The Elven (The Saga of the Elven Book 1)

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In later Old Icelandic, alfr ("elf") and the personal name which in Common Germanic had been * Aþa(l)wulfaz both coincidentally became álfr~Álfr. [46] Clark Hall, J. R. (2002) [1894]. A Concise Anglo-Saxon Dictionary (4thed.). University of Toronto Press. pp.286, 395, 423.

Elves were directly dangerous, too: the medical condition " elf-shot", described in the spell Gif hors ofscoten sie, "if a horse is elf-shot", meaning some kind of internal injury, [12] was associated both with neolithic flint arrowheads and the temptations of the devil. Tolkien takes "elf-shot" as a hint to make his elves skilful in archery. [2] Another danger was wæterælfádl, " water-elf disease", perhaps meaning dropsy, [2] while a third condition was ælfsogoða, "elf-pain", [12] glossed by Shippey as "lunacy". [2] All the same, an Icelandic woman could be frið sem álfkona, "fair as an elf-woman", while the Anglo-Saxons might call a very fair woman ælfscýne, "elf-beautiful". [2] Some aspects can readily be reconciled, Shippey writes, since "Beauty is itself dangerous". [2] But there is more: Tolkien brought in the Old English usage of descriptions like wuduælfen "wood-elf, dryad", wæterælfen "water-elf", and sǣælfen "sea-elf, naiad", giving his elves strong links with wild nature. [2] [13] Yet another strand of legend holds that Elfland, as in Elvehøj ("Elf Hill") and other traditional stories, is dangerous to mortals because time there is distorted, as in Tolkien's Lothlórien. Shippey comments that it is a strength of Tolkien's "re-creations", his imagined worlds, that they incorporate all the available evidence to create a many-layered impression of depth, making use of "both good and bad sides of popular story; the sense of inquiry, prejudice, hearsay and conflicting opinion". [2]Reaney, P. H.; Wilson, R. M. (1997). A Dictionary of English Surnames. Oxford University Press. pp. 6, 9. ISBN 978-0-19-860092-3. Jolly, Karen Louise (1996). Popular Religion in Late Saxon England: Elf Charms in Context. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press. ISBN 978-0-8078-2262-3. Shippey, Tom (2005), "Alias oves habeo: The Elves as a Category Problem", The Shadow-Walkers: Jacob Grimm's Mythology of the Monstrous, Medieval and Renaissance Texts and Studies, 291 / Arizona Studies in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance, 14, Tempe, AZ: Arizona Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies in collaboration with Brepols, pp.157–187 Historically, people have taken three main approaches to integrate elves into Christian cosmology, all of which are found widely across time and space:

From the Romantic idea of elves came the elves of popular culture that emerged in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The " Christmas elves" of contemporary popular culture are a relatively recent creation, popularized during the late nineteenth century in the United States. Elves entered the twentieth-century high fantasy genre in the wake of works published by authors such as J.R.R. Tolkien; these re-popularised the idea of elves as human-sized and humanlike beings. Elves remain a prominent feature of fantasy media today. In his Rerum Danicarum fragmenta (1596) written mostly in Latin with some Old Danish and Old Icelandic passages, Arngrímur Jónsson explains the Scandinavian and Icelandic belief in elves (called Allffuafolch). [102]Huld, Martin E (1998). "On the Heterclitic Declension of Germanic Divinities and the Status of the Vanir". Studia Indogermanica Lodziensia. 2: 136–46. Tolkien, J. R. R. (1977). Christopher Tolkien (ed.). The Silmarillion. Boston: Houghton Mifflin. ISBN 978-0-395-25730-2. Taylor, Lynda (2014). The Cultural Significance of Elves in Northern European Balladry (PhD). University of Leeds. Hall, Alaric (2015), Why aren't there any elves in Hellisgerði any more? Elves and the 2008 Icelandic Financial Crisis', working paper

Scott, William Henry (1994). Barangay: Sixteenth Century Philippine Culture and Society. Quezon City: Ateneo de Manila University Press. ISBN 978-971-550-135-4.

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Hall, Alaric (2007). Elves in Anglo-Saxon England: Matters of Belief, Health, Gender and Identity. Boydell Press. ISBN 978-1-84383-294-2. Hafstein, Valdimar Tr. (2000). "The Elves' Point of View Cultural Identity in Contemporary Icelandic Elf-Tradition" (PDF). Fabula. 41 (1–2): 87–104 (quoting p. 93). doi: 10.1515/fabl.2000.41.1-2.87. S2CID 162055463.