At Home with the Elves
Because the world of the elves is closely bound up with our own, it is in our own best interests to stay on the good side of these mysterious creatures. In the old days, this might mean the pouring of milk, blood, and even gifts of gold and silver into their earthen houses. Nowadays, it can be as simple as showing kindness and respect to a stranger, because you just never know. The elves in this chapter have no interest in making toys (or becoming dentists), nor are they particularly small. They have, however, always been a part of Christmas, even if their feast was originally held in October.
“What’s with the Elves?”
We know that the feast of the elves was called Álfablót, or “Elf Sacrifice,” and we know that it took place in southwestern Sweden, but we do not know exactly what took place. In fact, we know almost nothing about Álfablót, and that is the fault of a rather ill-tempered old farm wife who lived in the settlement of Hov in the year 1017. But before we take her to task, we must answer a question: who exactly are the elves?
“Hvat er med alfom?” or “What’s with the elves?”2 asks the prophetess in the Old Norse poem Völuspá. You may be asking the same question, for it is not yet December, and the battered rinds of the neighbors’ jack-o’-lanterns are still moldering at the curb while the Thanksgiving turkey cools its heels in the freezer. Hvat er med alfom? indeed. The ancient Scandinavians regarded the Álfar as a distinct class of beings, though there was some fluidity among the bloodlines of elves, gods, norns, and even humans. Thirteenth-century Icelandic poet Snorri Sturluson offers us not one race of elves but two. Light elves, whom Sturluson likens to the sun, lived in Álfheim, or “elf home,” which was located somewhere in the heavens. The dark elves, who were “blacker than pitch,” dwelt deep inside the earth.
From earliest times, or the Bronze Age at least, elves were associated with the sun. In Sweden, cup-shaped depressions can be found in rocks bearing carvings of what we presume to be sun wheels. These stone cups held offerings of milk, which rural Swedes continued to pour out for the elves into the twentieth century. An Old Norse kenning for the sun itself is álfröðull, or “glory of the elves.” The elves’ role as intermediaries between mortals and the life-giving sun helps to explain their shining aspect.
The highly literate Snorri Sturluson divided the elves neatly into light and dark, but this does not mean they were so divided throughout the Nordic world, or that every peasant who sought practical help from the elves was aware of such a division. The elves might have shone like the sun, but they were also very much of the earth. Because they were believed to be physically present in the landscape, they were often of more immediate importance to the farmer than were the mighty gods. It is possible that propitiation of the elves preceded worship of the gods, just as it has long outlived it in the general population, for the story of the elves does not end with Ragnarök, the fiery demise of the Old Norse worldview.
“Will You Know More?”
“Vitod er enn?” the Völuspá prophetess goes on to ask as she describes the end of that world. While many of the chieftains and kings of northern Europe were able to trade in Odin for Christ without much thought, the tillers of the soil had been working on their relationship with the elves for thousands of years and they were not about to give them up so easily. Rather than let the elves go, they resettled them within a Christian cosmology. In this new world, the elves were semi-fallen angels. When Lucifer rose up against God, the elves, or fairies, failed to choose sides and so they were not cast all the way down but were doomed to haunt the wild places of the earth until Judgment Day. The idea that these creatures of light reached their state because of the actions of the Angel of Light fit neatly with the old beliefs.
Another, rather more amusing theory has to do with an unexpected visit God paid to Adam and Eve long after they had been expelled from the Garden of Eden and set up house for themselves. By this time, they had so many children that Eve couldn’t keep them all properly bathed, so she presented to God only the ones who had just come out of the tub. When God asked to see the rest of the children, Eve denied that there were any, having sent the filthy ones to hide in the backyard. (She had apparently not learned her lesson about lying to an omniscient deity.) God declared that those children whom Eve had hidden from him would remain hidden from all mankind. The descendants of these grubby children are the Hidden Folk, as they are known in Iceland to this day.
