An Elven Herbal
As twenty-first-century people, we have a much better under- standing of the Iron Age than we do of the Bronze or Neolithic. This is partly due to our position on the timeline and partly to the fact that by the Iron Age, much of Europe was becoming literate. It’s quite clear to us that the Iron Age was characterized as much by thatched roofs, dyestuffs, linens, and kitchen gardens as it was by iron swords, but when it comes to the Stone and Bronze Ages, we have fewer organic remains and, in northern Europe, no texts whatsoever. We tend to forget that trees, flowers, and grasses rioted throughout the period and that the worlds of our prehistoric ancestors were just as colorful as the worlds that came after.
The five-thousand-year-old ruins of Skara Brae in far northern Scotland are about as stony as you can get. But even the Skara Braeans, who reclined on stone beds and stored their belongings on stone shelves, would not have defined themselves by stone. Wood was a rare and precious substance on their windswept island, but they would have enjoyed seaweed mattresses and woven grass mats as well as dustings of daisies and buttercups over the turf roofs of their houses.
The Old Elflanders did not inhabit a grey world either. How I would love to pick the brain of the old troll woman who sits atop the stove in the Swedish folktale “Communion Wine in the Troll Food” and claims to have “outlived seven oak forests.” 73 But until we can track her down, we’ll have to use our imaginations. Picture a Hindu festival in today’s India. A similar atmosphere would have prevailed at a Nordic Bronze Age funeral or solstice celebration, except there would have been no cars, bicycles, or apartment blocks, so the scene would have been a little less crowded. Instead of the bright orange Asian pot marigold, you might see wreaths, garlands, and bunches of blue flax flowers, yellow broom, yarrow, mistletoe, and the pendulous blossoms of the linden tree. The pastures and the mounds thrown up in their midst would have been covered in purple heather, juniper, dog violets, and that unassuming little member of the rose family, the tormentil.
Some of the plants familiar to the mound people, such as yarrow and crab apple, have been preserved inside their oak coffins. The presence of others has been confirmed by picking through the earth piled atop their graves. And most of them can still be seen growing among the hedgerows and even—in the case of the tiny commom daisy Bellis perennis—thriving in the postage-stamp backyards of Old Elfland’s suburbs.
Birch
The dwarf birch was the first member of the genus Betula to appear on Denmark’s windswept plains after the glaciers retreated about 18,000 years ago. By two thousand years after that, the winds had died down sufficiently to allow full-size birch trees to thrive there too. The birch has played an important part in the lives of the elves ever since.
The word “birch,” along with its Germanic relatives, comes from a Proto-Indo-European root meaning “to shine.” We know that birch leaves rained down on the oak trunk coffin of the Muldbjerg Chieftain when he was interred in 1365 BC in Jutland, for the leaves were still embedded in the peaty soil of the mound when it was excavated in 1883. Elsewhere, birch bark, too, was deliberately used to cover the coffin lids.
The birch bark hat was once favored by the Celts, or at least by their dead. In Hochdorf, Germany, a Celtic prince of the Hallstatt Period was buried with a birch bark hat on his head. The hat was simply made, the bark bent and sewn into a shallow cone. It may have had some spiritual significance, because the forty-something prince certainly could have afforded a hat made of more expensive materials. In fact, a prince like him, with his curvy-toed gold foil shoes, would have been well received in the realm of the light elves.
Three more birch bark hats pop up in the Scottish ballad “The Wife of Usher’s Well.” Three sons come to visit their mother at Martinmas (November 11) wearing hats “o’ the birk.” Nothing remarkable about that, except that these boys had been lost at sea the week before and were returning briefly from the dead to bid their mother farewell.
