The Lore of Old Elfland, by Linda Raedisch

The Lore of Old Elfland

Š Andrew Snyder

About the Author

Linda Raedisch is a papercrafter, soapmaker, and eclectic writer who loves to explore museums, grave mounds, and old coal sidings. She is conversant in German and is the author of Night of the Witches and The Old Magic of Christmas as well as numerous articles on folklore, herblore, and ancient religions. She lives in northern New Jersey.

Llewellyn Publications Woodbury, Minnesota

The Lore of Old Elfland: Secrets from the Bronze Age to Middle Earth © 2019 by Linda Raedisch. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever, including internet usage, without written permission from Llewellyn Publications, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.

First Edition First Printing, 2019 Book design by Samantha Penn Cover design by Shannon McKuhen Editing by Brian R. Erdrich Interior illustrations by Wen Hsu Project templates by Llewellyn Art Department Llewellyn Publications is a registered trademark of Llewellyn Worldwide Ltd. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data (Pending) Names: Raedisch, Linda, author.

Title: The lore of old elfland : secrets from the Bronze Age to Middle Earth / Linda Raedisch.

Description: First edition. | Woodbury, Minnesota : Llewellyn Publications, 2019. | Includes bibliographical references and index. | Summary: “This masterful work of storytelling and scholarship explores the fascinating history of elfland, sharing magical tales of elves and faeries from the Old Norse sagas, little-known Danish ballads, classical folktales, Tolkien’s Mirkwood, and even personal, first-hand encounters. With lovely recipes and crafts, this book also invites you to realize your own vision of elfland-a vision that will fill your spirit with mysterious wonders and strange delights”—Provided by publisher.

Identifiers: LCCN 2019033969 (print) | LCCN 2019033970 (ebook) | ISBN 9780738758459 (paperback) | ISBN 9780738758633 (ebook) Subjects: LCSH: Elves—Folklore.

Classification: LCC BF1552 .R34 2019 (print) | LCC BF1552 (ebook) | DDC 398.21—dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019033969 LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019033970 Llewellyn Worldwide Ltd. does not participate in, endorse, or have any authority or responsibility concerning private business transactions between our authors and the public.

All mail addressed to the author is forwarded but the publisher cannot, unless specifically instructed by the author, give out an address or phone number.

Any internet references contained in this work are current at publication time, but the publisher cannot guarantee that a specific location will continue to be maintained. Please refer to the publisher’s website for links to authors’ websites and other sources.

Llewellyn Publications A Division of Llewellyn Worldwide Ltd. 2143 Wooddale Drive Woodbury, MN 55125-2989 www.llewellyn.com Printed in the United States of America

Other Books by Linda Raedisch Night of the Witches The Old Magic of Christmas

In memory of Marlene Raedisch (1964–2016)

contents Disclaimer … xi Acknowledgments … xiii Pronunciation Key … xv Introduction … 1 Chapter One: Through Darksome Wood … 9 Spell Break: In the Gloaming Grey … 17 Chapter Two: Black Hair, Blue Bones … 21 Craft: Balkåkra Sun Crown … 29 Spell Break: Spirited Away … 33 Chapter Three: A Crossing of the Ways … 37 Craft: Elf Stones … 44 Spell Break: A Slice of Bread … 54 Chapter Four: Lights in the Forest … 57 Spell Break: The King of Hollow Hill … 67 Craft: Elf Candles … 69 Chapter Five: Durin’s Day … 73 Craft: Paper Skínfaxi … 81 Craft: Elf Cross … 86 Spell Break: Knocking on Elfland’s Door … 90

x

Contents

Chapter Six: Long Was the Making … 93 Craft: Elven Pennons … 99 Spell Break: Made in Elfland … 102 Craft: Elven Inn … 104 Chapter Seven: Glory of the Elves … 111 Craft: Álfröðull Ornament … 114 Recipe: Álfröðull Cookies … 117 Recipe: Christmas Rye Bread … 119 Spell Break: We Meet at Yule Once More … 122 Chapter Eight: The Uttermost West … 127 Craft: Ship Candelabrum … 137 Spell Break: The Shield and the Sheaf … 140 Chapter Nine: An Elven Herbal … 143 Recipe: Birch Soap … 146 Recipe: Elderberry Soup with Farina Dumplings … 151 Conclusion: All Aboard! … 161 Appendix: A Guide to Elves, Elfkind, and Related Phenomena … 165 Bibliography … 185 Index … 191

