Buddy the Elf in the Christmas movie classic “Elf.” I was so inspired by this drawing that I found the movie on the AMC channel and recorded it. It is a heartwarming tale of workaholic dad who doesn’t have time for his family being changed by a 6-foot tall elf — his biological son — who seems to wreak havoc everywhere, but loves everyone. Elves are mythical creatures who are small in stature and often have a caring nature. Let’s find out more about them.
According to Wikipedia, an elf is a type of humanlike supernatural being in Germanic mythology and folklore. In medieval Germanic-speaking cultures, elves seem generally to have been thought of as beings with magical powers and supernatural beauty, ambivalent towards everyday people and capable of either helping or hindering them. However, the details of these beliefs have varied considerably over time and space, and have flourished in both pre-Christian and Christian cultures.
The word “elf” is found throughout the Germanic languages and seems originally to have meant “white being.” Reconstructing the early concept of an elf depends largely on texts, written by Christians, in Old and Middle English, medieval German and Old Norse. These associate elves variously with the gods of Norse mythology, with causing illness, with magic and with beauty and seduction.
After the medieval period, the word “elf” tended to become less common throughout the Germanic languages, losing out to alternative native terms like “zwerg” or “dwarf” in German and “huldra” or "hidden being" in Scandinavian languages, and to loan-words like “fairy” borrowed from French into most of the Germanic languages. Still, beliefs in elves persisted in the early modern period, particularly in Scotland and Scandinavia, where elves were thought of as magically powerful people living — usually invisibly — alongside everyday human communities. They continued to be associated with causing illnesses and with sexual threats. For example, a number of early modern ballads in the British Isles and Scandinavia — originating in the medieval period — describe elves attempting to seduce or abduct human characters.
With urbanization and industrialization in the 19th and 20th centuries, beliefs in elves declined rapidly — though Iceland has some claim to continued popular belief in elves. However, from the early modern period onwards, elves started to be prominent in the literature and art of educated elites. These literary elves were imagined as small, impish beings, with William Shakespeare’s “A Midsummer Night’s Dream” being a key development of this idea. In the 18th century, German Romanticist writers were influenced by this notion of the elf and reimported the English word “elf” into the German language.
From this Romanticist elite culture came the elves of popular culture that emerged in the 19th and 20th centuries. The "Christmas elves" of contemporary popular culture are a relatively recent creation, popularized during the late 19th-century in the United States. Elves entered the 20th-century high-fantasy genre in the wake of works published by authors such as J. R. R. Tolkien; these re-popularized the idea of elves as human-sized and humanlike beings. Elves remain a prominent feature of fantasy books and games nowadays.
Integration into Christian cosmologies
Beliefs about elves have their origins before the conversion to Christianity and associated Christianization of northwest Europe. For this reason, belief in elves has — from the Middle Ages through into recent scholarship — often been labelled "pagan" and a "superstition.” However, almost all surviving textual sources about elves were produced by Christians — whether Anglo-Saxon monks, medieval Icelandic poets, early modern ballad-singers, 19th-century folklore collectors or even 20th-century fantasy authors. Attested beliefs about elves therefore need to be understood as part of Germanic-speakers’ Christian culture and not merely a relic of their pre-Christian religion. Accordingly, investigating the relationship between beliefs in elves and Christian cosmology has been a preoccupation of scholarship about elves both in early times and in modern research.
Historically, people have taken three main approaches to integrating elves into Christian cosmology, all of which are found widely across time and space:
- Identifying elves with the demons of Judaeo-Christian-Mediterranean tradition. For example:
In English-language material: in the Royal Prayer Book from c. 900, “elf” appears as a gloss for "Satan." In the late 14th-century “Wife of Bath’s Tale,” Geoffrey Chaucer equates male elves with incubi — demons which rape sleeping women. In the early modern Scottish witchcraft trials, witnesses' descriptions of encounters with elves were often interpreted by prosecutors as encounters with the devil.
In medieval Scandinavia, Snorri Sturluson wrote in his “Prose Edda” of ljósálfar and døkkálfar or light elves and dark elves, the ljósálfar living in the heavens and the døkkálfar under the earth. The consensus of modern scholarship is that Snorri's elves are based on angels and demons of Christian cosmology.
Elves appear as demonic forces widely in medieval and early modern English, German and Scandinavian prayers.
- Viewing elves as being more or less like people, and more or less outside Christian cosmology. The Icelanders who copied the “Poetic Edda” did not explicitly try to integrate elves into Christian thought. Likewise, the early modern Scottish people who confessed to encountering elves seem not to have thought of themselves as having dealings with the devil. Nineteenth- century Icelandic folklore about elves mostly presents them as a human agricultural community parallel to the visible human community, which may or may not be Christian. It is possible that stories were sometimes told from this perspective as a political act, to subvert the dominance of the church.
