“Wonderful folk, Elves, sir! Wonderful!”, as Sam Gamgee put it after his first encounter. Tolkien was a bit of an enthusiast on the subject himself; but for the master elf-lore was only a recreation from his day job as an Old English philologist. Not so Alaric Hall.

	Many a hero, like Weland, ‘leader of elves’, may have been a fairy in more senses than one

Here is a man whose studies have been devoted to the language of Anglo-Saxon elfdom, with a linguistic precision which non-specialists can only envy. After all, you can’t excavate an elf. You can only pick away the layers of meaning that have accumulated around that tricksy name over the last 15 centuries.

“They are quite different from what I expected,” Sam goes on, and readers of this book will find much to surprise them. Elves, it seems were not little people, they weren’t invisible, they didn’t fly. If you met an Old English ælf or a Scandinavian álfr, he would look like an aristocratic male, as splendid as one of the vanir, who intermarry with the gods in Eddaic mythology. They were mighty fighters: “elf of battle” was a poet’s compliment, and Alfred, ‘elf-wisdom’, was a fitting name for a king.

Can these be the same elves which the Beowulf-poet dismisses as Cain’s kin, and that the early exorcists drove out as demons? Have we lost an original, pagan sense of the supernatural – or was there ever such a thing as “the supernatural” in Anglo-Saxon culture at all?

Only by studying language in detail can we get at what the vanished generations thought, and Hall is a master at the analysis of language. He suggests that, instead of perceiving Reality and the Other, the early English thought in terms of three worlds: those of humans, gods and monsters.

The god-world, to which elves belonged, would always make common league with our own against the monsters that threaten the order of things. Indeed, some human beings, such as magicians and that queer race the Finns, are half-elven themselves. But though gods and elves are, in some sense, on our side, they are as touchy and violent as men, and may threaten or kill individuals to avenge a slight.

This is where the elf-charms come in. Old English lore was rich in protective formulæ for when elves turned bad, including the superb psychodrama Wi færstice. Anachronistic readings of these charms have assumed that Anglo-Saxon elves caused illness by shooting little arrows, like those in modern folklore, but Hall shows that it’s more subtle than that. Shooting in the charms is an enacted metaphor, not a literalist supernatural ætiology; the cunning man/doctor uses it to act out a cure for a stabbing pain. The same medicine books consistently associate elves with fevers and madness, and this ties in with the Middle English idea that the elvish is imaginary or delusory. Delusions, in this world-view, are not the outcome of your own mental state, but things that are put in your head by outside agents.

But what if these visions were not delusions after all?

Siden, the illness which the medical texts blame on elves, is Scandinavian seir, a magical technique which has aroused renewed interest in practitioners of the Northern Tradition, and which has always been associated with the elf-like vanir.

Religion and ecstasy are close cousins. The word gydig meant god-inspired before it turned, more prosaically, into our ‘giddy’; and there is a parallel word ylfig, which must have meant elf-inspired, though it came to mean ‘prophesying in fits’. For the saints and rulers who wrote our Anglo-Saxon texts, this was mere madness, but it is possible that others might have gone beyond insanity in search of knowledge – at a price. Seir had squalid associations, being linked with despised forms of male homosexuality.

So the archaic elves were beautiful, uncanny, gender-bending practitioners of a shameful magic – a bit like David Bowie.

Many a hero of legend, like Weland, “leader of elves”, may have been a fairy in more senses than one. If so, they had opposite numbers in the manly females of myth, the frightful harridan woman-warriors who loom large in charms such as Wi færstice, and who have left their trace in the angry fairy queens of later lore.

And yet in the beginning, there were no female elves. Hall deploys some densely technical arguments here – if you can’t keep up with the textual analysis of gloss and lemma, there’s a lot you’ll have to take on trust – but his conclusion is a simple one. Eighth-century clerics were baffled by the nymphs they read about in classical texts. Who were these lovely supernatural women? Otherworldly hags, yes, they were familiar. Fierce, graceful, haunting youths, they were a possibility. But to imagine a beautiful, noble, woman from the realm of Færie was a revolutionary step. It would be many years before Galadriel took her place in the imaginary yearnings of the heart. And this tells us much about gender relations then and now, about the slow transformation of the heroic Northern world into the courtly culture of feudal Europe that is both scene and author of our fairytales.

It’s amazing what you can get out of a monosyllable. Alaric Hall has done a sterling job with elves.