Disclaimer

Any mention of herbs, herbal potions, or remedies outside the context of a recipe is meant for historical interest only. Neither the publisher nor the author take any responsibility for any possible consequences from any treatment, action, application of herb, or preparation to any person reading or following the information in this book.

xi

Acknowledgments

Special thanks go to Familie Ernst and its spin-off, Familie Wedelborg-Witt; my mother Marion “Meine Küche ist deine Küche” Raedisch; the New Providence Memorial Library for their interlibrary loan service and pleasant views from the study tables; Louise Wheeler for fielding all those Swedish questions at five o’ clock in the morning; Ursula Raedisch for photographic interface transmittability; editor Elysia Gallo for taking a chance on an unpublished, unagented writer all those years ago; and to Brian Raedisch for taking me all those places where only elves and inquisitive little rat children go.

xiii

Pronunciation Key

Of the many languages that appear in this book, I am fluent only in English and conversant German. Speakers of the ancient and modern Scandinavian languages will no doubt find fault with this key. It is not meant to impart fluency, only to help the reader muddle through. å

Danish, Norwegian, and Old Norse: long o, as in “lone.” Swedish: “awe” as a British person rather than an American Midwesterner might pronounce it

ä

Swedish, German: long a as in “eight”

ö

Swedish: “er.” German: a little like the “eu” in the French word bleu

ü

German: like the French “eu” but with shades of the English expression of disgust, “Ew!”

y

German, Danish, Norwegian, and Old Norse: like the German “ü”

j

“y” as in “yellow”

þ

soft “th” as in “thistle”

ð

hard “th” as in “the”

xv

INtRODUCtION

A

re elves real? I hope I will not disappoint you, dear reader, when I say that this question is immaterial to me. To be sure, my own ancestors of not so long ago believed in them, petitioned them, took precautions against them, and even considered the possibility of marrying and having children with them.

I would like to believe that I myself have seen elves, but the more rational bits of my brain will concede only that elves are a fascinating subject, one worthy of a much deeper look than they are usually given today. Indeed, the elves have done so much to enrich our culture that it would be a little disingenuous, I think, to demand proof of their existence. If you yourself are a believer in elves, you might find my approach to them irreverent at times.

I can only say that this is the attitude that comes naturally to me and that, so far, the elves, if they really are out there, have not had a problem with it.

1

2

Introduction

Throughout this book, I have chosen the adjective “elven” 1 over “elfin” because “elfin” has never fallen out of popular use and has come to mean “delicate, diminutive,” a word used to describe small children. Elves are not small children, though they have, in isolated incidents, appeared as such. The further back one traces the elven lineage, the taller the elves become, the branches of their family tree eventually winding themselves around those of the radiantly beautiful giants of Norse mythology.

Are elves the same as fairies? They are. I prefer the term “elf ” simply because as a “Disneyfied” American child, I was conditioned early on to think of fairies as tiny ballerinas with wings.

I’ve since learned that the phenomenon can be either male or female and is far more complex, elusive and, yes, dangerous, than my coloring books had led me to believe. As a young adult, I continued to favor “elf ” as I delved into the religious beliefs, literature, and archaeology of the ancient Germanic peoples. The word “elf ” is of Germanic origin, while “fairy,” I learned, descends through French from the Latin fatum, “fate.” For speakers of Modern English, the terms overlap, but for the most part, “fairy” is the Celtic/Romance2 name for the being in question, and “elf ” is the Germanic—a pleasingly tidy distinction and one I was able to enjoy for a long time.

1. The standard spelling is “elvan,” but I have gone with “elven” because (a) I was long unaware of the standard spelling and (b) it’s closer to the German elfen, and many of the elves in this book inhabit Germanic-speaking lands.

2. I am not suggesting that “fairy” is a word of Celtic origin, only that it is the English word most commonly applied to the diversity of otherworldly folk of Britain and Ireland, just as the French fée is used for their brethren on the other side of the Channel.