Of course, not everyone is satisfied with such apocryphal explanations. From the early to mid-twentieth century, it was fashionable to identify the elves and fairies as Europe’s first settlers. In his 1955 book Witchcraft Today, original Wiccan Gerald Gardner equated them with the Picts and other tribes whose desire to keep the Old Ways in the face of Christianity sent them scurrying to the furthermost reaches of the Celtic realm, to the barren mountaintops and to dark holes in the hills where they could continue to practice their own brand of earthy magic. Already a small race compared to the Romano-Britons and Anglo-Saxons, their children were made smaller still by the deprivations of a life in hiding. These aboriginal “pixies,” a corruption of “Picts” as Gardner would have it, kept very much to themselves, stealing out only at night to pinch butter, milk, and the occasional cow from their more agriculturally advanced neighbors. In between times, they occupied themselves with their ancient rituals and with making stone arrowheads tipped with poison, or “elf-shot.”
What did these pixies look like? No doubt their hair was knotted into “elf locks” for want of a good combmaker, and at one time it was common knowledge that they were red-haired. In Washford Market, Somerset, they were also thought to be cross-eyed and to have “pointed ears, short faces, and turned-up noses.”3 The observation that redheads could pop up unpredictably in otherwise blond or dark-haired families may have had to do with this belief. Rather than attribute such children’s coloring to a recessive gene or to the milkman, parents might regard them as changelings—the cast-off progeny of the pixies.
We know from the Romans that the Picts brushed themselves with a blue paint that may have been mineral-derived, though the more popular explanation is that it was derived from indigo extracted from the woad plant (Isatis tinctoria).4 According to Gardner, when they wanted to go unnoticed, they mixed this blue colorant with a dye made from the yellow-flowered weld (Reseda luteola), the result being a whole race of tiny men and women roaming the moors in varying shades of blue and Lincoln green, the latter eventually becoming the national color of Faerie.
Like their Neolithic ancestors, these beleaguered but colorful “little people” maintained homes of dry-stone construction half sunk in the earth; perhaps even elaborate complexes of them as can be seen at Skara Brae in the far north of Scotland. Since the whole house was covered in grass or heather, it would have looked to the casual eye like a natural feature of the landscape. If one of the “big people” happened to be passing by on a winter’s night and witness the opening of a well-concealed door, he could not have failed to notice the blaze of hearth light staining the snow as it does at the doors of elvish abodes in so many folktales of northwestern Europe. There would have to have been smoke holes in those hollow hills through which the scents of the bracken fire and roasted shrew could have escaped, but these details are seldom present in the folklore. Gardner insists that most of the coming and going would have been through those primitive chimneys, which only added to the pixies’ exoticism in the eyes of their neighbors.
Unfortunately, this Gardnerian version of elvish origins probably has a lot more romance in it than truth. Instead, Gardner’s concept of the “mighty dead” might give us a better idea of who the elves really are. The mighty dead are the spirits of magical practitioners—“witches,” if you will—who, through a series of reincarnations, have honed their skills to the point where they, in death, have become objects of worship or at least consultation.
The elves were certainly revered, but one would hesitate to call them mighty. Especially in the Scandinavian folktales that were first recorded in the nineteenth century by roving ethnographers inspired by the Brothers Grimm, the elves appear to carry on lives that parallel those of their human neighbors. They move their cattle from one pasture to another and spread their hay to dry in the sun. They cook, clean, and concern themselves with the welfare of their children. They even attend their own church services, though they appear not to have undergone either Reformation or Counter-Reformation, even in those countries where the humans were staunchly Protestant. Often, the elves are possessed of an unearthly beauty, but just as often they appear as ordinary people, albeit in quaint dress.
If the elves resemble us, it is because they are us, or, rather, they were. The human who stumbles upon a procession of elves or an impromptu elvish feast is often startled to recognize someone he knows among them: someone who has died either recently or years before. Often, this dead acquaintance advises the human witness how to safely leave the party, the standard precaution being not to touch the food. The elves, then, are the dead—not the quietly resting dead but those who, for whatever reason, have taken up new lives on the other side of the veil and at times, either knowingly or unknowingly, might come strolling back through it.
