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These literary elves were imagined as tiny, playful beings, with William Shakespeare's A Midsummer Night's Dream being a key development of this idea. However, elves started to be prominent in the literature and art of educated elites from the early modern period onwards. With urbanisation and industrialisation in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, beliefs in elves declined rapidly (though Iceland has some claim to continued popular belief in elves). For example, several early modern ballads in the British Isles and Scandinavia, originating in the medieval period, describe elves attempting to seduce or abduct human characters. They continued to be associated with causing illnesses and with sexual threats. Still, beliefs in elves persisted in the early modern period, particularly in Scotland and Scandinavia, where elves were thought of as magically powerful people living, usually invisibly, alongside everyday human communities. These associate elves variously with the gods of Norse mythology, with causing illness, with magic, and with beauty and seduction.Īfter the medieval period, the word elf tended to become less common throughout the Germanic languages, losing out to alternative native terms like Zwerg (" dwarf") in German and huldra ("hidden being") in North Germanic languages, and to loan-words like fairy (borrowed from French into most of the Germanic languages).
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The word elf is found throughout the Germanic languages and seems originally to have meant 'white being.' However, reconstructing the early concept of an elf depends largely on texts written by Christians, in Old and Middle English, medieval German, and Old Norse.
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However, the details of these beliefs have varied considerably over time and space and have flourished in both pre-Christian and Christian cultures. In medieval Germanic-speaking cultures, elves generally seem to have been thought of as beings with magical powers and supernatural beauty, ambivalent towards everyday people and capable of either helping or hindering them. Ängsälvor (Swedish "Meadow Elves") by Nils Blommér (1850)Īn elf (plural: elves) is a type of humanoid supernatural being in Germanic mythology and folklore (especially North Germanic mythology and folklore).