Introduction

3

As I dug a little deeper, like the dwarves3 who will also be appearing in these pages, my spade broke through the crust of language to reveal a confusing tangle of roots. It might have been simpler to leave them alone, but there were glittering jewels hidden among those hairy roots. “Fairy” ultimately comes from fatum, “fate,” but was supposedly formed more directly from fātā, “the Fates”—Clotho, Lachesis, and Atropos of Greek mythology —supernatural figures who spun, wove, and cut the individual’s destiny from the loom and who look very much like the norns of Norse mythology. Fatum, as it turns out, comes from the Latin verb fārī, “to speak.” 4 I’m inclined to believe that “fairy,” rather than deriving from fātā, was spawned by the same Indo-European root as fārī, and that it came into being thousands of years before William the Conqueror imported a Latinate vocabulary to English shores. It may have appeared as early as the Bronze Age, for at some point in the mists of prehistory, that same root also gave birth (through consonantal shift) to peri, the ethereally beautiful, fire-blooded creatures of Persian lore.

Within the context of Middle-earth, J. R. R. Tolkien, who was first and foremost a philologist, or “lover of words,” calls an elf an elf, but in his other writings, he refers to a place or state of being he calls “Faërie.” What Tolkien calls “Faërie” I have chosen to call “Elfland.” Faërie and Elfland are not exactly the same thing; no two such realms ever are. My motive for writing this book is to

3. “Dwarfs” is the correct form, as in “Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs,” but I cleave to the spelling made familiar to me in The Hobbit.

4. Because I have not studied Latin, these etymological revelations have come to me piecemeal over the years. I found them expressed most recently and most clearly on p. 85 of Tolkien On Fairy-Stories as part of the “Editors’ Commentary.” See bibliography.

4

Introduction

share my own vision of that land beyond the billowing curtain and what I have discovered there.

In the introduction to his 1911 opus, The Fairy-Faith in Celtic Countries, anthropologist and adventurer W. Y. Evans-Wentz laments, “Books too often are written out of other books, and too seldom from the life of man.” In writing my own book, I have relied heavily on others. Much of my life is books, and books have helped to shape my concept of Elfland. Were I to defend myself to Mr. Evans-Wentz, I would argue that my preoccupation with the books and stories in which elves appear was not born from the books themselves but from a direct experience of that other world, imagined or otherwise. Was it that experience, which I will share in these pages, that eventually drew me to the subject of elves and their origins? I will probably never know, but it certainly has been an interesting journey.

One can hardly talk about elves without mentioning Tolkien, as I do throughout this book. When I was a child, it was his novels —in particular, The Hobbit—that spurred my imagination. As an adult eager to root out the “truth” about elves, I have been more likely to seek guidance in his academic observations, but that is not to say that the elves, dwarves, and hobbits of Middle-earth do not continue to inspire me. Tolkien was himself immersed in the northern European folk memory, so it can be hard at times to separate his visions from the “reality” of the Bronze Age, Viking Age, and medieval elf. Each time I happen upon the image of a dwarf-forged ring or magical sword in the literature or archaeology, I feel a little thrill, for I know that Professor Tolkien has also passed this way. I hope I will succeed in communicating some of that excitement to you.

A reader of my first book, Night of the Witches, complained that there were no spells in it. That reader would probably be

Introduction

5

disappointed with this book for the same reason, for I will not be instructing you in the intricacies of soliciting the elves. I will not even tell you whether or not you should try to engage them.

Though you must use the crafts and recipes in this book as you will, they are not intended to help you summon the elves but to create a psychical crossroads at which you might meet them. I was able, on one occasion, to enter a sort of Elfland through an old wardrobe—more about that later, and no, I did not end up in Narnia—but more often one must create the world one wishes to visit. What better way to conjure the atmosphere of Elfland than with the glint of gold paint or an artfully cast shadow?

Besides, fine craftsmanship has long been a hallmark of elfkind.

If you desire an experience of elves, try stepping into their finely crafted shoes. The elves do a fair amount of traveling—paying visits, moving house, and embarking on great migrations—so there’s a good chance that sooner or later their paths will cross with yours.

If you can craft, decorate, and narrate your way into the proper frame of mind when they are passing, you might just be able to see them. But be warned: they might not look as you expect them to, and you might not realize who they are until long after they have traveled on.

If you are neither craftily nor culinarily inclined, feel free to skip over the crafts and recipes in this book, but do read the introduction to each project: there is valuable information there.