Among these elves are the long-dead who speak a language the barest traces of which are remembered in the names of hillocks that used to be mountains, or of rivers that have long ago changed course. The bones of these people have become fully incorporated into the soil, yet still they rattle about the landscape on their elvish business. They no longer remember any other kind of existence and may be only dimly aware of developments since their passing. They are troubled by the tolling of church bells and might be scalded by the dripping of holy water into their homes, not to mention the seeping of car exhaust, for these things belong to a world they no longer do.
The more recently dead, in their petticoats and high-crowned hats, have crossed over just long enough ago not to notice anything strange about the banquet, how the candles blaze but never burn down, how the platters of cakes are never diminished. But the sweetheart who was put in the churchyard just last week has not yet been fully absorbed into the company of elves. She can still remember who belongs on which side of the divide and will do what she can to prevent her living loved ones from being taken up prematurely by the dead.
An Offering to the Elves
It is time now to join Sigvat5 the Scald, or court poet, on a journey he has undertaken through southwestern Sweden on behalf of the Norwegian King Olav. It is the “beginning of winter.” Since this is the Viking Age, in which the year was divided into a summer and a winter half, this puts us somewhere around the time of our Halloween. No doubt snow has already fallen on the forest of Eidaskog, though the river is not yet frozen. Sigvat and his small party of king’s men are cold, footsore, and probably hungry to boot. Darkness is falling as they emerge from the woods at Hov. In search of beds or at least a pile of straw for the night, they approach the first farm they see, but the door is barred. As Sigvat attempts to stick his nose in the crack, it is explained to him by those within that he has arrived at a holy time, that the space inside is already consecrated and he may not enter. Since this is no church but a farmhouse, Sigvat, an Icelandic Christian, assumes correctly that it is a heathen observance. He curses the farmer, either for his lack of hospitality or his backward ways or both, and goes on his way.
Scald and king’s men continue to the next farmyard, where they are again turned away, this time by an old woman who calls Sigvat a “wretch” and informs him that “they are holding an offering to the elves.” Her use of the third person suggests she may be a servant sent by the family to get rid of the unwanted visitors. We can only wish she had opened the door, for the compulsive versifier Sigvat would surely have left us a detailed, if biased, description of the ceremony had he been allowed inside to witness it. As it is, we can only wonder. How was the family dressed? In workaday clothes or in special garments reserved for the occasion? Did lights burn within? How was the table laid, or was all the action going on in the enclosed courtyard?
We cannot lay all of the blame at the feet of the “old hag,” as Sigvat calls her, for Sigvat’s behavior is just as intolerable. Though an Icelander and a Christian, Sigvat is presumably of Norwegian descent. He should therefore have been familiar with the Dísablót, or “sacrifice to the dísir,” which his own heathen grandparents and possibly even parents would have celebrated at “winter-nights” at the same time of year. The Dísablót took place before an altar dedicated to the dísir, ancestral female spirits who are the precursors of our fairy godmothers and a few of our witches, too.
There is a lot of overlap between the dísir and the norns who sat spinning among the roots of the World Tree. Like the dísir, the norns occasionally made house calls but all in all were considered to be more aloof than the dísir. Sometimes the dísir behaved more like bloodthirsty valkyries than fairy godmothers, and, in fact, the Dísablót altar was reddened with blood, though we are not sure whose. In the Saga of Hervor and King Heidrek, the Dísablót is presided over by one Princess Álfhild of Álfheim, so it is possible that the Álfablót and Dísablót were precisely the same thing. Had Sigvat shown a little respect for the traditions of Hov, he might have been allowed to slip quietly inside and take part in the feast.
He might even have been asked to play his harp, if harp he had, and if his fingers were not too stiff with cold, for it was not unheard of for a Christian to join in heathen rituals in times of need. In the Saga of Erik the Red, Sigvat’s fellow Icelander, Gudrid, now a Christian, is persuaded to assist the prophetess Thorbjorg by chanting the magical formulae she had learned as a child. Unfortunately, there was no such syncretism that evening in Hov, and Sigvat is turned away by four more bonders before he gives up his search for hospitality. When he finally arrives at his ultimate destination, the hall of Ragnvald the Jarl, he is rewarded with a gold ring and sympathy, so you really can’t feel sorry for Sigvat.
