The Filaments of Fiction: Elves Through the Ages and Pages

Were I to ask you to imagine an elf, the image likely to come to mind will be based on nearly a century of modern fantasy: a tall, graceful, magical being with flowing locks and pointed ears, probably a little woodsy, and more than likely not handy with a bow and arrow. It’s Legolas, or Galadriel, or Will Ohmsford, or maybe even Drizzt Do’Urden.

Have you ever wondered where the archetypal elven image came from?

The Germanic roots of the Old English word elf (“alf” or “nightmare”) points us toward the Norse myths, or at least what we know of them. The Prose Edda, our best source for these old tales, was authored by a medieval monk named Snorri Sturluson hundreds upon hundreds of years after the Norse people converted to Christianity. There’s no way to know how authentic Snorri’s stories were, and to what extent his religious beliefs colored his account.

The Prose Edda divides elves them into two types: the Ljósálfar, or light elves, and Dökkálfar, or dark elves. The light elves live in Alfheim, the land of the elves, and the dark elves live underground. Sturluson may have created this division himself, seeing it as analogous to the Christian myth of heaven and hell. Regardless, we can probably thank him for fantasy’s various dark elves, like the Drow of Dungeons & Dragons.

Alaric Hall’s Elves in Anglo-Saxon England further illuminates the place of the elf in the Scandinavian mind. They were considered supernatural spirits aligned with the gods, or possibly even gods themselves. The elves and their godly cohorts stood apart from the monsters of Norse myth, like trolls and giants. Our own modern elves are traditionally conceived as being the enemies of orcs and other troll-like beings, and while it might be an oversimplification to say this is where that comes from, it is probably an inspiration.

The Germanic people — the Angles, Saxons, and all the rest — brought their elf stories with them when they came to (or conquered) Britain, and when the island was re-Christianized, the elves became associated with demons and Satan. There were prayers written to protect the faithful from malevolent elves, who were blamed for misfortune of all sorts. Sickness was sometimes blamed on the elves, who were rumored to be armed “elfshot”: invisible, poisoned arrows.

New ideas about who or what elves were eventually came into vogue. Theologians and other scholars suggested that they were once angels who were banished to Earth for refusing to take a side in the war between Heaven and Hell. Others thought that perhaps they were brought into being by an ancient act of Biblical sin, like Cain’s murder of Abel. Beautiful but powerful women were also characterized as elves, as opposed to early conceptions of the beings as solely masculine.

Moving on toward the Renaissance and Enlightenment, elves became synonymous with the supernatural beings of other cultures, including French fairies and Greek nymphs. Ancient Celtic ideas about the supernatural world were absorbed into elf lore, as well. Elves also came to reflect contemporary human society, with kings, queens, and royal courts of their own. In this way, elves became a catch-all for any kind of supernatural, human-like being, from a ghost to a pixie or demon.

Belief in elves waned toward the twentieth century, but stories about them remained popular. The Brothers Grimm, Andrew Lang, and other writers collected these old “fairy tales” to preserve for future generations. These collections proved to be very popular with contemporary readers, and continue to be so today.

In 1924, Lord Dunsany published The King of Elfland’s Daughter, a work considered to be the first to feature what we might consider the modern version of the elf. In Dunsany’s tale, these glamorous, magical beings live in a timeless realm parallel to our own. Tolkien picked up where Dunsany left off in 1937 with The Hobbit, a book that further codified our contemporary conception of the elf.

In Tolkien’s hands, elves became more than just shadowy background characters. They weren’t monsters or ghosts: They had their own distinct nations and cultures, and motives of their own. This was revolutionary, really, and paved the way for our modern elven protagonists. The true genius of Tolkien was that he codified who and what an elf was in the absence of any true consensus. He saw an opportunity to make a myth and he took it.

While Tolkien laid the foundation, in the decades since, many wonderful writers have brought their own perspective to elfdom, reinterpreting these ancient beings in new and imaginative ways. Authors like Poul Anderson and Terry Brooks have further built upon this legacy of folklore and fantasy, expanding it and making elves their own.

That’s the nature of myth: it is forever being reinvented, and our fantasy authors are nothing if not modern myth-makers. In time, perhaps the books of Tolkien and Brooks will be seen in the same way that we do The Prose Edda: important works of mythology from which we’ve derived our greatest sagas. They seem to be well on their way.