There is also an elven herbal for those who want to know more about the ethnobotany of the other world and a “Guide to Elves, Elfkind, and Related Phenomena” to which you should feel free to skip whenever questions arise.

While I will not be teaching you any spells, I will be sharing, retelling and dissecting a handful of stories. As Tolkien was well aware, the Old English spel denoted both a tale and a spoken

6

Introduction

charm. When the speakers of proto-Germanic gathered on the hard-packed earth around the open hearth to hear what stories their elders might be inclined to tell, they understood that a web of magic was about to be woven around them. I am not referring to some vague “magic of storytelling” but to a belief that change could be affected in the here and now by the recounting of events that occurred in the mythic “before.”

Those spells are still working. Archaeology can tell us only so much about Elfland, even the physical region I call “Old Elfland” (southern Scandinavia around 1250 BC). Folktales help to fill in many of the gaps. Those who first wove the spells were not particularly interested in organizing them into a canon and most of them were not written down until the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. You will find “spell breaks” throughout the book. Do sit down for a spell and listen to the story. It is not my intention to break the spells these old stories weave but to break them open in search of clues to the true nature of Elfland.

There are no fairy tales in this book. You may ask, what is the difference between a fairy tale and a folktale? Fairy tales are about princes and princesses; folktales are about dairymaids and charcoal burners. Fairy tales have titles like “East of the Sun and West of the Moon”; folk tales have titles like “The Drinking Horn Stolen from the Huldre-folk at Vellerhaug” or “She Whistled the Tune.” Fairy tales take place in nameless kingdoms in the vague and distant past; folktales take place in villages, on islands, and in the shadows of mountains you can find on a map, and they happen in the teller’s grandparents’ or great-grandparents’ day.

There are no glass slippers or golden balls in the stories you will read here, only hooks, spoons, and storehouse keys and, oh yes, the occasional bridal crown. And, oddly enough, while fairy tales

Introduction

7

usually feature one fairy or elf per story, folktales often include whole families, dancing parties, and even folk migrations of elves.

The belief that there are preternatural beings going about their business right under our noses is all but universal, and there are countless tales of human/elven encounters. I gravitate toward the idiosyncratic story, the one that deviates from the usual course of the “tale type” to which it belongs. I am also drawn to stories associated with physical objects—a brass crown, a tobacco pouch, a door. Such stories share a certain quality that I have not yet been able to put my finger on. Could it be the ring of truth, or the ring of something so delightful, so almost true, that one longs for it to be so?

Tolkien, in his essay “On Fairy-stories” (not to be confused with fairy tales), observed that there are not many stories that hold elves as the main subject, and that those that do are “not very interesting.” (He would prove himself correct when he wrote The Silmarillion!) I agree, which is why this book is not so much about elves as it is about me, you, and our relations with the all but invisible race with whom we have been sharing the planet for as long as we have been human.

Chapter One

THROUGH DARKSOME WOOD

T

he Danish ballad “Young Svejdal” was written sometime in the thirteenth century, but the following verse might just as easily have been addressed to a young warrior of the Nordic Bronze Age (1800 to 500 BC): A shining sword I’ll give thee, Was tempered in dragon’s blood, ’Twill glow like a burning bale-fire When thou ridest through darksome wood.5

The elite of southern Scandinavia three thousand years ago were farther traveled, more richly accoutred, and, well, more elite than those of the more dismal Iron Age that followed. Their feasts 5. Olrik, A Book of Danish Ballads, p. 122.

9

10

Chapter One

were more lavish, their festivals noisy with the music of their sinuous bronze trumpets, their conversations a little more interesting. With the last ice age long forgotten, Europe’s northern hinterlands were warmer and drier in the early to middle portions of its Bronze Age than they are even today. As the Bronze Age drew to a close, the weather turned colder and wetter, so it would not be an exaggeration to say that the sun shone a little brighter in those earlier days.