Was the Álfablót unique to that district of Sweden? The only other reference we have to a sacrifice made to the elves occurs in Kormak’s Saga. Here, a witch directs the wounded Thorvald to invoke the healing power of the elves by pouring bull’s blood on a nearby elf mound and making a feast of the meat for the elves dwelling within. Could the Hovians have been sacrificing something more precious than livestock? Human sacrifice was certainly not unknown at this time in this part of the world, but had that been the case, then surely the farm folk would have dissembled in front of the Christian Sigvat, pleading sickness in the house rather than announcing the occasion of a sacrifice. And whereas a portion of the livestock had to be slaughtered at the onset of winter anyway, humans were valuable members of the workforce and not to be dispatched lightly.
So why the secrecy? The celebrants may have been in the process of inducing a trance state in one or more of the family members or even of a visiting prophetess like Thorbjorg. The speaking of prophecies serves as the highlight of several feasts in the Old Norse sagas. Much work went into preparing both the speaker and the space, so if this were the case, it is no wonder the old woman was short with Sigvat. She would have been eager to learn what the future held for her and therefore anxious not to break the spells that had been woven about the scrying platform.
Ironically, the man who sent Sigvat on his errand in the first place, the Christian King Olav, was in some respects an elf himself. Though Olav denied even the possibility, a few of his followers believed him to be the reincarnation of an earlier king, Olav Geirstader, who, upon his death and laying “in howe” (i.e., in his grave mound), received both offerings and the epithet of álf, or “elf,” after his name. It is also interesting to note that Hov lay just to the east of the limits of a kingdom still known in the early Middle Ages as Álfheim. Scholars argue that the name has nothing to do with elves but refers instead to the bed of gravel that lies beneath the tillable soil of this district, a fact that Tolkien fans will quickly forget when they hear that, in the ninth century, Álfheim was ruled by a king named Gandálf. According to one of the Fornaldar Sagas, or “Sagas of Ancient Days,” the inhabitants of this earthly Álfheim were so fair of face that only the risir outshone them. As to who the risir were, I suppose that is another story.
Like Christmas Itself
You probably have to clean house before Thanksgiving anyway, so why not host your own Álfablót this year? (Elves, like most Christmas spirits, love a clean house.) As witnessed at Hov, the door need not be opened to anyone outside the family—anyone living, that is—so you won’t have to do much shopping or decorating. Now, the question to ask is: How would the elves wish to be fêted?
If you are already following a Norse or Saxon Pagan path, you may be able to commune with the elves and ask them yourself. The rest of us must turn to the old tales for clues. One of the most helpful is the Norwegian fairy tale “The Finn King’s Daughter.” Here we have a Finnish princess playing the starring role in a Norwegian story whose roots have been traced back to Jutland in Denmark, a pan-Scandinavian folktale if ever there was one.6 All that’s missing is the Swedish element, but I say the Swedes missed the chance to put in their two kronor when they shut the door in Sigvat’s face back in 1017.
Although she is not identified as an elf in the tale as it was collected by Rikard Berge in 1900, the Finn King’s daughter bears such a close resemblance to the Álfar that she must once have been one. Here are the bare bones of the story:
Before going off to war, the Finn King encloses his beloved daughter inside a mound, mostly because he’s caught her exchanging glances with the new serving boy. When the princess and her nine handmaidens are well and truly shut up in their well-appointed house of earth, the king departs, never to return. The princess and her maids begin at once to try to dig their way out. The effort takes nine years and the life of each of her maids. At last, the princess claws her way out into the now unfamiliar countryside. While she is rambling round the forest, lost, the king’s men finally return to the mound to release her, the Finn King himself having died of sickness. They find nothing except, presumably, the bones of her handmaidens.
