A Guide to Elves,
Elfkind, and Related Phenomena
Is this all of them? you ask. No, this is not all of them. I have limited the discussion here to those elemental beings who, when they do appear, do so in human form. I have also restricted myself to the land-lubbing members of elfkind, leaving out the vast tribes of freshwater and sea sprites who probably exist in even greater numbers than their earthbound counterparts. I have left the nisse and tomten out too, except for a brief mention under “spámaðr.” The little fellows are beyond the bounds of this book and, besides, I have already given them their fair share of pages in my previous book The Old Magic of Christmas.
The seal people made a good case for inclusion because they are able to function on land as humans at least part of the time and they are as much a part of Scandinavian folklore as of Scottish and Irish.82 But if I had included the seal people, I would also have had to include the nøkk, who is sometimes human and sometimes horse. So you will not see either of them here.
Scandinavia is home to a host of infant ghosts who go by many names. There are so many of them that they deserve a book all their own, and they have one: The Nordic Dead Child Tradition by Juha Pentikäinen. You will need the help of a librarian to get hold of this one. If she succeeds, bring her chocolates.
The elven phenomenon that has had the most staying power in our culture is the changeling: the elven baby swapped into the cradle when the human baby is stolen. The changeling is very much alive in mainstream literature and needs no help from me, so I have omitted him in favor of less celebrated characters like the Klabautermann and the Spökenkieker. If you want to read about changelings, I recommend the novels The Stolen Child by Keith Donahue and The Changeling by Victor Lavalle. (Spoiler alert: He’s right in your backyard! Even if you don’t have a backyard!)
Also absent from this guide are the fylgja and varðogr because they are phenomena attached to living persons rather than to independent entities. They have never been linked to the elves who, when all is said and done, belong to the realm of the dead.
There are, no doubt, other creatures and phenomena that I have left out simply because they have fallen through the gaps in my own knowledge.
Álfheim
Álfheim is the world of the elves, but which elves? In the Old Norse prose piece Gylfaninning, Alfheim is located in the world above ours and is the haunt of the famously fair light elves. The dark or black elves have their own world, Svartálfheim, deep underground. When the god Loki requires a large amount of gold from the dwarf Andvari, he journeys to Svartálfheim to get it.
Álfheim was also a very real kingdom in medieval Norway.83 According to The Saga of King Heidrek the Wise, Álfheim was ruled by King Gandalf. There is a Gandalf in the Old Norse poem Völuspá who is identified as a dwarf, but this Gandalf was supposedly a mortal. His daughter was the beautiful Princess Álfhild.
Both these royal Álfheimers seem to be more elf than human. Gandalf’s name also includes the word for “magic” and they are both supposed to have lived even before Odin’s appearance on the scene. True, in this version of events, Odin was supposed to be a mortal too, a mere king of Asia. Still, it would have been a very long time ago.
Barrow Fire
Any light seen burning within or above an ancient burial mound begs the question, “Who left the light on?” When, in verse 22 of The Saga of King Heidrek the Wise, the fearless Hervör ventures to the Danish isle of Samsø in search of her father’s grave, the many mounds are aflame. These fires, Old Norse hauga-eldrinn, “howe fire,” hover above the mounds, but in later Scandinavian folklore they are more likely to burn inside them.
By the 1800s, the barrow fire had come to be identified as the glow of the piles of golden treasure the trolls kept inside such mounds and which they liked to take out and admire on Christmas Eve. In 1827 in Bollerslev, Denmark, looters were inspired to dig inside a mound because they had seen a light burning inside it. The looters soon gave up, but more conscientious excavators eventually unearthed an oak coffin containing weapons, woolen clothing and a bronze safety pin.
And what was Hervör looking for her in her father’s grave mound? The infamous dwarf-forged sword Tyrfing, of course. She found it.
Black Elves
The Svartálfar or “black elves” are a category of elves described by twelfth-century Icelander Snorri Sturluson as “blacker than pitch.” They live underground, about as far from the realm of the light elves as one can get. Black elves may or may not be the same as dark elves or dwarves. Snorri numbers the sons of Ivaldi and the ring-bearing Andvari, all identified elsewhere as dwarves, among his black elves.
