Elves: The Luminous Ones of Norse Myth and Ancient Memory
Elves by Arthur Rackham — the great illustrator's vision of the fairy folk, combining naturalistic detail with otherworldly strangeness, from his 1908 illustrations for *A Midsummer Night's Dream*. In the mythological landscape of the Germanic and Norse world, few beings have captured the imagination as powerfully as the elves — the álfar of Old Norse, the ylfe of Old English, the elbe of Old High German. They are among the oldest supernatural beings in the Germanic traditions, predating the written mythology by centuries, embedded in place names, personal names, and folk belief across the entire Germanic linguistic world from Iceland to the Alps. They are not merely the pointed-eared helpers of Santa Claus or the magical craftsmen of Tolkien's fiction; they are something far stranger and more powerful — beings of light and darkness, of health and illness, of beauty and terror, that occupied a central place in the religious imagination of northern Europe for a thou...