The Nordic Iron Age (overlapping the end of the Bronze Age to AD 800) began when local deposits of bog ore were discovered, precluding the need to venture far from home in search of the tin and copper needed to make bronze. By this time, the Bronze Age had become a golden age that lived on in tales of foreign adventures, glittering treasures, and impossibly wealthy princes, all told as the rain drummed on the round thatched roofs and the puddles grew in the yards. The thing about golden ages is that the people living in them often don’t realize it. And while they spark and blaze in the memory of a people, they do not remain static but change, taking on new meaning as the memory is passed from mouth to mouth down through the generations. The people who occupied southern Scandinavia from about 1800 to 500 BC were just that: people. Ethnically, they were for the most part the same people who had lived there since the Neolithic or New Stone Age (5000 to 1799 BC, give or take) and who would stay on through the Iron and Viking Ages, but time and imagination have transmuted the Bronze Age folk into a race both more and less than human.

Let’s take a look at their stomping grounds, the area I like to call Old Elfland, because it was in this northern realm around 1250 BC that the elves as a concept began to crystallize into the forms that would be familiar to the Vikings and later Scandi-

Through Darksome Wood

11

navian peasants, the same forms that would eventually fall into Professor Tolkien’s capable hands—that is, a race of tall, shining, otherworldly creatures. At the heart of Old Elfland was Denmark: the northward-jutting peninsula of Jutland along with the large islands of Funen, Lolland, Zealand, and the many smaller ones as well. There was, however, no such thing as “Denmark” back in the Nordic Bronze Age. We don’t know where the political boundaries were drawn, but the cultural sphere encompassed modern-day Denmark, southern Sweden, southern Norway, and parts of Germany. Writing in 1970, Danish archaeologist P. V. Glob acknowledged that the influence of the “mound people,” as he called the ancient aristocrats who had been laid to rest in well-appointed graves under huge mounds of earth, extended all the way down to Lüneburg in Lower Saxony. Recently, we’ve learned that the acquisitive fingers of these Bronze Age princes reached all the way to Germany’s Black Forest.

I have not yet been to the Black Forest, but I have been to the Lüneburg Heath. In fact, it was there that my journey into Old Elfland began in earnest. I was only ten, so my memory of the place is like one of those postcards that crams too many images on one surface, affording detail to none. I remember an enclosed bird park in nearby Walsrode, lots of sheep, beehives, and acres of heather and juniper shrubs, though I didn’t know or even think to wonder what they were. Mention might have been made of Heide (heather) and Wacholder (juniper), but my German at the time was even sketchier than it is now. I remember hordes of the bathing-capped elderly bobbing like barrels among the artificial waves of the mineral baths and a little vacation apartment in the spa town of Bad Bevensen. But most of all, I remember The Hobbit.

This was 1978, and our whole family had hobbit fever. The book itself wasn’t new; it had been published in 1937, but we’d

12

Chapter One

recently seen the animated 1977 movie on television and it had affected us all deeply. In my humble opinion, Peter Jackson has nothing on the Rankin Bass musical The Hobbit cartoon. My German cousins had a jigsaw puzzle of the liquid-eyed Bilbo finding the ring deep beneath the Misty Mountains and we had put it together on my aunt and uncle’s living room floor. My sister had brought the mass market paperback along on the trip, the one with the top half of the cover white and the bottom half with Bilbo astride one of the barrels as he and the dwarves go bobbing past the huts of the raft elves. By the time we fetched up on the Lüneburg Heath, she had finished it and passed it on to me.

I didn’t finish the book on that trip. The truth is, it would be more than thirty years before I read The Hobbit from cover to cover, though I would dip into it every now and then and reread my favorite parts. Looking back, I think my fascination with the book had less to do with the story and more to do with the creatures and landscapes of Middle-earth. I distinctly remember asking my sister how big a hobbit was and my sister holding her hand up at about waist height. To my ten-year-old brain—and keep in mind that ten-year-olds were a little younger in 1978 than they are today—if you could hold your hand up to show how big or small something was, it meant that that something, on some level, actually existed.

I read the first pages of The Hobbit while holed up in an old, dark wardrobe in the bedroom of that vacation apartment at the edge of the heath, bombé front doors cracked to let in just enough light to read by. It was a little like being in a hobbit hole. And, to my sister’s and my delight, there was an even bigger swath of Middle-earth just outside the front door: a hilly forest of majestic conifers. This forest was significantly darker than any woods we had traipsed through at home in New Jersey. My uncle’s house in

Through Darksome Wood

13

Schleswig-Holstein, a long bus ride north of Bad Bevensen, stood near a beech wood with a complex of streams like the one outside the elven king’s gate in chapter IX of The Hobbit, where “great beeches came right down to the bank, till their feet were in the stream.” 6 But this new world of dark pines, my sister and I agreed, was none other than Tolkien’s Mirkwood.