Dark Elves
The dark elves can clearly be distinguished from the light elves, but not so clearly from the black elves. Jacob Grimm, writing of medieval Germanic tradition, echoes Icelander Snorri Sturluson when he divides the elves into Light and Black, but he adds a third category, the döck-âlfar, the dark or “dingy” elves, as his döck is sometimes translated. One possibility is that Grimm’s dingy elves are those of Eve’s children who were the last to climb into the bathwater: no longer dirty enough to have to creep away and become “hidden folk” but not radiant enough to push forward when God came to visit.
Dís
A dís is a female tutelary spirit. The dísir looked after certain families and farmsteads and may have originally been ancestral spirits. They required regular offerings, sometimes bloody, in return for their services.
The draug is the corpse that inhabits a mound. Despite being dead, he or she may leave it from time to time. Because dwarves live among boulders, some of which may have comprised Neolithic passage graves, they, too, are often identified with the dead—not the kind that lie quietly but the kind that scrabble around and sometimes cause trouble.
The dwarf Álvis had a corpse-like pallor, especially about the nose, which, as he explained in Álvismál, the Old Norse poem named for him, was the result of living “beneath a rock.” And the famous catalogue of dwarves in Völuspá includes a dwarf named “Corpse.”
From Migration Period Germany to medieval Iceland, it is the draug or revenant rather than the insubstantial ghost who appears to the living. In Iceland, the corpse that broke out of its mound or grave presented a threat to the community. Back home in Old Elfland, however, the draug was a more reticent fellow. If one sought advice from a warrior who was already ensconced in his mound, one often had to climb right down into the mound, stand at his side and beg him to speak.
I have often lamented the dearth of ghosts in my family’s part of Germany. There is a ghostly white horse on a North Sea islet and any number of sunken towns and churches, but few hauntings above sea level. Perhaps it is because this part of the world has always been served by the draug rather than the insubstantial ghost. In the medieval Danish ballad “The Mother under the Mould,” Lady Sölverlad returns from the dead to comfort her children and to scare the living daylights out of their wicked stepmother. It is clear Sölverlad is no ghost; she has come straight from her grave, carrying her coffin on her back.
There remains much confusion about the nature of the undead. Were they doomed to lie in their mounds forever, or would they eventually be reborn like the pagan Olav Geirstadálfr (“Geirstad-elf,” the “elf” having been added posthumously by his followers) who got to start over as yet another Olav, this time a Christian king. (King Olav himself denied he had ever been that other Olav, or an elf, but his followers, though nominally Christian, believed otherwise.) Not helping matters is the fact that English translations of the Icelandic sagas often describe the corporeal dead as “ghosts” or “spooks.”
Dwarf
At his most basic, the dwarf is a supernatural, rock-dwelling creature. One must be careful with the term “creature” because it implies that the subject was created by some other force, the opposite of an elemental being which has always been a fixture of the landscape. Dwarves are older than humans, but they, too, were created by the Norse gods, the Aesir.
You might think you could easily tell the difference between a dwarf and an elf, but there is no more than a fine line between them, and often not even that. Many if not most of the attributes ascribed to the elves in the Old Norse literature belong to the dwarves in the medieval German tradition. The root of the word “dwarf” can be traced all the way back to Proto-Indo-European, so the idea that dwarves were the new guys on the scene who usurped the identity of the elves in Germany cannot be the case.
Like the elves, dwarves were skilled craftsmen, wise in herblore and easily able to change their appearance. Their relationship to the earth, however, is even more intimate than that enjoyed by the elves. Dwarves are often seen popping out of and disappearing into rocks. And whereas elves, especially elf women, often appear to travelers at midday, dwarves must avoid sunlight.
Ultimately, the Scandinavians did not hold the dwarves in quite as high regard as they did the elves. We don’t know exactly how the elves came to be, but the Old Norse poets state clearly that the dwarves were created from the maggots writhing in the flesh of the dead primordial giant Ymir.
