The elf in Anglo-Saxon England

[herecirm]

Right; this is my first post here and may be something of a long shot, but I figured I have nothing to lose in putting the question out there to you good folk

Comments

[orange_fell]

"Elves in Anglo-Saxon England" by Alaric Hall is a revised version of Hall's PhD thesis, and it looks like you can download the dissertation version from his website: http://www.alarichall.org.uk/phd.php

The reviews seem positive, although they say it's densely written and there's actually not all that much about aelves in the original sources, so he's drawing conclusions from a limited body of evidence.

[niki_chidon]

Alaric has a tendency to draw far reaching onclusions from very limited sources... I love the guy, I do, but he does. But he's also a type who'd probably love to answer OPs questions if approached.

[orange_fell]

Haha, I'm an ancient historian, so I know that tune very well. :) So do you go to Leeds? I know one of this history grad students there.

[niki_chidon]

I actually knew him when he was at Helsinki University in Finland. (And yeah, I so know, too;)

[samtyr]

I know it's not quite what you're looking for but you might have better luck asking in some of the Tolkien-related comms and boards. I know there are quite a few scholarly works and some of them have good reference sections.

This book deals more with the Celtic/Sidhe/Tuatha de Danann 'history' of Elves but it might be of some help: Dimitra Fimi, "‘Mad’ Elves and ‘Elusive Beauty’: Some Celtic Strands of Tolkien's Mythology [1]," Folklore 117.2 (2006), Questia, Web, 22 Feb. 2011.

Hope this helps some.

[herecirm]

I did consider Tolkien-related searches, but as I wanted to see how the Anglo-Saxon elf would differ from the Tolkien elf (which seems to be the blueprint for all elves in literature etc.) I'd deliberately avoided it.

That book does look like a very good read though, even if it is more Celtic than Anglo-Saxon, so thank you muchly for the reference. I will search it out. :)

[rhiannon_s]

Tolkien's elf is pretty much the Anglo-Saxon Elf, just with a dollop of extra romanticism added. The depictions of elves in The Hobbit is pretty close to a lot of the myths. It's the LotR elves that are scrubbed up and whitewashed a bit more.

[janewilliams20]

I have an Odinist friend who tells me that elves do exist... not quite what you're after, but getting in touch with an Odinist community might be of use - sorry, I don't have any useful contacts.

[herecirm]

No, that is helpful, thank you! From what I have found out, the Anglo-Saxon elf does seem to be quite similiar to the elf in Scandinavian myth. So learning about the latter may help to put together pieces for the former. Thanks!

[mab_browne]

If you can lay hands on A Dictionary of Fairies by Katharine Briggs, it has a lot of folklore stuff, including elvish/fairy characteristics, and folklore beliefs and stories. Some of it will be Celtic in derivation, some of it Anglo-Saxon, but most likely filtered through the 19th century when people started taking the collection of this information more seriously. If you don't want to buy, what about interlibrary loan systems, depending on where you come from?

Terry Pratchett's story Lords and Ladies takes some of the more unattractive characteristics of elves and ramps them up good and proper.

[herecirm]

My only concern with sources filtered through Victorian ideas is that they may have upped the romanticism of the creatures, if that makes sense. But still, it looks like a useful book to have around. Thank you. :)

I love Terry Pratchett, although I only really started reading him last year (yes, I know ... I lived under a rock), so I haven't read that one yet. I will now!

[transemacabre]

Okay, from the aforementioned Alaric Hill book:

Elves (aelfen) seem to have been perceived as humanlike, originally masculine, beings. They were sometimes associated with nymphs from Greek mythology, such as in translations of the Latin works of Aldhelm (d. 709/10), which translated such terms as 'country-Muses' (ruricola musas) as landaelfe and 'Castalian nymphs' (Castalidas nimphas) as dunaelfa. Elves also came to denote beauty; there's a word, aelfscyne, "beautiful as an elf", which appears in a gloss of Genesis-A from about the same period as Beowulf, when Abraham fears that the Egyptians will kill him so they can take his wife because she is aelfscyne (this is used to translate the term pulchra, beautiful).

Elves are mentioned briefly in Beowulf, where they appear among the "misbegotten beings" that sprang forth after Cain slew Abel, and which "struggled against God". Keep in mind Beowulf was written when Anglo-Saxon England was already Christian.

[nineveh_uk]

IIRC, Judith in the Anglo-Saxon version of the story is also described as "ides aelfscyne".

[herecirm]

Ooh, thank you. Also you've answered a question that I forgot to put in the original post - which was: should they be referred to as elven or elfen? Ha. :)

Thank you very much for your comment!

[teithiwr]

Re: elven/elfen: in Old English, "f" was pronounced like "v" when between vowels (such as in aelfen), so I'd go with elven. :)