Long Was
the Making
Y ou now know enough about the dwarvish arts to be able to curate your own museum exhibit of swords, ships, chariots, and animatronic gold-bristled boars. If you’ve been cutting, pasting, and folding along with the projects in this book, you’ve already made a few elven treasures of your own. But don’t worry. If you want to introduce an elven heirloom into the household, you don’t have to make one; you just have to create one.
About twenty years ago, I was shopping in the basement of a bookstore in the twelfth-century trading city of Lübeck on the Trave river in Germany. Few Americans are aware that Germany extends north of Bremen or that it even has a coastline. Of those who have ventured farther north, the landmark they are most likely to recall is the Holstentor, the peak-roofed, asymmetrical, double-towered gate that was the only way in or out of this jewel of the Hanseatic League, the medieval association of merchant shipmen who ruled the Baltic Sea. The Holstentor is so famous it even makes an inexplicable appearance in the 1939 American children’s book The Country Bunny and the Little Gold Shoes, where it stands in for Grandfather Bunny’s Palace.
From a distance, the Holstentor looks like it’s built of bricks that are uniformly the color of a tea stain, but closer inspection reveals a combination of red-, black-, and greenish-glazed bricks. I found that greenish glaze again in the basement of this bookstore in a glassed-in niche cut in the medieval foundation wall. Inside the illuminated niche sat a green-glazed mug along with a few other humble pieces of pottery that had been unearthed when the basement of the current building was scooped out. Instead of being boxed up and sent to the museum, they were enshrined right there in the children’s book section, an impromptu window on the city’s past.
Had I known then, as I do now, about the Danish/North German legend type “Death of an Underground Person,” I might have read more into that little green mug. The basic blueprint for the many variants of “Death of an Underground Person” goes like this: a hardworking tradesman, usually but not always a tavern keeper, ventures outside the walls of the town on some errand. While out in the hills or on the moor, he hears a voice announcing the death of one Pingel/Pippe/Prilling/Pralling—the name varies from region to region. The unseen speaker exhorts the tavern keeper to repeat the news when he gets home.
He does so, relating the whole story to his wife over dinner. When he gets to the part about Pingel’s death, they both hear an anguished cry coming from the cellar. Hurrying down the steps to investigate, they find a mug or silver jug or drinking horn lying on the floor near the beer tuns. Apparently, whoever had been haunting their cellar and helping himself to their beer had known this Pingel very well and been so overcome with grief that he dropped his cup before disappearing again through the wall.
Had I only known about this vast otherworldly network of underground people or “cellar men,” I could have told my then-seven-year-old daughter that the small green mug had been dropped in the basement of the bookstore by a dear friend of the deceased Pingel. I could have told her also about how this ancient tribe of little people lived by tunneling from pantry to pantry, helping themselves to beer, wine, and cheese. And wasn’t it a wonder that a few of their dishes had survived for us to look at today? Both my children are now too old to have the wool pulled over their eyes, but I may have grandchildren someday and I intend to spin a tale for them. I’m sure I could find a chunky green-glazed mug just like the one in that basement at any of Old Elfland’s craft markets. I’ll plant it in the kitchen cabinet and wait for someone to ask me about it.
More recently, assorted members of our extended family gathered on a cold and rainy summer’s day at Gottorf Castle, Schleswig-Holstein’s principal museum. In one of the halls there was an exhibition of the 1715 wreck of the Swedish warship Princess Hedvig Sofia, while upstairs in the loft was a display of hundreds of spoons, old and new, wood, bone, horn, silver, and stainless steel. None of them were elf-made, not according to the museum labels, but some of them certainly could have been. In fact, there are so many Nordic stories about elves dropping spoons on the floor as payment for goods and services that I wonder if silver spoons might be the official currency of Elfland.
In one of the many variants of the “Midwife to the Fairies” tale type, such a dropped spoon is the Norwegian midwife’s payment for delivering an elven baby. In another, a spoon is left on a kitchen floor by a young elven mother when she comes to retrieve the swaddling cloth she had dropped there earlier.
In another folktale, “The Tusse Folk Help with the Harvest,” 54 from Kviteseid in southern Norway, some eighteenth-century elves, or tusse as they were called in those parts, leave a few silver spoons at the bottom of a beer barrel as payment for having drunk all the beer. This shows what upstanding elves they are, since they only took the beer as payment for bringing in the harvest from an old couple’s farm and tying up the sheaves for them. These Kviteseid elves were then credited with inventing the “straight tie” method of binding the sheaves, being unable to cope with the traditional “cross tie” because the shape of the cross was as repugnant to them as the burn of holy water. (This is nonsense, of course; the straight tie was in fact invented by Danish elves, not Norwegian.) The story was collected in 1952, at which time the spoons were supposedly still in the keeping of the old couple’s descendants.