- Integrating elves into Christian cosmology without identifying them as demons. The most striking examples are serious theological treatises: the Icelandic “Tíðfordrif” in 1644 by Jón
Guðmundsson lærði or, in Scotland, Robert Kirk's “Secret Commonwealth of Elves, Fauns and Fairies” in 1691. This approach also appears in the Old English poem “Beowulf,” which lists elves among the races springing from Cain’s murder of Abel. The late 13th-century “South English Legendary” and some Icelandic folktales explain elves as angels that sided neither with Lucifer nor with God, and were banished by God to earth rather than hell. One famous Icelandic folktale explains elves as the lost children of Eve.
Elves as causes of illness
The earliest surviving manuscripts mentioning elves in any Germanic language are from Anglo-Saxon England. Medieval English evidence has, therefore, attracted quite extensive research and debate. In Old English, elves are most often mentioned in medical texts which attest to the belief that elves might afflict humans and livestock with illnesses: apparently mostly sharp, internal pains and mental disorders. The most famous of the medical texts is the metrical charm Wið færstice or "against a stabbing pain," from the 10th-century compilation “Lacnunga,” but most of the attestations are in the 10th-century “Bald’s Leechbook” and “Leechbook III.” This tradition continues into later English-language traditions too: elves continue to appear in Middle English medical texts.
Beliefs in elves causing illnesses remained prominent in early modern Scotland, where elves were viewed as being supernaturally powerful people who lived invisibly alongside everyday rural people. Thus, elves were often mentioned in the early modern Scottish witchcraft trials: many witnesses in the trials believed themselves to have been given healing powers or to know of people or animals made sick by elves. Throughout these sources, elves are sometimes associated with the succubus-like supernatural being called the “mare,” a malicious entity in Germanic and Slavic folklore that rides on people's chests while they sleep, bringing on bad dreams or nightmares.
While they may have been thought to cause diseases with magical weapons, elves are more clearly associated in Old English with a kind of magic denoted by Old English “sīden” and “sīdsa,” a cognate with the Old Norse “seiðr,” and also paralleled in the Old Irish “Serglige Con Culainn” or “The Sick-Bed of Cú Chulainn,” also known as “Oenét Emire” or “The Only Jealousy of Emer.” It is a narrative from the Ulster cycle of Irish mythology. It tells of a curse that fell upon the warrior Cú Chulainn as a result of his attacking otherworldly women, and his eventual recovery by reluctantly agreeing to give military aid to those he had wronged. His developing relationship with one of the otherworldly women, Fand, occasions his wife Emer's "only jealousy." By the 14th century, elves were also associated with the arcane practice of alchemy.
In one or two Old English medical texts, elves might be envisaged as inflicting illnesses with projectiles. In the 20th century, scholars often labeled the illnesses elves caused as "elf-shot," but work from the 1990s onwards showed that the medieval evidence for elves being thought to cause illnesses in this way is slender; debate about its significance is ongoing.
The noun “elf-shot” is actually first attested in a Scots poem, "Rowlis Cursing," from around 1500, where "elf schot" is listed among a range of curses to be inflicted on some chicken thieves. The term may not always have denoted an actual projectile: shot could mean "a sharp pain," as well as "projectile." But in early modern Scotland “elf-schot” and other terms like “elf-arrowhead” are sometimes used of neolithic arrowheads, apparently thought to have been made by elves. In a few witchcraft trials, people attest that these arrowheads were used in healing rituals, and occasionally alleged that witches — and perhaps elves — used them to injure people and cattle. Compare with the following excerpt from a 1749–50 ode by William 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.
In Middle English and early modern Scottish evidence, while still appearing as causes of harm and danger, elves appear clearly as humanlike beings. They became associated with medieval chivalric romance traditions of fairies and particularly with the idea of a Fairy Queen. A propensity to seduce or rape people becomes increasingly prominent in the source material. Around the 15th century, evidence starts to appear for the belief that elves might steal human babies and replace them with changelings.
In order to protect themselves and their livestock against malevolent elves, Scandinavians could use a so-called Elf cross, which was carved into buildings or other objects. It existed in two shapes, one was a pentagram, and it was still frequently used in early 20th-century Sweden as painted or carved onto doors, walls and household utensils in order to protect against elves. The second form was an ordinary cross carved onto a round or oblong silver plate. This second kind of elf cross was worn as a pendant in a necklace and in order to have sufficient magic it had to be forged during three evenings with silver, from nine different sources of inherited silver. In some locations it also had to be on the altar of a church for three consecutive Sundays.
