ELVES AND FAIRIES

Inventing mythology.

Egeler, a professor of Old Norse literature and culture, offers an erudite history of elves and fairies from the time of the Vikings to the early 21st century. Translated from German by Spencer, Egeler’s examination reveals the cultural interchanges and social transformations that affected the way elves and fairies were imagined in Iceland, Britain, and Germany in medieval, early modern, Victorian, and modern times. Beginning in Iceland, Egeler considers the appearance, habitat, and behavior of elves, whose presence, for isolated farmers, alleviated the “oppressively vast emptiness” of the countryside. In Ireland and Scotland, the rural poor developed fairy stories in response to illness, death, suffering, and misfortune. Their fairies could be beneficent or malevolent, occupying a gray area between the godly and the devil; witch hunts, for example, equated fairies with demonic forces. From the Middle Ages on, the educated aristocracy conceived of fairies living in their own kingdom, as in Spenser’s The Faerie Queene and Shakespearean plays. Egeler credits the Brothers Grimm and other folklorists with publishing fairy tales and folk tales that made spirits and sprites accessible to the urban middle classes. Fairies became a prevalent artistic theme in Victorian Britain, which Egeler ascribes to “a worried sense of nostalgia” amid increasing industrialization. Blake, Lady Gregory, Yeats, and Arthur Conan Doyle are among many writers who shaped their culture’s conception of the spirit world. James Barrie’s Tinker Bell, Egeler asserts, contributed to the infantilization of fairies as tiny creatures with insect wings, diminishing their status “as some of the most powerful figures of the otherworld”—status that has been revitalized by medievalist J.R.R. Tolkien’s bellicose elves. Egeler’s analysis supports his contention that “every age and every stratum in society has its own otherworld that reflects its fears, its longings and its needs.”

A scholarly investigation of magical beings.