Introduction

SCG Daily has always, like a lady of easy leisure, been something of a mixed bag. Some weeks, you get wit and Swiss bondage from Dr. Mox; other weeks, you get genuine, solid, collard-greens-and-fried-chicken strategy. Or dating advice. Yet never before, not even so many months ago when I became the first sucker to volunteer for the first three weeks of SCG Daily, never before will you have seen an SCG Daily series like this.

It should, hopefully, come as no surprise to anyone that the background stories and characters in Magic are, in one way or another, influenced by traditional folk beliefs. That is to say, whatever their historical truth, cards like Elves of Deep Shadow, Elvish Pioneer, and Elvish-Just-About-Anything all dip into a theoretically common fund of knowledge of what, exactly, an elf is. We Magic players are expected to know about elves, goblins, dragons, and zombies from the start, before we even open our first pack of cards. Sure, you could easily play Magic without paying any attention to game’s flavor, but to a greater or lesser extent, this flavor influences how we appreciate the game.

Now, if we’re all dipping into a common fund of folklore knowledge to understand Magic’s flavor, the story, like Kylie Minogue’s career, should end here. There’s a problem, however, with society’s common fund of folklore knowledge; just about everything we think we know about folklore is wrong. And I’m not just talking about Americans either. My own studies in Denmark have revealed an astonishing gap in understanding of old beliefs. Is it so different with Magic players? It may well be that the average citizen of America, the UK, and the Nordic countries (all of which share a folkloric heritage) could tell you nothing at all about elves whereas the average Magic player could discourse about elves for at least half an hour, but what have we benefited if what we know about elves has sprung from the tainted wells of Tolkein and the like? Obviously, there’s a caveat here: The fine people at Wizards of the Coast are surely aware that the common fund of knowledge we’re meant to dip into isn’t one of “actual” belief but rather one of fantasy fiction. Nevertheless, the fact that readers of fantasy are frequently unable to tell the difference between fantasy and what was, to our ancestors two hundred or three hundred years ago, reality means that this is a poor excuse.

Even disregarding appreciation of Magic and fantasy fiction and film, knowledge of old folk belief is necessary for our understanding of history. For example, most educated Americans, Brits, and Scandinavians have a general idea of how people lived three hundred years ago (no cars, a lot of farming, etc.) but have only a very limited idea of how people thought back then. Consider that even fifty years ago, a large percentage of rural, elderly Scandinavians and British people would have believed in communities of intelligent, non-human beings living literally in their own back yards and interfering, for better or worse, in nearly every aspect of human life. The difference in mindset that this implies is enormous and the way this affected daily life just as large. It is academic to debate the actual existence of fairies and elves because, so far as many people just a few generations ago were concerned, they did exist, and this belief had a very real influence on how people acted.

In this series, we’ll discuss only Northern European folklore, not because other traditions aren’t represented in Magic but because I’m not qualified to say many intelligent things about them.

The Article Proper

Tolkein, surely without intent, is to be blame for much of the current misinformation regarding belief in the supernatural (though this isn’t the same as saying that, without Tolkein, people would know the truth). An accomplished mythologist and folklorist, Tolkein knew exactly what he was doing when he created Lord of the Rings, and a big deal of the resultant trouble is, in fact, a matter of translation. Tolkein’s Middle-Earth is much more mythological than it is folkloric, and its elves more closely resemble those of Old Norse mythology than those of more recent Northern folk belief (It’s clear that this “more recent” folklore was, in some form, concurrent with the mythology yet survived much longer.). Indeed, in the Scandinavian languages, the division between mythological elves and folkloric elves is clear enough; in Danish, the mythological are alfer and the folkloric are elver. English though, lacking native alfer, was forced to translate the word as elf (the same as elver), the British and Irish beings which most resemble alfer. Even more confusingly, whereas the Nordic tongues offer no general term for intelligent supernatural beings, English gives us fairy, a word with a complex etymological history but which has come to include everything from elves to mermaids, goblins to water-horses, giants to pixies. While the word fairy is often used merely to describe elves, for the sake of simplicity, it will only used in this article series to signify the general grouping of beings.

Across Northern Europe, elf traditions are strikingly similar, something which holds true for most varieties of folkloric creatures. The current popular association of fairy with Tinkerbell-style (or Magic-style) elves is itself complex. It must be noted that, in tradition, elves come in a large range of sizes. They are occasionally extremely tiny, but the usual size is 1½ foot tall, 3 foot tall, or slightly taller than humans. This last is, perhaps, the most common conception. Our first prolonged description of elves comes from Giraldius Cambrensis’ 1188 Itinerarium Cambriæ. This work is of particular interest because the Welsh elves he writes of are very small yet, even at so early a date, exhibit most of the elvish features that would survive into the 19th century. Throughout the Early Middle English period, we find scattered references to elves (notably in Chaucer), but these taper out in the 1400s, possibly because people became more scared to write non-fiction about elves because the writers were afraid of 1) being accused of being witches or 2) being punished by the intensely-secretive elves.