North and east of Old Elfland, in Finland, a switch of birch leaves continues to be an integral part of the sauna experience, as does the traditional birch soap. We can’t all have a sauna or even a birch tree growing in the yard, but if you keep a bar of birch soap in the bathroom, you might be able to attract a very special kind of elf known as a saunatonttu. To this day, the sauna is much more than a steam room; it’s the center of Finnish family life, and it’s the saunatonttu’s job to make sure no one misbehaves inside it. In return for his service, he expects the odd offering on Christmas Eve. Don’t give him the same milk or porridge you would serve a tomten or nisse; he prefers brandy. He’s also a smoker, so he probably wouldn’t mind a pouch of the best pipeweed too.
Recipe: Birch Soap
Makes one pound of soap/eight bars.
Equipment:
1 child’s shoebox or expendable box of similar shape and size
Freezer paper
Wooden board
Kitchen scale
Sharp knife
2 heatproof glass measuring cups, 8 oz. or larger
Pot in which one measuring cup fits nicely in a water bath
Medium-sized bowl (about 1 ½ quarts), preferably with a spout and definitely NOT aluminum, which interferes with the action of the lye
Cups or small bowls for measuring oils and lye
Kitchen scale
Slotted wooden or silicone spoon (if wooden, it should be used only for soapmaking hereafter, not for cooking)
Stick blender (optional)
Rubber gloves
Goggles
Shoes
Kitchen thermometer
Bath towel
Grease-cutting dishwashing liquid
Ingredients:
(Note: all ingredients should be weighed, not measured by volume—ounces, not fluid ounces.)
4 oz. coconut oil
½ oz. yellow beeswax, shaved into small pieces
11 oz. olive oil (plain or pomace grade, not extra virgin)
1 oz. sweet almond oil
½ oz. castor oil
2.2 oz. Red Crown High Test Lye or other brand
5 oz. distilled water
1 teaspoon GSE (grapefruit seed extract)
2 teaspoons sweet birch essential oil (Yes, it smells like root beer!)
First, line your shoebox mold. Place the box on a large, dull-side-up sheet of freezer paper and trace around the bottom of the box. Use a ruler to extend the shape out into the arms of a cross. Cut out and crease well on the lines. Push the liner into the box, place on your wooden board, and set aside.
Weigh all oils. Remember to use the tare function on your scale to subtract the weight of the cup or bowl you are using.
Heat the coconut oil in one of the measuring cups in a hot water bath. Make sure no water splashes into the cup if it boils. When oil is clear, add the beeswax. It will take some time to melt. In the meantime, pour the olive, almond, and castor oils into the spouted bowl. If they are already room temperature, they don’t need to be heated; just don’t let them get cold.
Once the beeswax has melted into the coconut oil, you can turn off the heat, but keep an eye on it. If it starts to form a skin, turn the heat back on.
Weigh your distilled water in the measuring cup. Set aside.
Now for the lye. Put your gloves, goggles, and shoes on (if you haven’t already) before you even open the container. Weigh lye, being careful not to spill any. Just a speck of lye on the floor can burn the paw pad of an unsuspecting cat or barefoot human. In fact, it’s best to lock all cats and extraneous humans in the bedroom before even beginning the soapmaking process.
Open the kitchen window.
Add the lye carefully to the distilled water, stirring until dissolved or until you have to leave the room—you’ll see what I mean! When the lye fumes have dissipated, you can return and check the temperature. You will spring into action when it has cooled to around 130–140 degrees Fahrenheit.74 This could take as long as half an hour, more or less depending on the temperature of the room, so keep checking.
When the lye has cooled within range, you are ready to soap. First, add the coconut oil and beeswax to the other oils in the spouted bowl. Wearing your gloves and goggles, pour your lye solution into the oils. Stir with slotted spoon until lye and oils are blended and mixture starts to pale and thicken. If you use a stick blender, this could happen within minutes. If you are stirring by hand, it will take much, much longer, but eventually it will achieve the consistency of cake batter. This is called “trace.” If you have been stirring for half an hour and there are still no signs of trace, go ahead and add the GSE anyway since it often accelerates the process.
Next add the sweet birch essential oil, stir well, and pour the soap into your mold. Cover the mold with the folded towel and put the whole thing in a warm (or at least not cold), safe place, like the inside of the oven. Leave it alone for two days.
