For today’s Friday Feature, I wanted to share this fun little blog on Elves and Faeries by writer and friend of A Pilgrim in Narnia, L.A. Smith.
I’ve blogged before about C.S. Lewis’ faerie lecture in The Discarded Image, and guest blogger Prof. J. Aleksandr Wootton has shared his great resource list. This post takes the conversation both global and to the point of what writers can do today.
Here’s the new link to this file: click here.
“Go not to the Elves for counsel, for they will say both no and yes.”
– J.R.R. Tolkein
Elves are fascinating creatures of legend, and their roots go deep into our history. And when I say “our”, I mean collective mankind, for although we may think that the concept of elves is a Western European one, you can actually find elf-like creatures in most of the world’s mythology. In the Norse and Germanic cultures they are alfar, supernatural beings having great beauty and long lives, sometimes helping humans, sometimes hindering them. These are the Tolkein elves,for the most part, which is not surprising, as his LOTR saga was based on Norse mythology.
Many legends of elves speak of the Trooping of the Elves, a mysterious night trek of a long line of elves, and woe to the human who spies them! This is referenced in Lord of the…
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A Pilgrim in Narnia 
Aww, thanks for the re-post! Appreciate it!
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Yeats divided Irish fairies into trooping and solitary fairies – which would sort of tie in with the notion of an elvish procession. The solitary fairies tended to stay above ground.
You’re probably already familiar with the Cailleach (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cailleach) an Irish-Scottish legend, which I’m guessing was one source of inspiration for the White Witch – although the latter owes a great deal to Hans Anderson’s Snow Queen as well.
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I knew about Cailleach, but have never known how to pronounce it. I will have to dig into my Scottish heritage. I had not thought of white witch = hag of any kind. It would take a turn of thinking for me–not on the white witch but on hags. I don’t know if they have that stately harsh beauty of the white witch.
Thoughts?
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Yeah, a hag has very specific connotations in Irish mythology (ie, not beautiful!). The Morrigan in one of her three manifestations is classified as a hag.
Scots Gaelic and Irish differ slightly in pronunciation. I’d pronounce Cailleach – “Kyle-luck”, stressing the last ‘k’ as in ‘loch’.
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Thanks for the pronunciation!
I have used a bit of MOrrigan in a character, with St. Brigid (spelling is various). The opposing character in the dark fantasy is a Death character.
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Thank you for this!
Though I did not meet either until I was an adult (and reading them aloud to children), I delight in two uses of similar… ‘beings’, in some ways “human-like creatures who lived alongside humans”, but solitary and benevolent ones, Astrid Lindgren’s The Tomten (also in The Tomten and the Fox) – two very atmospheric picture books – and Katharine Briggs’s Hobberdy Dick (a richly detailed little novel). Related to the former, though quite distinct, too, is the jultomte who (or more the expectation of whom) features in one of Sven Nordqvist’s delighful Pettson and Findus books, Findus at Christmas / aka: Merry Christmas Festus and Mercury (2011) (Original: Pettson får julbesök, 1989).
What you say about the Arabic jinn is interesting and seems to have its parallels in Jewish lore which I encountered in Gershom Scholem’s 1974 book based on his contributions to the new Jewish Encyclopedia and entitled simply, Kabbalah. I wonder what MacDonald’s exact sources were for his treatment of (the apparently solitary) Lilith?
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