After a search of the kingdom turns up no princess, a troll woman presents herself at the Finn King’s hall and claims to be the missing girl. She immediately starts planning her wedding to the serving boy, who, by this time, has revealed himself as an exiled prince—of course!—and, having earlier earned the Finn King’s deathbed blessing, has taken up residence in the hall. He goes along with the wedding plans (People change, don’t they? And this girl had been in a mound for nine years!), but he is clearly not looking forward to the upcoming nuptials.
At last, the real princess emerges from the forest, chilblained and emaciated. Rather than declare her true identity, she takes a job as a maid at her old home and helps the troll woman to pass a series of tests by which the prince is hoping to expose her as an impostor. We are not told why the real princess lets it drag on for so long, but eventually the troll woman is tripped up by an incident involving a pair of gloves, and the Finn King’s daughter takes her proper place at the prince’s side.
Those are the bare bones; the elvishness emerges in the details of the story. Unlike the trollish impostor who can barely thread a needle, our plucky princess is a whiz at sewing and the textile arts, both elvish traits in nineteenth-century folklore—think of “Rumpelstiltskin” and “The Shoemaker and the Elves.” She’s also good with the horses, like the Scandinavian household sprites who mucked out the stables and braided the horses’ manes.
Elves were believed to dwell in mounds, and it was to these mounds that mortals went to offer sacrifice. In the opening of “The Finn King’s Daughter,” the father stocks the mound with “food and drink, clothing and cups and vessels.” The poor girls are going to need all these things, of course, but these are also exactly the sorts of gifts that were laid with the dead in howe in pagan days. (Celtic fairies and brownies were highly offended by gifts of clothing, but their Nordic counterparts expected them.) Other than these basic provisions, the Finn King does not take into account any practical considerations such as a conduit for fresh air or waste disposal system. And would it not have been simpler and far more humane for him to have appointed a guardian to look after his daughter in his absence? Could he not have sent her to stay with relatives or at the very least have banished the serving boy? The answer is no, because practical considerations are for the living, and as soon as she enters the mound, the princess enters the elvish realm: the realm of the dead.
So there they are, the princess and her nine doomed handmaidens, without door or smoke hole such as Gardner’s euhemeristic pixies enjoyed. They blink at one another in panic as, within, the candlelight glances off the silver cups and plates and, without, the last shovelfuls of clay are tamped down above their heads. Those nine years inside the mound must have seemed like a lifetime to the princess, and when she finally scrabbles her way out, it really does seem like a lifetime or more has passed. Even before he departed, the Finn King had ordered the mound leveled—suggesting that the “living” space was very deep inside the earth—and sown over with grass. By the time the princess breaks out, the forest has taken over the razed site, obliterating all familiar features of the landscape. Like Rip Van Winkle, she recognizes no one at her old home, with the exception of the former serving boy, and no one recognizes her. Our princess is not simply a lost daughter; she is one of the mighty dead, coming home to a world much changed. Toward the end of the tale, she and her prince enjoy a church wedding, so it is obviously a Christian world to which she has returned. Originally, she would have been a heathen princess, most likely also a priestess, buried along with a sacred number of her servants and the finest of her worldly goods and ritual paraphernalia.
But where was our princess all that time the Finn King’s men were scouring the forest for her? It turns out she was attending a sort of Álfablót. Devastated and disoriented, she is taken in for a time by a party of charcoal burners. This is the first human company she has had since her last handmaiden died. The charcoal burners offer her a bed inside their leafy shelter, a bowl of rabbit stew, and a seat close by the fire. The story tells us, “It seemed like Christmas itself to her after what she had been through.”7 What did they talk about there in the firelight? Conversation would not have been easy, for the princess’s courtly speech was probably no more closely related to the deep woodsmen’s jargon than the language of the light elves was to that of the dark elves. What mattered was the treatment she received.