There are a few heirloom spoons among my own family’s possessions. My mother presides over the silver Pied Piper sugar spoon that someone brought back as a souvenir from a trip to Hamelin long enough ago that I don’t remember the piper on the handle ever not sticking up out of the sugar bowl or being any color other than black. My mother’s tiny silver baby spoon, now also due for a polish, protrudes from my own sugar bowl. A few years ago, while rooting through the family trove of silverware, I found another tiny spoon, this one with a fragile-stemmed rose for a handle.
We polished and washed the spoon then replaced it in the little box it came in. My mother thinks it might have been one of her own confirmation presents. Individual pieces of silverware were the traditional gift for teenage girls on the day of their confirmation, an echo, perhaps, of the pieces of bridal silver that nubile young girls would have been amassing in the old days. My mother must also have been put off by that fragile stem because she never used the spoon. I suppose I can come up with a story about it for the grandkids.
But to get back to those sheaf-tying elves: whether it’s tying up bundles of rye, spinning straw into gold, or weaving fine cloths and coverlets, elfkind has always excelled at manipulating fibers, and they are especially talented when it comes to the textile arts.
There are a number of woven flags, banners, and altar cloths that were supposedly the gifts of the elves. The most famous is the Fairy Flag of Dunvegan Castle. This silk pennon is so old that no one can even agree what color it is anymore. It has been described as green or yellow. Sir Walter Scott, on a visit to the castle on the Isle of Skye, was able to make out a pattern of red berries against the now faded ground. To my eyes, the silk is the color of a very old blood stain or an oak leaf that has been lying on the ground all winter.
According to one version of the legend attached to it, the flag was a christening present from a local fairy to the infant scion of Clan MacLeod. (Highland fairies are apparently not as repulsed by Christian symbolism as their Scandinavian counterparts.) In another, the fairy woman was the adult MacLeod’s lover. Since fairies are immortal, or very nearly so, she could conceivably have been both his lover and his fairy godmother. Either way, the banner was presented with the promise that whenever the MacLeod waved it, help would come to him from the other world. Wave it he did, on several occasions, and each time he was saved, even after he had set his supernatural sweetheart aside and taken a mortal wife. At least the MacLeods were true to the flag: it has never been let out of the castle.
The currently prevailing opinion is that the Fairy Flag was made somewhere in the Middle East in the early centuries AD and was brought back to Scotland as a souvenir by a Crusader. It may once have been in the keeping of the Knights Templar, which is almost as good a story as the one about the fairy woman—almost but not quite.
Meanwhile in Iceland, a blanket woven by elven hands once rested on the altar of Hvalsnes Church. Like the Fairy Flag, it too had been used to wrap an infant in its cradle. The Hvalsnes cloth was probably wool, not silk, but that is not to say it was any less fine. The baby inside it was half human, and for that reason its elven mother brought it to the church to be baptized one Sunday. But the baby’s mortal father, who had sojourned a whole year with the elves and was supposed to have arranged for the child’s baptism, refused to acknowledge his part in the business. When the priest asked him if he was indeed the half-elven child’s father, he only mumbled and looked at his toes. And so the livid elf woman threw the coverlet in through the open church door and carried the still pagan baby away in a huff.
But first, she uttered a special kind of Icelandic elf curse known as an álög that condemned her common law ex-husband to live out his life as a monstrous whale. Often, when Icelandic stories talk about human/whale shapeshifting, it’s actually the walrus that is meant, but “The Red-Headed Whale” 55 of the folktale goes on to swallow ships whole and, after he dies, leaves some giant bones behind, so this seems to be an actual whale. I have always thought it a clumsy ending to the story. The elven coverlet, however, was far from clumsy. It was said to have been of an astonishingly fine weave, which is why it was given pride of place on the altar for so many years.
I doubt the Scottish Reverend Robert Kirk ever clapped eyes on the Hvalsnes Altar Cloth. I don’t know if he ever ventured to the Isle of Skye to look at the Fairy Flag of Dunvegan Castle either, but if he did, I’m sure he would have agreed that these pieces were very likely the handiwork of fairies. In his The Secret Commonwealth of Elves, Fauns & Fairies, Kirk describes the weaving of the fairy women as so very fine that they were not limited to the usual linen, wool, and silk but also worked with cobwebs and rainbows.
