“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.

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.