Mythological texts
Scholars of Old Norse mythology now focus on references to elves in Old Norse poetry, particularly the Elder Edda. The only character explicitly identified as an elf in classical Eddaic poetry, if any, is Völundr, the protagonist of Völundarkviða. However, elves are frequently mentioned in the alliterating phrase Æsir ok Álfar or “Æsir and elves” and its variants. This was clearly a well-established poetic formula, indicating a strong tradition of associating elves with the group of gods known as the Æsir, or even suggesting that the elves and Æsir were one and the same. The pairing is paralleled in the Old English poem “Wið færstice” and in the Germanic personal name system; moreover, in Skaldic verse the word “elf” is used in the same way as words for gods. Sigvatr Þórðarson's skaldic travelogue “Austrfaravísur,” composed around 1020, mentions an álfablót or “elves' sacrifice” in Edskogen in what is now southern Sweden. There does not seem to have been any clear-cut distinction between humans and gods; like the Æsir, then, elves were presumably thought of as being humanlike and existing in opposition to the giants.
There are hints that the god Freyr was associated with elves. In particular, Álfheimr or "elf-world" is mentioned as being given to Freyr in Grímnismál. Snorri Sturluson identified Freyr as one of the Vanir. Given the link between Freyr and the elves, it has therefore long been suspected that álfar and Vanir are — more or less — different words for the same group of beings. However, this is not uniformly accepted.
Other sources
The legendary sagas— Norse sagas that unlike the Icelanders’ sagas takes place before the colonization of Iceland — tend to focus on elves as legendary ancestors or on heroes' sexual relations with elf-women. Mention of the land of Álfheimr is found in “Heimskringla” while “Þorsteins saga Víkingssonar” recounts a line of local kings who ruled over Álfheimr, who since they had elven blood were said to be more beautiful than most men. According to “Hrólfs saga kraka,” Holfr Kraki's half-sister Skuld was the half-elven child of King Helgi and an elf-woman. Skuld was skilled in witchcraft. Accounts of Skuld in earlier sources, however, do not include this material. The “Þiðreks” saga version of the Nibelungen describes Högni as the son of a human queen and an elf, but no such lineage is reported in the Eddas, “Völsunga saga” or the “Nibelungenlied.” The relatively few mentions of elves in the chivalric sagas tend even to be whimsical.
Christmas elf
With industrialization and mass education, traditional folklore about elves waned, but as the phenomenon of popular culture emerged, elves were reimagined, in large part on the basis of Romantic literary depictions and associated medievalism.
As American Christmas traditions crystallized in the 19th century, the 1823 poem "A Visit fro St. Nicholas" — widely known as "'Twas the Night before Christmas" — characterized St. Nicholas himself as "a right jolly old elf." However, it was his little helpers, inspired partly by folktales like “The Elves and the Shoemaker,” who became known as "Santa's elves;" the processes through which this came about are not well-understood, but one key figure was a Christmas-related publication by the German-American cartoonist Thomas Nast. Thus in the U.S., Canada, United Kingdom and Ireland, the modern children's folklore of Santa Claus typically includes small, nimble, green-clad elves with pointy ears, long noses and pointy hats as Santa's helpers. They make the toys in a workshop located in the North Pole. The role of elves as Santa's helpers has continued to be popular, as evidenced by the success of the popular Christmas movie “Elf.”
Fantasy fiction
A pioneering work of the fantasy genre was “The King of Elfland’s Daughter,” a 1924 novel by Lord Dunsany. The elves of Middle Earth played a central role in Tolkien’s legendarium, notably “The Hobbit” and “The Lord of the Rings;” this legendarium was enormously influential on subsequent fantasy writing. Tolkien's writing had such influence that in the 1960s and afterwards, elves speaking an elvish language similar to those in Tolkien's novels became staple non-human characters in high fantasy works and in fantasy role-playing games. Tolkien also appears to be the first author to have introduced the notion that elves are immortal. Post-Tolkien fantasy elves — which feature not only in novels but also in role-playing games such as Dungeons & Dragons are often portrayed as being wiser and more beautiful than humans, with sharper senses and perceptions as well. They are said to be gifted in magic, mentally sharp and lovers of nature, art and song. They are often skilled archers. A hallmark of many fantasy elves is their pointed ears.
In works where elves are the main characters, such as “The Silmarillion” or Wendy and Richard Pini's comic book series “Elfquest,”, elves exhibit a similar range of behavior to a human cast, distinguished largely by their superhuman physical powers. However, where narratives are more human-centered, as in “The Lord of the Rings,” elves tend to sustain their role as powerful, sometimes threatening, outsiders. Despite the obvious fictionality of fantasy novels and games, scholars have found that elves in these works continue to have a subtle role in shaping the real-life identities of their audiences. For example, elves can function to encode real-world racial others in video games or to influence gender norms through literature.
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