Keep your gloves and goggles on for clean-up since the soap batter is still caustic. Scrape as much of the residue out of the mixing bowl as you can and deposit it in the garbage before attacking the bowl with the grease-cutting dishwashing liquid.
After two days, lift the soap out of the mold, peel off the freezer paper and cut into eight bars with a sharp knife. Put the bars in a clean, shallow cardboard box or tray, leaving plenty of space between the bars for air to circulate. Turn them every few days. They’ll be ready to use in four weeks but will be even better and harder after six.
Crab Apple
There were wild apple trees in Old Elfland by about 1700 BC, but their fruits would not have been good eating, at least not raw. The English word “apple,” like the Old Norse epli belongs to an ancient strain of Indo-European spoken north of the Alps and dubbed “Old European” by German linguist Hans Krahe. The word originally referred to Malus sylverstris, the wild European crab apple, because there simply were no other apples in northern Europe at the time.
Even though the raw fruits were less than delicious, the tree itself was revered as a habitation of the ancestors at least as early as the Viking Age and probably earlier. Sometime in the 1380s BC, a small child buried at Guldhøj in Denmark was given three crab apples to take with him to the afterlife.
In AD 834, a fancy bucket filled with crab apples was placed aboard the richly furnished Oseberg Ship before it was sealed inside a grave of blue Norwegian clay. The bucket, with its delicate bands of open bronzework, is believed to be of Irish workmanship. Could it be that the ship had already put in at the Blessed Isles of which both the pagan Irish and early Irish Christians believed to lie somewhere in the Atlantic and to be covered with apple blossom?
Elder
In England, witches were thought to inhabit elder trees, but in Denmark it is the Hyldemoer or “Elder Mother” who personifies Sambucus nigra. You had better beg her pardon before cutting any branches or gathering any of the white flowers or black fruits from her tree. The Hyldemoer’s daughter is the peripatetic Hyldequinde, a term often translated as “elle maid.” Hyld means “elder” while quinde seems to be an antiquated form of the Danish kvinde, “woman.” It’s not clear to me if “Hyldequinde” was ever a term familiar to the Danes or if it was cobbled together by nineteenth-century English writers when translating Danish folklore.
I have not given the elle maid her own entry in the Appendix because she is so much like the hollow-backed skogsrå. The English word “elder” comes from Old English ellen, which denoted a hollow tree. It all seems to come together in the German word for the elder, Holunder. Why hollow? Because the pith of an elder twig can be easily scooped out, leaving a hollow tube. Like the skogsrå, when the elle maid turned around, she revealed a hollow back.
The elle maid was most likely to appear in the wilderness in the heat of the day to offer a cool drink to whoever was passing by. No doubt she served it with an elder twig straw. The drink often came with an invitation to rest in the shade of her hall. It was wisest to decline both. The following recipe was provided by my mother who grew up in the old Hansa town of Lübeck, Germany, in what I like to call the “Dessert Soup Belt” of Old Elfland.
I was able to find elderberry juice in my own ordinary grocery store. If yours doesn’t carry it, try a natural foods store or online.
Recipe: Elderberry Soup with Farina Dumplings
Makes four bowls of dessert soup with three dumplings in each.
For the soup:
2 cups elderberry juice
2 tablespoons lemon juice
Dash vanilla extract
2 tablespoons cornstarch
¼ cup water
Sugar
1 Granny Smith or other tart apple, peeled and cut into small chunks
Whipped cream (optional)
Bring elderberry juice, lemon juice, and vanilla to a simmer in a small pot.
In a cup, stir cornstarch and water together until smooth. Add it to the juices in the pot, stirring well. Soup will start to thicken. Add sugar to taste. Remember, this is a dessert soup.
Add apple chunks to soup and simmer on low until they are soft but not mushy.
In the meantime, make the dumplings.
