Elves

Elves are cool, man.

Orlando Bloom

As far as mythical beings go, elves have a pretty varied press: supernaturally beautiful but also mischievous and capricious. Trolls and goblins are ugly or grotesque, scorned and despised, fairies have been downgraded from playful demons to wand-wielding, saccharine dispensers of good fortune, gnomes were once respected earth-spirits but are now little more than odd-looking ornaments ‘fishing’ in garden ponds and dwarfs may be the loyal smiths and miners of Middle Earth, but they are also often ‘poison’ or Disneyfied into being Snow White’s flunkeys. Elves on the other hand, have long been at the attractive end of the supernatural spectrum – the Old English adjective ielfsciene ‘gorgeous’ is literally ‘as beautiful as an elf’ – but they have also had something of an image makeover in modern times. This is partly down to sympathetic descriptions of elves in literature and on the silver screen, particularly J.R.R. Tolkien’s depiction of Legolas, an elven prince in The Lord of the Rings. A fleet-footed, keen-sighted warrior, Legolas is indomitable in battle, but also has a sensitive side and can sense the memory of ancient elvish civilisations from standing stones. In Peter Jackson’s film adaptation of the novel (2001-2003), he’s played by Orlando Bloom, so he’s quite a good-looking boy, too.

Elves have a prominent place in Germanic folklore, appearing in the classic works of Old Norse literature, the Poetic Edda and Snorri Sturluson’s 13th-century Prose Edda. The latter features two types of elves: Ljósálfar ‘Light Elves’, who live in the heavenly realm of Álfheimr ‘Elfland’ and Dökkálfar ‘Dark Elves’, who live underground, a duality possibly influenced by the angels and demons of Christian cosmology. Elves crop up in numerous other folktales, such as Hans Christian Andersen’s The Elfin Hill, which features beautiful dancing elf maidens who live inside the hill, but are hollow when viewed from behind, and the Brothers Grimm fairy tale, The Elves and the Shoemaker, in which helpful elves come at night to help a poor shoemaker make perfect shoes and are given new clothes and shoes to wear in return. (Elves also accompany Santa Claus and help him to wrap up Christmas presents, or stagger around the office Christmas party looking remarkably like your inebriated colleagues wearing pointy hats. Take no notice of this heresy, it’s a patently ridiculous Victorian invention – they’re not real elves.)

Words for elf are similar across Germanic languages, e.g. Norwegian alv, German alp and Danish and Dutch alf. Linguists have traced these cognates back to a common Proto-Germanic ancestor *albiz, which in turn stems from Proto-Indo-European *albhos- ‘white’, elf seemingly ‘white being’ in its original meaning. Elf is therefore from the same word family as Spanish and Italian alba ‘dawn’, a ‘shining light’ and Slavic words for ‘swan’, literally ‘white bird’, such as Polish łabędź, Czech labuť and Russian лебедь (lebedʹ), which is cognate to Old English elfetu (also ‘swan’). This survives as the first component of several English place-names, such as Altham, Lancashire ‘meadow inhabited by swans’ and Elveden, Suffolk ‘swan valley’. More obviously, *albiz links elf to albino and albumen ‘egg-white’ and the Latin name for ‘England’, Albion, probably because the white cliffs of Dover were the first sight that would greet those arriving in England from the Channel. Elf is also a cousin of album – in Roman times albums were boards or tablets painted or chalked white, upon which public notices and lists of names were inscribed, and auburn, which used to mean ‘yellowish-white’ or ‘flaxen’. William Caxton (1422-c.1491), the first person to introduce a printing press into England, explains in one of his translations that ‘the rays of the sun make the hair of a man auburn or blond’ (Myrrour of Worlde ii. xvii. 103) – but the word changed sense due to the influence of Middle English brun ‘brown’ and ended up meaning ‘reddish-brown’.

In early Germanic cultures, elves are often viewed as being malicious or spiteful – according to the Anglo-Saxons, ielfsiden ‘elf magic’ could make a victim ielfig ‘insane’, literally, ‘elfy’. Elves were also thought to be incubi, male demons who have sexual intercourse with sleeping women – incubus comes from Latin incubo ‘that which lies down on someone while they sleep’. (However, by the time of Chaucer’s Wife of Bath’s Tale, written at the close of the 14th century, the elves have been dislodged from their position as incubi by licensed beggars and holy friars who have taken to dishonouring women ‘in every bush and under every tree’.) In German, Alptraum (also Albtraum) ‘elf-dream’ means ‘nightmare’, because folklore states that nightmares are caused by an elf sitting on a person’s chest when they are asleep – Old English had a parallel form ælfadl, literally ‘elf disease’, also meaning ‘nightmare’, which could only be abated by the judicious use of ælfþone ‘nightshade’, an elvish cure. Common ailments were also attributed to elves, as Old English ælfsogoða ‘elf’s hiccup’, possibly used to describe both hiccups and heartburn and Middle English elf-shot ‘illness caused by elves’ illustrate. Other evidence for the pernicious nature of these pesky elves comes from the 16th-century, when the term elf-lock ‘tangled mass of hair’ (the elves’ handiwork, again) and the expression play the elf ‘act in a malicious manner’ were in common use. Elves were also believed to steal children, often substituting foolish, defective or otherwise undesirable changelings in their place. These changelings were known as oafs – a word which is still used to describe the clumsy or uncultured (or just northerners, if you live among the ivory towers of Cambridge). Oaf closes the elfish circle as it is derived from Old Norse alfr ‘silly person’, a word which also means – you’ve guessed it – ‘elf’.

Despite their malign reputation, elves were respected as well as feared for their eldritch (formerly elphrish) magical powers, which enabled them to live invisibly among human communities. It was considered wise to stay on their good side, thus Ælf was a popular element in Anglo-Saxon names. The female given names Ælfġiefu ‘elf-gift’ and Ælfflæd ‘elf beauty’ may have died out, but Ælfwine ‘elf-friend’ survives as Alvin and Ælfræd ‘elf counsel’ is today’s Alfred. Similarly, Old High German Alberich ‘ruler of elves, elf-king‘ produced Aubrey, Auberon and Oberon,  while Oliver may be an Old French loan of Middle Low German Alfihar ‘elf-host, elf-army’.

Belief in elves persisted into the early modern period, especially in Scotland and Scandinavia and until even more recently in Iceland and the Faroe Islands, where they are known as huldufólk ‘hidden people’. In fact, surveys reveal that a significant minority of today’s Icelanders think that elves are real, and one educational institution based in Reykjavik, the Álfaskólinn ‘Elf School’, still runs courses about the thirteen types of elves that are said to live in the country. Belief in their mischievous streak persists – elves have been blamed for sabotaging infrastructure and construction projects and for causing rocks to rain down on residential streets, but on the other hand, Icelanders are very keen to look after their elves and want no harm to come to them. In 1982, 150 people went to the Keflavik NATO airforce base to check that the elves were not being endangered by the American phantom jets there, and on more than one occasion, road-building has been halted or roads have been diverted to ensure that the habitat of elves is not damaged.