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An elf (pl.:elves) is a type of humanoid supernatural being in Germanic folklore. Elves appear especially in North Germanic mythology, being mentioned in the Icelandic Poetic Edda and Snorri Sturluson's Prose Edda. 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. However, the details of these beliefs have varied considerably over time and space and have flourished in both pre-Christian and Christian cultures. Sometimes elves are, like dwarves, associated with craftsmanship. Wayland the Smith embodies this feature. He is known under many names, depending on the language in which the stories were distributed. The names include Völund in Old Norse, Wēland in Anglo-Saxon and Wieland in German. The story of Wayland is also to be found in the Prose Edda. 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. These associate elves variously with the gods of Norse mythology, with causing illness, with magic, and with beauty and seduction. After 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). Still, belief 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. They continued to be associated with causing illnesses and with sexual threats. 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. With urbanisation and industrialisation in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, belief in elves declined rapidly (though Iceland has some claim to continued popular belief in elves). However, elves started to be prominent in the literature and art of educated elites from the early modern period onwards. 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. In the eighteenth century, German Romantic writers were influenced by this notion of the elf and re-imported the English word elf into the German language. 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. Relationship with reality Reality and perception Elves have in many times and places been believed to be real beings. Where enough people have believed in the reality of elves that those beliefs then had real effects in the world, they can be understood as part of people's worldview, and as a social reality: a thing which, like the exchange value of a dollar bill or the sense of pride stirred up by a national flag, is real because of people's beliefs rather than as an objective reality. Accordingly, beliefs about elves and their social functions have varied over time and space. Even in the twenty-first century, fantasy stories about elves have been argued both to reflect and to shape their audiences' understanding of the real world, and traditions about Santa Claus and his elves relate to Christmas. Over time, people have attempted to demythologise or rationalise beliefs in elves in various ways. Integration into Christian cosmologies Beliefs about elves have their origins before the conversion to Christianity and associated Christianization of northwest Europe. For this reason, belief in elves has, from the Middle Ages through into recent scholarship, often been labelled "pagan" and a "superstition." However, almost all surviving textual sources about elves were produced by Christians (whether Anglo-Saxon monks, medieval Icelandic poets, early modern ballad-singers, nineteenth-century folklore collectors, or even twentieth-century fantasy authors). Attested beliefs about elves, therefore, need to be understood as part of Germanic-speakers' Christian culture and not merely a relic of their pre-Christian religion. Accordingly, investigating the relationship between beliefs in elves and Christian cosmology has been a preoccupation of scholarship about elves both in early times and modern research. Historically, people have taken three main approaches to integrate elves into Christian cosmology, all of which are found widely across time and space: Identifying elves with the demons of Judaeo-Christian-Mediterranean tradition. For example: In English-language material: in the Royal Prayer Book from c. 900, elf appears as a gloss for "Satan". In the late-fourteenth-century Wife of Bath's Tale, Geoffrey Chaucer equates male elves with incubi (demons which rape sleeping women). In the early modern Scottish witchcraft trials, witnesses' descriptions of encounters with elves were often interpreted by prosecutors as encounters with the Devil. In medieval Iceland, Snorri Sturluson wrote in his Prose Edda of ljósálfar and dökkálfar ('light-elves and dark-elves'), the ljósálfar living in the heavens and the dökkálfar under the earth. The consensus of modern scholarship is that Snorri's elves are based on angels and demons of Christian cosmology. Elves appear as demonic forces widely in medieval and early modern English, German, and Scandinavian prayers. Viewing elves as being more or less like people and more or less outside Christian cosmology. The Icelanders who copied the Poetic Edda did not explicitly try to integrate elves into Christian thought. Likewise, the early modern Scottish people who confessed to encountering elves seem not to have thought of themselves as having dealings with the Devil. Nineteenth-century Icelandic folklore about elves mostly presents them as a human agricultural community parallel to the visible human community, which may or may not be Christian. It is possible that stories were sometimes told from this perspective as a political act, to subvert the dominance of the Church. Integrating elves into Christian cosmology without identifying them as demons. The most striking examples are serious theological treatises: .... Discover the Elfish popular books. Find the top 100 most popular Elfish books.