Dwarf Names
These were names given to dwarves. The Middle German word for “elf” is Alp or Alb, a word that survived in a handful of dwarf names such as Alberich and Alban even as the elves themselves faded from the narrative. But the best place to look for dwarf names is in a rather boring stretch of the Völuspá which lists the names of dozens of dwarves, including Durin, Dvalin, Bifur, Bafur, Bombur, Nori, Oin, Thorin, Fili, Kili and Oakenshield (twice). And, oh yes, Gandalf, too, was a dwarf. The catalog also mentions a dwarf named simply “Elf.” There are no names for female dwarves, but some of the norns for whom we do have names may have been Dvalin’s daughters and therefore also dwarves themselves.
Dwarf Women
Yes, there are female dwarves. The first time I read The Hobbit, I did wonder how there could be such a multiplicity of dwarves in Middle-earth without there apparently being any dwarf women around. At some point, the dwarvish females must have fallen out of favor with the poets and the storytellers, but there is still plenty of evidence for them in the medieval literature.
In the eleventh-century German poem Ruodlieb, a dwarf offers the titular hero his wife as a hostage. The wife, who is also a dwarf, is quite lovely. She is well-dressed, too, her garments spangled with gold. And the Old Norse poem Fafnismál reveals that some of the norns are “daughters of Dvalin,” that is, dwarves.
The Proto-Indo-European root that eventually became the German Zwerg and the English “dwarf” evolved also into Sanskrit dhvarás, a tribe of tricksy demon women in the Rig Veda.
Echo
“Echo” in Old Norse is dvergmál, “dwarf speech.” In Greek mythology, Echo was a disgraced nymph who was doomed to repeat only what others had already said. To me, the concept of dwarf speech makes more sense. In the days when Old Norse was spoken, the most likely place to hear an echo would have been inside a cave, among large rocks or in any of the remote spaces where dwarves were known to dwell. I was even younger than six-year-old Ib from Sarah Ellis’ short story “Tunnel” the first time I remember hearing an echo. Like Ib, my sister and I were in a concrete tunnel that ran underneath the road and provided a shortcut between the garage where our father worked and the deli where we liked to go to buy Sno-balls and Flavor-Ices. When I asked my sister whose voice it was we were hearing in the tunnel, she replied, “That’s an echo,” which I immediately pictured as an apelike creature clinging to the ceiling in the darkness. It was some time before I would go inside that tunnel again.
Elf Mound
Any heap of earth or stones that houses, has housed or is believed to house a corpse, be it Neolithic, Bronze Age, Vendel Period, or Viking Age, is an elf mound. No corpse? No problem; the simple belief that elves dwell inside a rise in the landscape is enough to make it an elf mound. The hills or mounds of Celtic tradition served as portals to Faerie whereas the Germanic mound had only to be sat upon in order for the magic to be tapped. Gifts could be placed on or poured into the mound in return for which the dweller therein might bless the supplicant with good health, fortune or fertility. A mound required a lot of manpower to put up. Its presence in the landscape testified to the high status of the deceased and, by extension, of his or her descendants.
Elf Names
While several dwarves were named for elves, no elves seem to have been named for dwarves. Many mortals were also named for elves, especially among the Anglo-Saxons. These were no longer pagan names, despite the fact that the church condemned the worship of elves. Bearers of elf names include the Christian queen Aelfgifu (“elf gift”) and an archbishop of Canterbury, Aelfheah (“elf high”).
The elves were known for their beauty, so it is not surprising to find aelf as a component of several women’s names, such as Aelflaed (“elf beauty”). But aelf was the first component of many masculine names as well and was placed in front of such concepts as “friend,” “battle,” “strong,” “guardian,” “bold,” and “victory.” In the Anglo-Saxon imagination, elves embodied desirable male qualities in addition to feminine beauty and otherworldiness.
The only English elf names that remain at all common today are Alfred (“elf counsel”) and its feminine form, Elfrida. Alfgif Hollaston is the hero of Geoffrey Household’s cautiously supernatural 1980 novel The Sending, but I know of no real-life Alfgifs in either the twentieth or the twenty-first centuries. Alvin means “friend to all” rather than “elf friend,” and Elvis, in case you were wondering, has nothing directly to do with elves; it comes from Álvis, “all wise,” which is the name of an Old Norse dwarf. And we mustn’t forget Álfhild of Álfheim. Her name means “elf battle.” Though Álfhild was a princess, not a warrior, she was an officiant of the sometimes warlike dísir.