Actually, we were not far off. Had we traveled a little further north, beyond the heath and beyond Schleswig-Holstein, we might have discovered the mirkwood through which young Svejdal rode in the ballad. Yes, that’s mirkwood with a small “m,” and it’s used in an earlier verse to describe that same “darksome wood.” So, was there a the Mirkwood before Tolkien invented one for Middle-earth? Yes, there was. Or, rather, there were.

There is a Myrkviðr, translated by J. R. R.’s son Christopher Tolkien as “Mirkwood” in verse 82 of the Old Norse Saga of King Heidrek the Wise. It was, however, nowhere near Denmark. It was in this “renowned forest” 7 that the kings of the Goths were buried inside their mounds with all their treasures on the banks of the Dnieper in southern Ukraine, just spitting distance from the gathering Hunnish hordes. By verse 91, this Mirkwood seems to have become a heiðr, a heath or moor covered in heather.

Tenth-century Saxon bishop Thietmar of Merseburg, who liked to write about history, Latinized Mirkwood to Miriquidui and placed it in the Erzgebirge mountains between Germany and Bohemia. The Erzgebirge is an important source of tin, so our intrepid Nordic Bronze Age traders would have been quite familiar 6. My sister’s copy of The Hobbit with the stream and barrels on the cover is long gone. I have replaced it in my own library with the 2001 Houghton Mifflin edition with cover art by Peter Sís. All Hobbit quotes in this book are from that edition. The one above appears on p. 186.

7. Tolkien, The Saga of King Heidrek the Wise, p. 49.

14

Chapter One

with the region. In fact, we know they roamed even farther afield in search of goods, technology, ideas, and royal brides.

But Thietmar doesn’t get the last word on Mirkwood. In verse 42 of Carolyne Larrington’s translation of the Old Norse poem Lokasenna (“Loki’s quarrel”) the inhabitants of the fiery realm of Muspelheim must ride through “Myrkwood” in order to invade Midgard or “Middle Earth,” the habitation of mortals. The “mirk” in Mirkwood does not always mean “murky”; it comes from the Old Norse mork, meaning “boundary.” It is the same word as the English “march,” as in “the Welsh marches,” the borderlands between England and Wales, and the “mark” in “Denmark.” You might find a Mirkwood anywhere that one realm leaves off and another begins, be it the boundary between Goth and Hun, German and Slav (or perhaps Celt since Bohemia was named for the Celtic Boi tribe), forest and heath, or the primordial and the mortal.

During my first assault on The Hobbit, it was the dwarves’ adventures inside Bilbo’s hobbit hole, through Mirkwood and elsewhere, that fired my imagination, but it was the elves that kept me coming back. Many years later, on another visit, my oldest daughter and I did that same jigsaw puzzle on my aunt and uncle’s floor at the edge of the elven king’s wood. And it was in that same living room, while riffling the pages of my uncle’s history books, that I first learned the magical word Bronzezeit, a word I would eventually come to associate with elves.

For me, the English term “Bronze Age” conjures up images of Minoans and Mycenaeans, while the German Bronzezeit means fragile bits of gold foil clinging to a darkened sun disc, amber beads, finely netted caps, and barrows topped by birch and linden trees.

Through Darksome Wood

15

Happily, my uncle had a map of all the Neolithic and Bronze Age grave mounds in the neighborhood. Off we went down the country lanes, fields of barley and yellow rapeseed on one hand, the quietly sighing Baltic on the other. Much as I tried to keep them straight, it was a lot of mounds all at once and they have since become jumbled in my mind. Some were Hügelgräber, runof-the-mill grave mounds, others Hünengräber, grave mounds composed of boulders and dating all the way back to the days of the first Scandinavian farmers and into which people continued to insert the bones and ashes of the dead over many generations.

Not all of them had been officially excavated, though probably all of them had been pilfered at one time or another.