For the dumplings:
½ cup milk
1 teaspoon plus 1 pinch salt
1 tablespoon butter
1 tablespoon sugar
5 tablespoons farina
1 beaten egg
Begin heating a large pot of water. Add one teaspoon salt.
In a small pot, heat milk, butter, sugar, and a pinch of salt. As soon as it boils, add farina, turn off heat and stir until it thickens into a soft dough. Transfer to bowl and stir in beaten egg.
When salted water reaches a rolling boil, use two spoons to scoop up a dollop of dough and push it into the water. Dip the spoons into the boiling water between each scoop for easier release of the dough. Dumplings will sink to the bottom of the pot. When they’re all in, remove pot from heat. Dumplings will float up when they are done.
Remove dumplings with a slotted spoon. Put three in each bowl and ladle soup over them. Serve warm.
You can also make the soup ahead of time and serve it cold, in which case an artful squirt of whipped cream in each bowl would not go amiss.
Fern
Golden fern is one of the three “fruits of summer,” along with wild garlic and primrose, that a fairy woman gives to the warrior Nera when he departs her mound on Halloween in the ancient Irish Ulster Cycle. The plants are meant to be proof that Nera has indeed been among the Tuatha Dé Danann and the prophecy he brings is to be trusted.
In Germany, ferns, which do not in fact produce flowers, were said to bloom at midnight on St. John’s Eve (June 24), their golden blossoms marking the spot where treasures—possible elven—were buried. The consumption of fernseed, actually spores, was supposed to make the eater invisible and to enable him or her to see other invisible folk, i.e. elfkind.
A bracken75 fern frond lay under the body of Egtved Girl, placed there, perhaps, so that anyone who dropped into her mound in wintertime would have proof of their visit. The edible new shoots of the bracken are called fiddleheads and closely resemble the spiral ornamentation of which the mound people were so fond.
Mezeron
The Norwegian folktale “The Hill Man” 76 is also known as “The Tysbast Legend” after the tysbast plant, Daphne mezerum, or “mezeron” in English. Daphne was the nymph whose father turned her into a laurel tree so she could escape the lovelorn Apollo’s advances. The leaves of the mezeron, a hardy, lavender-flowered garden shrub, do resemble those of the bay laurel, and the girls of Swedish and Norwegian folktale also used the plant to deflect the attentions of supernatural lovers.
Smart enough to know a hill man when she sees one, the heroine of one of the Norwegian versions, Ingebjørg Hovrudhaugen by name, tricks this particular hill man into revealing the recipe for the potion that will eventually repel him. When she asks the hill man how she might deter an elven bull that’s been troubling one of her cows, he prescribes an ointment of mezeron, woody nightshade, and orchis bound with tree sap, probably pine or birch. In some versions, honeysuckle replaces the nightshade, and in the Swedish tale “Garlic and Tar,” a wife wins her husband back from a skogsrå by feeding him garlic, pine tar, and “grass from the north side of the chimney.” 77 The Swedes also like to throw in a little valerian.
Ingebjørg prepares the ointment as directed but slathers it over her braids instead of the cow’s tail. The hill man troubles her no more. She does suffer from arthritis afterwards, the result, perhaps, of her contact with the mezeron, whose berries are as poisonous as those of the deadly nightshade. (For nightshade’s story, read on.) In fact, the name mezeron has the “deadly” built right into it: mezerum arrived in Latin via Persian, from an Arabic word meaning “to kill.” Or, as the story seems to suggest, her ill health could have been the result of a curse cast by the spurned hill man.
Nightshade
The Anglo-Saxon name for woody nightshade (Solanum dulcamara) was aelfþone, “elf twine.” If you were “elf-addled,” that is, suffering from one of an array of elf-born diseases, you might be helped by a dose of elf twine. An ointment containing black nightshade (Solanum nigra), was used topically for pain in the Middle Ages. Deadly nightshade or belladonna was best left alone.