Álfhild may or may not have been an elf herself, but we do have two names that we know belonged to elves. The first was Dáin, the elf who fetched the runes for his people. The second belonged to the “prince” or “lord” of the elves himself, the vengeful smith Volund (English “Wayland”). A gentle elf Volund was not; some of the remarkable objects he crafted were made from human body parts.
Elf Sickness
Many illnesses were believed to be caused by elven agency. At the same time that the Anglo-Saxons were naming their children for the elves, they lived in fear of the spells they believed these beings could work on them. A variety of aches and pains were chalked up to the firing of invisible arrows or “elf shot” into the victim’s body. (Curiously, the Germans—rather than blaming their sciatica on the dwarves, as one might expect—refer to it to this day as Hexenschuss, “witch-shot.”)
A serious red rash was known as “water elf disease,” and the Old English word aelfsgoða meant “insanity.” This was apparently as much of a problem in the gentler landscapes of England and Jutland as it was in Norway and Sweden, where sojourning with the trolls in the mountains was believed to result in mental illness. Elves might creep into your bed, too. One of several German words for nightmare is Alpdruck, “elf pressing,” because it was an elf, not a mare, exerting its weight on the sleeper.
With all this elf sickness going around, I wonder if the Anglo-Saxon gesture of bestowing an elf name on a child might have been a way of protecting it, since the elves were not in the habit of harming their own.
Elf Woman
Elf women are almost always beautiful and often dangerous too. Elf maids make cameo appearances in the more supernaturally themed sagas and in medieval Danish ballads. Male or female, elves were supposed to be better looking than mere mortals, but it is usually human men who come to grief when seduced by elf women.
An elf woman might insert herself into a king’s bed in order to contribute to the royal blood line, and elven blood was claimed with pride by those who believed it ran in their veins. Elf women could also deliver prophecies, but beware of asking for one: you might not like what you hear.
In the Danish “Long Ballad of Marsk Stig,” King Eric asks the elf maid who is sitting on his bed what fate awaits him in the future. She informs him that his life is less secure than the little hook on the wall where he hangs his sword. Shortly thereafter, King Eric is stabbed over fifty times by a jealous husband (not the elf maid’s). The murder, which occurred at Finderup in 1286, is a matter of record, so, unfortunately, this is a true story—except, perhaps, for the part about the elf maid.
Elflocks
This is my favorite euphemism for messy hair. Elves were renowned for their beauty and were presumably well-groomed. Be that as it may, they enjoyed ruffling the hair of mortals as we see Sir Bosmer’s Elf-maid doing in one of the Danish ballads. They may have been a little overenthusiastic in their ruffling, however, because “elflocks” refers to hair that is inextricably tangled or knotted.
Ghost
A ghost is the insubstantial manifestation of a dead person. The identification of elves and elf-like beings with the dead is indisputable, but not all elves are ghosts, and not all ghosts are elves. Nor are all ghosts alike, especially in Sweden, where a distinction was made between the friendlier spöke,84 the ghost you know, and the more dangerous gast, the ghost of a stranger. Among the Low German speakers of northern Germany there was a type of man known as a Spökenkieker, literally “ghost looker.” Such a man could predict future events, especially deaths. Did the “ghost” in his name refer to the ghosts of those soon to expire or to a personal ghost guide who read him tomorrow’s obituaries today?
Huldufólk, “hidden folk,” is the name by which the elves are known in Iceland. The first Icelanders brought the concept of the hidden folk with them from Norway, where they would later be known as the huldre. The Christian explanation for the term is that all elves are descended from the dirtiest of Adam and Eve’s children whom Eve hid from God because she did not have time to wash them. The more plausible explanation is that the elves prefer to stay out of sight. This does not mean the Icelanders are unaware of them. In fact, the elves are better respected in Iceland than they are anywhere else in Europe. The hidden folk are consulted in all kinds of matters and their interests are considered whenever new roads or houses are built that might infringe on their territory. And no one complains much when these elves borrow household items like scissors, spoons, and bread knives because they always put them back again.