Heat, light, food, and a human welcome: keep these in mind if you want to host the Álfar. Schedule your “Christmas for the Elves” somewhere in that empty stretch of time between Halloween and Martinmas (November 11), or even between Martinmas and Thanksgiving, so they won’t have to share their special day. The elves are bearers of light, so if you cannot manage a full moon for your feast, a waxing crescent is better than a waning three-quarter moon. Just as the princess had to claw her way out of the earth, wander the forest barefoot, and cross a river on the back of a wolf, your guests will have completed a long and arduous journey. They have left their usual haunts and howes in order to join you, so greet them warmly. I suggest the following: “Let them come who wish to come, and let them go who wish to go, and do no harm to me or mine.”8 Once you have issued this invitation, I would advise you not to address the elves directly.
You don’t know how far some of them may have come in space or time, so it’s a good idea to turn off the television and most electric lights, which the oldest of the company may find glaring. If you have a fireplace, make a fire. Otherwise, light plenty of candles. Set the table with your best dishes but offer simple foods: bread, meat, milk. If you are very lucky, you will get some dísir along with the Álfar. These ladies may be expecting a reddened altar, so now would be the time to bring out that blood-red Christmas tablecloth or runner. Feel free to talk and laugh with any living company—it’s a party, after all—but keep in mind that it is all done in honor of the elves. Don’t be a Hovian; leave the door ajar for the duration of the feast, and don’t be surprised if you see a few familiar faces shining out from the shadows.
Craft: Elvish Window Ornament
Because we know so little about it, Álfablót is a feast that is open to interpretation. If you’ve already hosted the dead at Halloween, you may choose this occasion to celebrate the solar aspect of the light elves. The following craft is meant to be displayed in the window, where it will filter the light of the sun.
Tools and materials:
2 flimsy, plain white paper plates
Plain white paper, the thinner the better
Colored pencils and/or markers
Glue
Scissors
X-Acto or other craft knife
String
Cut out the centers of both your paper plates. Trace one of these cut-out circles on your plain white paper. Draw the face of the sun or moon inside the circle and color it in. Cut out the face, leaving a quarter-inch margin all around. Glue the face into the empty center of one of your plates with the colored side on the convex side of the plate.
Glue a knotted loop of string to the inside edge of one of the plates. Glue the two plates together, concave side to concave side, then decorate the fluted rim on each side.
In the daytime when the sun is shining in, turn your ornament so that the colored side faces out. The incoming sunlight will illuminate the celestial face. When the lights are on inside, turn the colored side in.
Elvish window ornament
2. This line is more usually translated as “What of the elves?” but I prefer this one, provided by John Lindow under the entry “Elves,” in his Norse Mythology: A Guide to the Gods, Heroes, Rituals, and Beliefs.
3. Quite often, the terms fairy, elf, and pixy are used interchangeably. However, as Ruth L. Tongue explains in Somerset Folklore, the Somerset pixies defeated the fairies at some mythical point in time and drove them all west of the River Parrett. Since we mortals are not all of one tribe, it should come as no surprise that our otherworldly neighbors have also divided themselves into factions.
4. The writers who described these blue warriors did not make it clear if their skin was only painted or tattooed. If the latter were the case, an ink made from woad would have been the sensible choice since woad reduces swelling when applied to the skin.
5. “Sigvat” is the spelling used in Erling Monsen and A. H. Smith’s translation of Snorri Sturluson’s Heimskringla: or, Lives of the Norse Kings. If you are looking for the scald in another translation, you might find him under “Sighvat.” The episode concerned takes place in chapter 91 of The History of St. Olav in Heimskringla.
6. “The Finn King’s Daughter” is an example of what is known to folklorists as Tale Type 870: The Princess Confined in the Mound, and is found outside Scandinavia as well. See Reidar Christiansen’s book Folktales of Norway.
7. Had it actually been Christmas, the charcoal burners would not have been in the forest to meet her, for charcoal burning was done only during the windless days of summer.
8. These words are spoken by the Cinderella figure in “The Sisters and the Elves,” on page 55 of Jacqueline Simpson’s book Icelandic Folktales and Legends. In the West Fjords of Iceland, it was customary to speak such formulae at either Christmas or New Year’s Eve.