Orchis
Orchis is the third active ingredient in the ointment prepared by the intrepid Ingebjørg in the Norwegian folktale, “The Hill Man.” Back in 1988, the editors of Scandinavian Folk Belief and Legend identified it as “o. machulata” 78 but the accepted name now seems to be Dactylorizha maculata, the heath-spotted orchid.
This is no showy jungle or hothouse orchid but a stalwart, light purple little fellow who can tough it out on the moors and has been seen as far north as Iceland, spiky head bowed against the wind. The roots of wild orchids were an ingredient of salep, a sweet, hot beverage that was once the signature drink of the Ottoman Empire. In Europe, it was soon eclipsed by the advent of coffee and chocolate. This is just as well, because if the northern Europeans had gone as crazy over salep as they did over coffee and chocolate, they probably would have hunted their native orchids to extinction.
The roots of wild orchids happen to be highly nutritious. In his Complete Herbal of 1653, Nicholas Culpeper touts orchis roots as the perfect ration for the long-distance traveler who expects to find nothing else to eat along the way. He directs his readers to wash and blanch the roots, dry them to translucence in a hot oven, then air dry them for another few days. He does not specify whether they should be added to water and drunk or baked into bread and eaten like lembas, the elvish waybread that sustains Frodo and Sam on their journey to Mordor in The Return of the King.
Tolkien, in a 1958 letter to Forrest J. Ackerman, insisted that “no analysis in any laboratory would discover chemical properties of lembas that made it superior to other cakes of wheat-meal,” 79 but I suspect that if we could subject a morsel of lembas to such a test, we would find at least a trace of Dactylorizha maculata.
Pennyroyal
This unprepossessing mint, Mentha pulegium, is definitely more “penny” than “royal.” You have probably stepped on it and not noticed. Its other name, “fleabane,” explains why our ancestors held it in such high regard. The Anglo-Saxons who knew it as dweorgdwostle, “dwarf dost,” also used it against elf- and demon-inflicted diseases. The “dwarf” part of the name tells us it was smaller than the standard “dost,” not that it should be used against dwarves, who were never much of an issue in England. We cannot be absolutely certain what the Anglo-Saxons understood by the term “dost,” but in German, Dost is oregano.
Rowan
The rowan or mountain ash (Sorbus aucuparia) has long been the bane of witches, but on the Isle of Man, May 11 was the day to place rowan crosses over all the doors to keep the fairies away. Plain twigs would not do; they had to have the red berries on them in order to be effective.
Why May 11, of all days? This was when May Eve was observed by those still following the uncorrected Julian calendar. Just as witches were out and about on its Germanic equivalent, Walpurgis Night, the evil Manx spirits roamed on this night.
Back in Old Elfland, we find a rowan twig among the many other bits of apparently magical paraphernalia buried with a Bronze Age woman’s cremated remains at Maglehøj on the island of Zealand. She was also equipped with weasel bones, a lynx’s toe, and quartz crystals. She may have used the rowan twig to locate lost or desired objects as the later citizens of Old Elfland would do thousands of years later, cutting a rowan twig during Easter Week or at Midsummer and using it to dowse for buried treasure.80
Scouring Rush
By now you might be asking yourself, “How, in a world without cream polishes, did the mound people keep up the shine on their bronze razors, cloak pins, tutuli, and sword hilts?” They probably rubbed them with scouring rush, Equisetum hyemale, also known as gunbright and rough horse-tail, a funky-looking, leafless plant that continues to thrive in both the Old and New Worlds.
The twelfth-century artisan’s manual, On Divers Arts, directs the carver to finish his ivory chesspiece by polishing it with the scouring rush. At the Wikinger Museum Haithabu in northern Germany, I got to watch a modern-day craftsman polish a recreated Viking era bronze brooch with a handful of the dried stems bound in a neat bundle. Scouring rush abounds in my own Great Swamp. The native Lenape used it to clean their carved wooden bowls and colonial housewives to brighten the pewter on the mantelpiece. You can still find it in some woodworking studios, the stems slit lengthwise, flattened, dried and used like a very fine sandpaper.