I remember one mound that was covered in grass and difficult to make out over the shoulders of the black and white cows grazing around it, just as cows (though probably not Holsteins) would already have been doing three thousand years before. Another mound rose up dramatically and improbably from a field of broccoli. That one had been a Hünengrab. I scraped a bit of moss from the rocks crowning the incline, frightening a russet fawn from the underbrush as I clambered over the roof of this ancient house of the dead. Moss from an ancestor’s barrow, when placed beneath one’s pillow, is supposed to summon prophetic dreams.

Since I’ve never been particularly eager to see what the future holds, I’ve never tried it, but I still have the moss.

I cannot say with absolute certainty that the occupants of that mound were my ancestors, but the chances aren’t bad. Whoever had been buried in that mound had been a person of high standing. He, she, or they must have presided over many head of cattle and a sizeable swath of arable land. They may even have had the means to launch their own trading ventures. Their children would have been well fed, well dressed, and well married. The

16

Chapter One

wealthier you were, the healthier you were and the more children you could have. A greater percentage of your children would survive to have children of their own who would go on sprinkling their genes throughout the landscape.

There were far fewer people in Schleswig-Holstein three thousand years ago than there are today, so many fewer that there simply aren’t enough ancestors to go around, so they must do double duty. Some of my ninety-times great-grandfathers would also have been my uncles, cousins, and who knows what else. Anyone who lived in the Bronze Age and was successful enough to parent a small tribe of children at a time when there were really not that many people in the world probably still has descendants living today, like me and you and even that faintly suspicious-looking person sitting next to you on the train.

Our ancient ancestors were much more adventurous than we usually give them credit for. Even the most sedentary farmers advanced about five miles per generation, and our Bronze Age river traders, as we’ll learn in chapter 3, were seriously affected by wanderlust, so even if you’re not European, there is very likely a wealthy mound person somewhere in your family tree.8 I am probably descended for the most part from Neolithic and Bronze Age lackeys, the people who actually built those mounds, but I’m sure there is also some glittering prince from whom I derive a skosh of my DNA still strutting around in the Mirkwood of the otherworld.

8. Will he show up in your DNA profile? Possibly not. There’s just not enough room in each of us for all the genes of all our ancestors, so many of them drop out over the course of generations.

Through Darksome Wood

17

SPELL BREAK: In the Gloaming Grey

Those low-population figures for the prehistoric and even early historic worlds mean that I am probably also descended from the nameless “franklin free” (or someone like him) introduced to us in the first verse of the medieval Danish ballad “Sir Bosmer in Elfland.” 9 Why? Because that franklin, or free-born farmer, was the father of five sons and “daughters twain,” a veritable flooding of the gene pool. But the following story is not about any of our ancestors; it’s about Sir Bosmer, the franklin’s one son who was removed from the pool before he had a chance to make a splash.

Much will be said about the “hill man” or “fairy lover” in this book. Sir Bosmer, however, was a mortal who was seduced by a true femme fatale of Elfland. She has no name. If she did, I’m not sure I would want to say it out loud, for she is certainly one of the more frightening characters in the ballads. She is referred to simply as “the Elf-maid.” The skogsrå and elle maid of later tales pale by comparison, for this is no chance encounter in the woods; this Elf-maid is cold and calculating.

We are not told much about her. She lives underwater, probably in a stream close to human habitation, because she has been able to pop her head up and observe Sir Bosmer over the course of fifteen winters. We don’t know what attempts she has made thus far to woo him, only that she has failed to win his love and now she means business. Toward the end of the ballad, there is some indication that she may have been wailing and weeping all this time, but I have to wonder. It seems to me that in this Elfmaid’s eyes, Sir Bosmer is nothing more than a prize to be won.

Her first move is to knock on his door in the “gloaming grey,” that is, dusk. Sir Bosmer is in bed already, so it must be summer, 9. Olrik, A Book of Danish Ballads, p. 257.

18

Chapter One

when the sun doesn’t set in Denmark until after ten o’clock. Sir Bosmer hasn’t lined up any dates for that night, so he’s reluctant to open the door. But it turns out that the knock was only a courtesy. When Sir Bosmer declines to let her in, the Elf-maid uses her nimble elven fingers to undo the locks herself.

