Álfar

Summary

The álfar, singular álfr, are a race of beings in Norse myth who are always named beside the gods. The poems pair the two in a fixed phrase, "Æsir and elves": a giant asks "How fares it with the Æsir? How fares it with the elves?", and in the feasting hall one hears "Of the Æsir and elves who are in here, not one is your friend". Lokasenna 2 and 13; Þrymskviða 7. Snorri says in Gylfaginning that there is a place in heaven called Álfheimr, where the people called light elves live, while the dark elves live down in the earth; they are unlike them in appearance and much more unlike in nature: the light elves are fairer than the sun to look on, the dark elves blacker than pitch. Gylfaginning 17. Grímnismál says that in ancient days the gods gave Álfheimr to Freyr as a tooth-gift, the gift a child receives when his first tooth comes through.

In the stories the elves are present more than active. They sit with the gods at the feast; Þrymr asks after them when Loki comes looking for Thor's hammer; and at the end of time the seeress asks: "What ails the Æsir? What ails the elves? All Jötunheimr resounds." Völuspá 48. They have a language of their own: in Alvíssmál every thing has one name among men, another among the Æsir, the Vanir, the giants, the elves and the dwarves, and the elves call the earth "the growing one" and the sun "the fair wheel". Alvíssmál 10 and 16. They also have a share in fate and in the runes: Snorri says that some of the norns who come to every child at birth to shape its life are of the elves' kin, and Hávamál says that Odin carved runes for the Æsir, Dáinn for the elves and Dvalinn for the dwarves.

They are among the few beings of the myths for whom the sagas record worship. Around 1018 the poet Sigvatr travelled east on his king's business through Gautland in Sweden. At a farm called Hof the door was barred, and the people said the place was holy that day. At the next farm the housewife stood in the doorway and would not let him in, saying that they were holding an álfablót, a sacrifice to the elves. In his verse he says that she told him: do not come in, wretch; we are heathen and fear Odin's anger; and she drove him off like a wolf. Óláfs saga helga 92. In Kormáks saga Þorvarðr is wounded and his wound will not heal, and the wise woman Þórdís tells him: there is a hill not far from here where elves live; take the bull Kormákr killed, redden the outside of the hill with its blood, and make the elves a feast of its meat, and you will be healed.

The idea their stories turn on is that the elves are dwellers in a place: Álfheimr in heaven, the hill near the farm, or the ground below, and they keep to it. They are close to the gods in speech and close to people at the farm and the hill, fed where they live and asked for healing there. The elves are not the dwarves: the dwarves grew as maggots in Ymir's flesh and the gods gave them human form, and every poem that lists both lists them as two races. But when Snorri describes the dark elves living under the earth he brings them close to the dwarves, and he calls the home of the dwarves who made the fetter Gleipnir "the home of the black elves".

We read the name in the Arabic tongue like this. The r of álfr is the Old Norse nominative ending; it drops in the plural álfar and the genitive alfa, leaving alf-. The Arabic essay reads Álfheimr as alifa + hāma and glosses it "the home of the familiar, or the home of light". The three letters of the word are the letters of alifa in order: the opening glottal stop is heard as a vowel, l is l, f is f. In Lane alifahu is "he kept, or clave, to it", said of a thing or a place: he frequented it, became accustomed to it; one says "the birds kept to the sacred territory, and to the houses", and "the gazelles kept to the sands". On this reading the álfar are "those who keep to a place", the familiar dwellers, which is what the sources make them: they have a known hill near the farm where they are fed, a day in the house when the door is shut to strangers, and a home in heaven given to Freyr. The "light" in the essay's gloss is Snorri's description of the light elves as fairer than the sun, and the poets call the sun álfröðull, "elf-beam".

Linguistic Root

The álfar and alifa

Cleasby and Vigfusson give Old English ælf, English elf, German alb; they note that only the Edda distinguishes light elves from dark elves, that "the Elves and Ases are fellow gods, and form a favourite alliteration in the old mythical poems", and that "in the Alvíssmál Elves and Dwarfs are clearly distinguished as different". In later folk tales the elves haunt the hills, hence their name "hidden people". Orel derives the word from Germanic *albaz and calls it "of uncertain origin": Kuhn compared Sanskrit ṛbhú-, "clever, skilful", and Wadstein a root meaning "white".

Lane gives alifahu, "he kept, or clave, to it", of a thing or a place; "he frequented it, or resorted to it habitually"; "he became familiar, sociable, companionable" with someone; "the birds kept to the sacred territory, and to the houses"; "the gazelles kept to the sands"; and īlāf, the covenant of safety given to travellers. Lane, ʾ-l-f. The comparison needs no substitution: the glottal stop falls away in the European languages and leaves its vowel, as the Juthoor table records for ʾ and ʿ; l is l; and f belongs to the labial group that surfaces as f or b in Europe, the very alternation between Norse álfr and German alb.

Black elves and dark elves

The essay reads the black elves as sawwada + alif, "the home of darkness". The s, w and d of sawwada answer the s, v and t of svart, and the r of svart has no partner in s-w-d. For the dark elves we read dökk "proposed on the method" as Arabic dukna. In Lane dakina is "it was, or became, of a blackish colour; of a colour inclining to blackness, or between redness and blackness", and adkan is blackish, said also of clouds. Norse dökkr, "dark", goes back to Germanic *dankwaz, whose n the k has swallowed in Norse, and Cleasby and Vigfusson suggest that German dunkel may be the same word. The Germanic word therefore has d, n and k, and dukna has d, k and n, with the k before the n.

Key Mythic Narratives

Völundr, "lord of elves"

In Völundarkviða the smith Völundr is called "lord of elves" three times: he sits on a bearskin counting his rings and finds one missing, and King Níðuðr asks him: "Where did you get, Völundr, lord of elves, our wealth?" The poem makes the goldsmith one of the elves, as the dwarves are the makers of treasures elsewhere.

Freyr's messenger is not an elf

When Skírnir, Freyr's messenger, reaches the house of Gerðr, she asks him: "Are you of the elves, or of the sons of the Æsir, or of the wise Vanir?" He answers that he is none of these. In the same poem Freyr says that no one among Æsir and elves wishes him and Gerðr to be together.

Symbolic Reading

The essay Rereading Norse Myths does not discuss the elves; the other essay places them in its table of the nine worlds: the home of the familiar and of light, set against the home of darkness.

The sources themselves support a reading from people's lives. The elf-sacrifice in the saga is a household rite: the housewife holds it, the door is shut to strangers, and Odin's anger is feared with it. The elf-sacrifice in Kormáks saga is a rite of healing: a bull's blood on a nearby hill and its meat as a feast for those who live there. The elves are not only distant gods in heaven but the farm's neighbours, fed to keep them content, and the keepers of the land that "grows", as they call the earth in Alvíssmál. In later Icelandic tales they became the "hidden people" of the hills, as Cleasby and Vigfusson note.

Cross-Cultural Parallels

The Roman household Lar guards the house and its people; the farmer greets him first on arriving at his farm, and a garland is laid for him on the hearth, while the Lares of the crossroads guard the meeting of streets. The elves are likewise beings bound to a place, fed at the house or the hill so that they will protect its people and heal their wounded. They differ in that the household Lar is a single being for each house, who in Plautus speaks of the owner's grandfather, while the elves are a whole people with a home in heaven and a language of their own.

In Japan the kami dwell in their places, the mountain, the tree and the place people know, and people offer them food at their festivals, which is the closest thing in other mythologies to the elves of the hill in Kormáks saga. At the end of time the elves are asked after together with the Æsir at Ragnarök.