Hill Man
A supernatural creature of the Norwegian wilderness with counterparts in Sweden, the hill man is just as likely to be encountered in the forest as on a hill. He usually plays the role of the fairy lover, for he is as interested in the human female as the skogsrå is interested in the human male. Sometimes it’s marriage the hill man desires; at other times, a simple roll in the heather with a lonely shepherdess or dairymaid will do. Little good can come of an encounter with him.
Jotunn
A jotunn (plural jötnar) is a giant. At least, that’s how this Old Norse word is usually translated. English “giant” comes from a Greek word meaning “earth born.” The jötnar are as old as the earth. While the fairy tale giant has evolved into an oversized, nasty brute, the jotunn is neither ugly nor stupid. The Norse gods were frequently and irresistibly turned on by jotunn women, and the Danish chronicler Saxo Grammaticus counted the jötnar as first class wizards. In the later folktales of Old Elfland, the giants are the supernatural beings one is least likely to encounter, either because they live too deep in the woods or mountains or because they lived too long ago. In both Danish Jutland and Germany’s Schleswig-Holstein, they were associated with the boulders marking the oldest of the burial mounds, the passage graves housing the remains of the first farmers whose names had been lost long ago.
Jötunheim
It was while searching for the location of the medieval Alfheim in my atlas that I happened upon the name “Jotunheimen” adorning some peaks in central Norway. I’m not sure who lives there now, but “Jötunheim” was the world of the giants in Norse mythology. It was often expressed in the plural because the giants were not socially organized and might be found anywhere in the wild. In The Saga of King Heidrek the Wise, however, Jötunheim is located very specifically in Finnmark in the northernmost reaches of Norway, beyond Gandvík, the “Bay of Sorcery.” The only people who would have been living up there in Heidrek’s day were the Sami or Laplanders who, like the giants, had a reputation for wizardry.
Klabautermann
The Klabautermann is a north German elf who is to the ship what the nisse or tomten is to the farm. I’m especially fond of the Klabautermann because it’s a term my mother has always used to describe rowdy children and pets, for no reason that she can explain. I’m pretty sure the Klabautermann passed into our household roster of names through Low German, but I have since discovered that he was also known in Sweden. In the tale “The Nisse Woke up the Ship’s Mate,” 85 collected not far from the many ship-inscribed rocks in Bohuslän in the mid-twentieth century, a Klabautermann saves the steamship he is traveling on from near collision. The Swedish Klabautermann doesn’t seem to be a rowdy fellow, but perhaps he is in the old trading town of Lübeck where my mother grew up.
Light Elves
The ljosálfar, or “light elves,” are the first class of elves identified by Icelander Snorri Sturluson. That’s “light” as in sunlight, not light-boned like Tolkien’s Legolas. Offerings poured over cup-marked stones were probably meant for these light elves who dwelt in Álfheim, high in the sky. Identified with the sun since the Bronze Age at least, the light elves are the dazzlingly beautiful elite of elfkind.
Norns
The most famous of the norns were Urd, Verdandi, and Skuld, who dwelt among the roots of the World Tree Yggdrasil, spinning, measuring, and cutting the threads of men’s individual destinies. Equated with the Greek Fates mentioned in the introduction to this book, the norns also had much in common with the Hittite spinning goddeses Istustaya and Papaya of Bronze Age Anatolia, so they probably came into Europe as part of the Indo-European package. The addition of a third spinner must have occurred after the Indo-Europeans crossed the Bosporus.
There were actually numerous norns in Norse mythology. The postion of norn seems to have been a calling rather than an ethnic designation. In Fafnismál, the dying but nevertheless long-winded dragon Fafnir takes the time tell us that the norns are drawn from all walks of supernatural society, that is, from the gods, the elves, and the dwarves.
Runes
Runic letters were in use in Denmark by the second century AD. If you are reading this book, you are probably already familiar with how the god Odin acquired the runes for himself and for the use of humankind. The elves, dwarves, and giants all had their own sets of runes as well their own rune heroes: Dáin for the elves, Dvalin for the dwarves, and Asvið for the giants. I don’t imagine any of them had to hang on a windswept tree to arrive at the runes; they probably just scratched them into wood or bone.
