My Elves are Different.

When calculating how to portray the elves in my current writing project (tentatively titled Moths and Cobwebs) I was thinking about Erlkoenig and Appendix N, and (of course!) about GK Chesterton. There is a connected train of thought here, but it meanders through some ox-bows and digressions, so I hope the patient reader enjoys the scenic route of thought.

First, Erlkoenig. I had noticed for some time that there was many a younger reader whose mental picture of the elves (those inhabitants of the Perilous Realm, the Otherworld, whose ways are not our ways) was formed entirely by JRR Tolkien and his imitators. They are basically prelapsarian men: like us in stature and passions, but nobler, older, and not suffering our post-Edenic divorce from the natural world. This is not alien to the older themes and material on which Tolkien drew, but there is alongside this an older and darker version.

This darker version is one which Tolkien did not draw upon, except, perhaps, in the scene in THE HOBBIT when the starving dwarves come upon the elves of Mirkwood feasting. When the step forward, the campfirelight vanishes, the elves disappear, and the dwarves are throw into an enchanted sleep. That is the kind of trick Puck might play on mortal fools. But there is mischief worse than these, kidnapping and killings, cradle-robbing the older tales retell. Again, Boromir and Eomer mention tales of the Lady of the Golden Wood which captures that sense of elves as something fair and perilous, but their misgivings, in Tolkein’s world, are merely wrong.

Here, for example, is a song about Erlkoenig, the elfinking, who is attracted to a boy child much as Oberon in Shakespeare wishes Corum the Indian child to be his. There are several recordings of this on YouTube, but in this one the master singer captures an expression that I hope not to see in my nightmares.

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Originally published at John C. Wright's Journal. Please leave any comments there.