Tolkien employs the theme in The Return of the King when the elven Lady Arwen creates the “banner of the Tree and the Stars” 56 to fly from the topmost tower of the Citadel in Gondor. Just because she’s an elf doesn’t mean the work was easy, though; the banner was “wrought … in secret, and long was the making.” 57 If you do decide to try your hand at any of the elven crafts, don’t be frustrated at your first unsuccessful attempts. Be patient, as the elves are. Remember, it took Rumpelstiltskin all night to spin that straw into gold, and he was already an old hand at it.
One of the first things I did as a child after seeing Rankin Bass’s animated The Hobbit was design my own elven military banners. I’ve always found battle scenes appallingly boring, whether in books or in movies, but I love pageantry. Irish fairies seem to need a lot more banners than their Nordic counterparts because they fight more battles and do a lot more parading around. But everyone needs a banner sometimes, even if it’s just to say “Here I am.”
These little flags feature the rays of the elves’ beloved sun and are designed to flutter over peaceful gatherings. I make mine out of hand-printed Nepali lokta paper because it’s soft and durable and the gold and silver patterns on the colored ground give it the look of a gorgeous medieval brocade. Incidentally, the lokta shrub from which the paper is made belongs to the genus Daphne and looks very much like Ingebjørg Hovrudhaugen’s mezeron (see Chapter Seven).
You will need:
Printed Nepali lokta paper or any soft, durable craft paper that is printed on one side and solid on the other, such as washi or mulberry paper
Scissors
Glue
String
For each pennon, trace your template twice on your good paper to make a diamond shape as shown. The solid line shows you where to cut and the dotted lines show how to fold the points back. Cut out and fold the diamond in half, then fold up one of the points on the dotted line. Unfold. Cut this point in half and fold up the two new points on each side. Use a dab of glue to stick each point down. That’s it!
You may have noticed I didn’t mention if you should have the printed side of the paper on the inside or the outside of the pennon. That’s because you’re going to make four one way and four the reverse. Alternate them on the string.
If you bought your paper rolled, as lokta paper often is, your pennons may be curling. Press them under a heavy book for a day or two before hanging them on the string. Glue each pennon closed with a dab of glue so it doesn’t fall off the string.
SPELL BREAK: Made in Elfland
The Norwegian folktale “The Girl Who Was Taken” 58 is half elves-on-the-move and half elf wedding. Just like the nubile girl in “The Abducted Bride,” Guro Ljöseng goes out to fetch some bread from the storehouse one night shortly before Christmas. And just like the “abducted” girl, she vanishes. Whatever the motive (the girl or the bread), Guro’s disappearance is blamed on the haug, or “mound” folk. The Norwegian elves are of a slightly different stripe than the more easy-going Danish mound folk. These elves live in the mountains and spirit young people away without warning, never to return them.
An attempt is made to ring poor Guro out of the mountain, but the villagers give up after three days and the church bells are stilled. But they haven’t seen the last of Guro. Exactly one year later, she is spied by an old scamp named Hanse-Jacob who has been lying at the crossroads and watching for the mound folk to pass by.
When they do, in a strange but splendid retinue shivering with bells, Guro is among them. She is now the wife of prominent mound man Tostein Longlegs and is having the time of her life. She tells Hanse-Jacob how glad she was that they finally stopped ringing the church bells when they did, for had they rung them for just a little bit longer, she would have been compelled to come home and would have been ill for the rest of her days. As it is, she’s quite happy to be Tostig’s wife because now every day is like Christmas!
Guro is only missing one thing—well, two: her shoes. Everything else she is wearing is of the finest elven make, but her feet are bound with rags. When the clothes she left behind at home were given to the poor, she received sumptuous made-in-Elfland replacements, but her mortal family is still holding on to her shoes. Guro tells Hanse-Jacob to remind them to donate the shoes right away so she can have new kidskin boots from Elfland.
With that, the retinue continues on their way to a Christmas feast at Ryseberg. It must be a long way away because both Guro’s disappearance and reappearance occur on an Imber evening. Imber corresponds to the English fourth quarter Ember Day, which was a day of fasting in the Middle Ages. Perhaps Guro’s abduction was punishment for fetching bread during what was supposed to be a day of abstinence. It makes sense that the at least semi-pagan elves would be feasting on a night when Christians were supposed to be fasting, but there’s a bit more to it this time.