Beings labeled elves or fairies play a significant role in the English, French, and German Romances of the Middle Ages, starting with the French Huon of Bordeaux, written at some point in the 1400 or 1500s. It is often, however, difficult to ascertain whether or not these elves are humans skilled in magic or a separate species of humanoid creature. At all events, when Spenser wrote his celebrated The Faerie Queene (which he continued until his death in 1609), the elves he had in mind were so similar to humans that the book’s characters cannot tell the difference between them by sight.

Spenser, unfortunately, was behind the times. In 1588, John Lyly wrote the play Endymion, recognized as the first work of art to include small elves (albeit in only one scene). Shakespeare wrote A Midsummer Night’s Dream in the mid-1590s and made place for a number of tiny elves alongside the human-sized main Titania and Oberon. Shakespeare being Shakespeare, this work achieved great fame and led a small circle of poets to create verse concerning elves for their mutual amusement. By pure chance, these writers lived in regions where belief in small elves was prevalent, and eventually, it became a sort of game for literary Britain at large to compose poems with increasingly miniscule elves. Hence, our current idea of tiny elves.

It is crucial to understand that, up until the early the 1800s, there is no evidence whatsoever for belief in elves with wings. Not even the fiction writers had thought that one up yet. Even after 1800, winged elves are common mostly among urbanites. It is theorized that changing ideas about angels (which around this time came to be seen as synonymous with the dead and transformed from minions of God to guardian spirits) influenced belief in elves, a type of being also often confused with the dead. Thus, winged angels created winged elves, and since elves among the literati were, by this point, frequently insect-sized, they were given insects’ wings. Interestingly, it doesn’t seem as though belief in winged elves was ever at all popular in rural areas until well into the 1900s, and even then, non-winged, relatively-tall elves still probably greatly outnumbered their squeaky-voiced brethren. This means that the majority of people who today believe in elves are unwittingly putting faith in a concept with only scanty historical tradition.

As for what we can call “real” elves (that is, elves that were once the object of widespread belief), our sources are mixed. The 1600s saw the first scientific collecting of folklore in the British Isles, but the Nordic folklore movement was far behind and did not really begin until the National Romanticism era of the early 1800s. In both regions, elves were social creatures. Some lived in small family units, and others lived in large companies. There is a tradition for elf kings and queens in both Scandinavia and the British Isles, but the majority of elves lived independent of any kind of regal power. It is difficult to say what elves were thought to do because, like humans, they led full-fledged lives of their own. They raised cattle, planted crops, danced on the hills and burial mounds in which they lived, had children, were born, and, eventually, died. The most common stories about elves involve theft of human produce, elves stealing unbaptized babies and leaving stupid creatures in their places, elves seducing young men and women into their hills, humans helping elves give birth, elves punishing those who invade their privacy, and elves rewarding humans for kindness. The overall picture is, like that of human society, mixed, neither good nor evil. Elves were greatly feared, but they could also be generous neighbors. If nothing else, elves were believed to have a strong sense of social justice.

Elves were generally beautiful; if we can find many exceptions to this rule, it is because there are so many elf stories to choose from. The biggest difference between British/Irish and Nordic elves is that the latter usually had some kind of physical defect by which they could be recognized and differentiated from humans. In Denmark, elves often had hollow backs or a limp, and in Norway, they frequently had tails.

Of all the fairies, elves were the best at creating illusions, whether in the form of phantasmal landscapes, fake food or people, or invisibility. This is clearly not shown in Magic, but then again, the activities of traditional, folkloric elves are rarely the stuff of planeswalkers’ wars. You won’t win many rounds playing creatures which primarily steal wheat and pinch people.

One final bit of useless trivia: In modern English, the word urchin has only two meanings, and those two meanings (slow-moving sea creatures and quick-fingered street children) appear not to be related at all. Originally urchin, of Latin origin, meant merely hedgehog, so when it came time to name the prickly ocean-dwellers, sea urchin was a perfect fit. But what about street urchins? Likely on account of some belief that hedgehogs were fairies in disguise, urchin became a word for a small, mischievous elf, and from this, it’s evident how street urchins originated.

If you have any questions about points not covered in the article, just ask in the forums. Also, I’m interested in hearing your feedback on whether or not this is at all interesting to you.

Until tomorrow,

Adam Grydehøj
[email protected]