She sits at the edge of Sir Bosmer’s bed, plays with his hair, and bids him to meet her at midnight on the stone bridge. This is a rather bold move on her part, for, as verses 11-16 reveal, Sir Bosmer is not alone in bed. Who is with him? We find out later that Sir Bosmer had a “true-love” to whom he was not yet wed, so it can’t be her in the bed at this point—at least, it shouldn’t be. More likely, it’s one of Bosmer’s brothers bunking with him. Whoever it is, the person wisely counsels Bosmer that it must have been an Elf-maid that invaded their chamber, and if he knows what’s good for him, he won’t go to meet her on the bridge.

Bosmer goes. Of course he does. But the Elf-maid is not sitting there waiting for him; she must first lure him to her own country. Bosmer’s horse throws a shoe and Bosmer is tossed over the bridge and into the water. He surfaces not in Denmark but on the twilit shores of Elfland, and it is there his would-be lover is waiting for him.

Those of us who were hoping for a detailed description of Elfland must go home disappointed. The Elf-maid keeps a hall of her own, but it must have been so unremarkable that the balladeer found nothing worth mentioning about it. Her serving maid brings wine and mead in an aurochs horn, but is the natural horn polished to a warm glow or sheathed in gold foil like the one stolen from the draugs at Vellerhaug? Disappointed though we are, at least we can go home again; Sir Bosmer cannot. When he first arrives, his fondest thoughts are still for Denmark and the true-love who awaits him there, the girl with whom he would

Through Darksome Wood

19

“fain … live and die.” The Elf-maid can’t have this, so, like Circe, she directs her servant girl to add “two grains of corn,” which we can imagine to be any old-world grain, to the horn.

Unlike Odysseus, poor Bosmer has no magic herb to protect him from the enchanted draught, and once he drinks it, he quite forgets both Denmark and his betrothed. He thinks that he has always lived in Elfland and the Elf-maid has always been his truelove. When he fails to return home, his real true-love weeps herself into an early grave, so whoever our medieval ancestors are, Sir Bosmer and his tragic fiancée are not among them.

Good travel writing this ballad is not, but it does provide one telling detail. When the Elf-maid first sits down for drinks with Sir Bosmer, she opens the conversation with: Tell me in the tongue of earth What land bred and gave thee birth?

The Elf-maid appears to conduct her household as any ordinary Dane would, but it is implied that she and Bosmer speak different languages, just as mortals, elves, and dwarves all had their own sets of runes. The idea that the elves speak in a nonhuman tongue bolsters the feeling of otherworldliness but also supports the notion that a belief in elfkind arose in part from an early, not quite complete mingling of cultures. It’s that quiet clash that we’ll investigate in our next chapter.

Body, Mind & Spirit / Elves & Fairies

“Elvish lore abounds in Linda Raedisch’s charming volume The Lore of Old Elfland, in which history and folklore are accompanied by generous doses of craft and fairy tale.”

—Natalie Zaman, author of Color and Conjure

Folktales, Stories, Recipes, and Crafts from the Lands of Elves and Fairies Stories of the elven tribes have been told throughout history, and for some people in the modern world, encounters with elves continue to this day.

This book explores the magical territory of Elfland, sharing tales of elves and fairies from Old Norse sagas, Danish ballads, and Tolkien’s Mirkwood. From the mound people of Lüneburg Heath to the Elf-maids of the Black Forest, The Lore of Old Elfland brings the shrouded activities of the elves into the light. With recipes, crafts, and an elven herbal, author Linda Raedisch invites you to realize your own vision of Elfland—a vision that is sure to fill your spirit with unexpected wonders and astonishing delights.

LINDA RAEDISCH is the author of Night of the Witches and The Old Magic of Christmas as well as numerous articles on folklore, herblore, and ancient religions.

Additionally, she is a professional craft instructor and an expert papercrafter and soapmaker. Linda lives in northern New Jersey.

“As a lifelong Tolkien devotee, I was delighted to learn more about the origin stories that inspired the elves of Middle-earth fame. … Linda’s book is both immersive and conversational, the kind of storytelling that makes you feel as though you’re sitting down with the author at her kitchen table over a cup of tea, discussing a rich and fascinating mythological history.”

—Andrew Beckham, author of The Lost Christmas Gift

$17.99 US

Facebook.com/LlewellynBooks Twitter: @LlewellynBooks

ISBN 978-0-7387-5845-9

Instagram: @LlewellynBooks

51799

www.Llewellyn.com

9

780738 758459