There were four Ember Days in a year. The one that fell closest to Christmas was December 13, St. Lucy’s Day, which was also (for a time) the date of the winter solstice in Scandinavia due to the backward shift of the old, uncorrected Julian calendar. Things are bound to happen on a night like that, and in Norway on St. Lucy’s Eve (December 12), goblins rampaged through the countryside, creating a ruckus and descending through the chimneys to raid the pantries of unsuspecting Christians. They were led by a witch who was known in some parts of Scandinavia, appropriately, as “Lussi,” but in parts of Norway her name was Guro.
The procession witnessed by Hanse-Jacob is positively tame compared to the usual Lussiferd or oskorei, as the rambunctious horde was known. Still, one can’t help but wonder if Tostein and Guro and their followers are going to Ryseberg as invited guests or as home invaders.
CRAFT: Elven Inn
Icelandic stories of elves on the move tend not to be as detailed as the Norwegian story of “The Girl Who Was Taken.” Instead, the witness watches from afar as a great migration of elves passes by with glowing lanterns and carts piled high with baggage and eventually disappears inside a rock. The greatest elf exodus of all occurred back in Koðran’s day when the hidden folk were seen fleeing in droves just before Iceland’s formal acceptance of Christianity.
Of course plenty of them stayed behind too, and these are said to move house either at Christmas or at New Year’s and need a spot to rest along the way. The concept owes much to Mary and Joseph’s fruitless search for an inn but also to the older tradition of the ancestral spirits coming back to visit at the winter solstice.
In Iceland, Christmas and New Year’s are still the most likely times for an elf to rent a moving van, but the Reverend Robert Kirk insisted that the fairies changed domicile at the beginning of each quarter of the year.59 Since Reverend Kirk was writing of seventeenth-century Scottish tradition, I consulted F. Marian McNeill’s Scottish Folklore and Folk-Belief to determine exactly when these occur. According to Mrs. McNeill, the Scottish Quarter Days are Candlemas (February 2), Old Beltane (May 15), Lammas (August 1), and Old Hallowmass (November 11), an intoxicating mix of both Julian and Gregorian dates. Of these, Old Beltane stands out because McNeill equates it with Whitsun or Pentecost, a moveable feast that still enjoys a high status in Old Elfland and usually involves picnicking. I like to think that the elves have been moving from mound to mound, paying calls on one another each mid-May ever since the Bronze Age.
None of the stories about moving elves ever conclude with “and after that there were no more elves in the land.” By the next year or quarter, they’re all back and ready to move again. Perhaps it is not a spatial journey the elves are making at all but a temporal one.
I would like to tell you that the medieval Icelanders made these little houses out of parchment and the Bronze and Iron Age folk out of birchbark, placing them in the corners of their halls and longhouses at Yule, but that would be pure fantasy. Still, if that’s the story you want to tell people, I’m all for it. Please also note that the dimensions of the house are not meant to suggest the elves are tiny, only that size is not an issue for them.
The design of the little house was inspired by Tolkien’s own illustrations for The Hobbit.
You will need:
Watercolor paper
Pencil
Watercolor paints in viridian (green) and ultramarine (blue) and yellow
Paintbrush
Paper towel or napkin
Scissors
Glue
Silver glitter (optional)
Gold or silver cord
Trace the house pieces onto watercolor paper. With a pencil, lightly sketch in the stars and the “snowfall” on the roof. Thin the yellow paint so it’s very watery. Dab paint inside each star then use a tiny twist of paper towel to wick away the extra paint when done. Paint a line of pale green along the bottom and around the door, then a line of blue over that, blotting when done.
For the roof, leave the space at the top white: that’s the snow. Paint a thin, pale blue line under it, then paint the rest of the roof green, again keeping the paint very thin and blotting.
When paper is dry, cut out the pieces and assemble the house. Glue tabs on the inside of the wall to make it round. Bend the roof into a cone, glue, and use another dab of glue to secure a knotted loop of cord inside the point. Fold up the tabs of the floor and glue inside the bottom of the house. Glue on roof as shown. If you like, mix a little silver glitter with glue and dab it onto the snowcap.
54. Kvideland and Sehmsdorf, Scandinavian Folk Belief and Legend, pp. 223–224.
55. For the full story, see Simpson, Icelandic Folktales and Legends, pp. 40–43.
56. Tolkien, The Return of the King, p. 246.
57. Ibid, p. 48.
58. Christiansen, Folktales of Norway, pp. 77–78.
59. They say you should move every three years in order to keep the clutter down. If Reverend Kirk was right, then the elven abode must be particularly spartan.