Skogsrå
The skogsrå is a supernatural maiden of the Swedish forest with counterparts in Norway and Denmark. Also known as a “hidden one,” the skogsrå was much better looking in front than she was in back. What was she hiding? Often it’s a tail, but just as often her back turns out to be a hollowed out log. Could this curious feature be a reflection of the hollowed out tree trunk coffins in which so many of the mound people were buried? Unlike the more family-oriented Swedish troll, the skogsrå is a solitary creature who nevertheless enjoys the odd encounter with a mortal man. Such an encounter may or may not prove fatal to the latter.
Spámaður
The spámaður is a non-human creature who resides in a stone, has the gift of prophecy and acts as a guardian of the farmstead. One could interpret the word spámaður as a man who can see into the future, like the north German Spökenkieker, but it is used instead to describe a dwarf-like creature. Sometimes such a creature is also called an armaðr, or “hearth man,” putting him in the middle of the hall rather than outside it. The spámaður may be the ancestor of the diminutive nisse and tomten who these days is only remembered at Christmastime.
Troll
Most of the actions performed by elves and fairies in the English literature and by dwarves in the German are taken over by the troll in the Swedish folktales. In English, this word has taken on shades of meanness and ugliness. But the troll was not always so.
In my opinion, the troll’s image has suffered most at the hands of Dutch illustrator Rien Poortvliet, who delivered to the world an obtuse, beady-eyed, snot-nosed troll in the 1970s. But the reality is that the troll has been devolving in public opinion ever since popular versions of the Swedish folktales began to circulate in print. Repackaged as fairy tales and illustrated accordingly, the stories entered the realm of fantasy and no longer represented what rural folk really believed went on among the rocks and trees in the deepest reaches of the forest.
Originally, the trolls were a race who dwelt apart from human civilization, going about their own business and socializing among themselves. They were human in size and appearance and had many of the same concerns. The few who went to church at all continued to attend Catholic mass long after the rest of Sweden had become Lutheran. The Swedish verb trolla means “to conjure, to enchant.” In the Norse sagas, a man who was “troll-wise” could work deceptive magic, so it appears the trolls, like the jötnar, were originally defined by their ability to create illusions.
Van
A Van is one of the Vanir, the Norse fertility gods. In an oversimplified nutshell, the Vanir were the indigenous gods of the early Nordic Bronze Age when the dead were believed to stick around in their native earth, making themselves available to their living descendants. The Aesir, the Norse sky gods, arrived later, their priests pushing for cremation and a freewheeling afterlife in the sky.
Everyone agrees that Njord, Frey, and Freya were Vanir. Brother and sister, Frey and Freya were the children of Njord, either by his own sister or by the giantess Skadi whom some scholars categorize as one of the Aesir, others as a Van. (Most giants were simply giants and often to be found in both conflict and congress with the gods.) The first time Aesir and Vanir meet, they go to war. According to Ynglinga Saga, the Vanir “withstood [the Aesir] well and defended their land.” 86 This supports the idea that the Vanir were there first. The war ends in a draw and an exchange of hostages, after which the gods become more or less one family.
Rather than the elves being dwindled gods, I think it more likely that the Vanir were upraised elves, ancestral spirits who were elevated so they might sit beside the new gods arriving from the east. But some of those spirits would remain elves, continuing in the lives to which they had become accustomed, tilling their fields, tending their flocks, and popping up in our world now and then to accept offerings, ask or grant a favor, or just to make us question the nature of reality.
82. If you really would like to know more about the seal people or selkies, see my article “A Man upon the Land” on pp. 210–214 of Llewellyn’s 2014 Sabbats Almanac. It includes resources for further reading.
83. What was once Álfheim now falls mostly within the borders of Sweden.
84. The spöke is probably the inspiration for the IKEA nightlight “Spöka” which resembles a very friendly-looking horned ghost.
85. Kvideland and Sehmsdorf, Scandinavian Folk Belief and Legend, p. 248.
86. Sturluson, Heimskringla, p. 2.