Scouring rush prefers wetlands, the edges of rivercourses and moisty divets beside the road: the kinds of borderlands in which one is likely to perceive elves. I wonder if Grimm’s “dingy elves” (see “Dark Elves” in the appendix) were originally those princes who neglected to polish their ornaments, while the “light elves” were those who always kept a fistful of scouring rush with them. I tried it out on one of the little silver spoons we talked about in Chapter Six and found that while it did impart a shine, it was not so good at removing tarnish.
Tobacco
In The Lord of the Rings, the hobbits smoke “pipeweed.” One might like to believe this was some ancient herb once used by many an Anglo-Saxon storyteller for inspiration, but it’s simply Tolkien’s fictional name for Nicotiana tabacum. At some point between publishing The Hobbit and getting The Lord of the Rings off the ground, it occurred to Tolkien that no one in the very Old World realm of Middle-earth ought to be smoking a New World herb, so he simply renamed the leaves in the hobbits’ pouches “pipeweed.”
In most of Europe, tobacco lost its mystical character as soon as the barrels were unpacked, but in Scandinavia it retained a touch of the sacred reputation it enjoys among Native Americans. In the Danish folktale “Trading Fire and Tobacco with the Mound Folk,” 81 the elves possess a superior blend of pipe tobacco and share it with a passing farmer who stops to give one of them a light.
For thousands of years, the mound known as Bredarör in southeastern Sweden remained intact thanks to the ghostly barrow fires that the people of nearby Kivik had observed burning within it. When Farmers Sahlberg and Pärsson broke into the mound in search of building materials on the evening of June 14, 1748, they went with glowing pipes to protect themselves from whatever spirits they might be disturbing. (June 14, it must be mentioned, was the date on which the observance of the summer solstice had drifted into the old unchecked Julian calendar, so it was a good night to go looking for treasure too.)
No such magical aura was able to cling to corn, tomatoes, potatoes or even chocolate when they were brought to Europe, so why tobacco? Could it have taken over from some now forgotten denizen of the northern hedgerows after all? No clay pipe has ever been found inside a mound, but we know that dozens of heady herbs were dropped into the celebratory bonfire long into historic times. Perhaps it was one of those that tobacco recalled to the distant descendants of the mound people.
Yarrow
Thanks to the science of dendrochronology, we know that the famous Danish mini-skirted Egtved Girl was laid in her oak trunk coffin in 1370 BC. And thanks to a flowering stalk of yarrow, Achillea millefolium, placed beside her left knee, we know it was a summer funeral. Long valued for its ability to heal wounds and staunch bleeding, yarrow was one of the many herbs included in the Anglo-Saxon monk Aelfric’s Colloquum of 995. (The name Aelfric, incidentally, means “elf king.”) Yarrow has been used as a flavoring in schnapps and some beers, so I’m sure the mound people used it in their own artisanal brews, too.
73. Lindow, Swedish Legends and Folktales, p. 95.
74. Most soapers soap at 110–120 degrees. This recipe calls for a hotter lye solution because you need to keep the beeswax from solidifying. Beeswax is a nice crutch for the beginning soaper because it helps the soap to trace.
75. “Bracken” is an old Proto-Germanic word denoting ferns in general. Scientifically, it refers to any fern of the genus Pteridium.
76. Kvideland and Sehmsdorf, Scandinavian Folk Belief and Legend, p. 214.
77. Lindow, Swedish Legends and Folktales, p. 111.
78. Kvideland and Sehmsdorf, Scandinavian Folk Belief and Legend, p. 215.
79. Carpenter, The Letters of J. R. R. Tolkien, p. 274.
80. If you, too, want to hunt for treasure, see Kvideland and Sehmsdorf, Scandinavian Folk Belief and Legend, p. 320, for the proper symbols to draw on your twig.
81. Kvideland and Sehmsdorf, Scandinavian Folk Belief and Legend, p. 230.