Meditations on Middle-Earth Read Online Free PDF

too. In fact, the story turns on a war between them. But these elves are very different, a difference that Tolkien would immediately have recognized.
    Let me paraphrase my introduction to the revised edition. In the year 1018, the skald Sighvat Thordarson made a winter journey into Sweden at the behest of his lord, King Olaf of Norway, afterward known as St. Olaf. Most of Sweden was then pagan. Seeking overnight shelter, Sighvat was turned away from three successive homesteads—behavior extraordinary in that day and age, with religious cause. As he related in a poem he made about it:
“That Odin be not angered,
keep off!” the woman said.
“We’re heathen here and holding
a holy eve, you wretch!”
The carline who unchristianly
cast me from the garth
gave out that they would offer
at evening to the elves.
     
    The sagas mention other sacrifices to them, and a law that warships approaching a friendly shore must dismount their ferocious figureheads, lest the land-wights take offense.
    Thus we see that they began as local gods or demi-gods. The Heimskringla tells of a petty king in a region of what was not yet Norway, buried with lavish grave-goods in a huge barrow. He came to be looked on as a tutelary spirit, given offerings and the posthumous name Olaf Geirstad-Elf. Legends about Elf Hill must spring from such happenings.
    The Eddas speak of “light” and “dark” elves, though rather vaguely. It seems as if at least some of the light elves served in Asgard, and the dark ones may have been the dwarves—who are themselves prominent in Tolkien. But this may be the invention of poets and yarn-spinners in the Christian era, who continued for two or three centuries to use the old motifs. In any case, it has little to do with the concept of elves either as godlings or as roughly equivalent to classical dryads and oreads or Japanese kami.
    They meant much to the early Germanic peoples. Probably they were far more real and immediate to most dwellers on heaths and lonely farms than were the great gods, of whom these outliers may well have heard only fragmentarily, if at all. Traces of their importance linger in names; for example, “Alfred” means “elf counsel.”
    Now, pagan gods were originally as ruthless as the natural forces and mortal conflicts they embodied. Homer, in the edited form we have him, and Hesiod can’t entirely cover this up. For instance, we see Achilles slaughtering Trojan captives at the funeral of Patroclus, both to honor him and to get help for him in the Otherworld. Human sacrifices were sometimes made directly to Odin, Thor, and Frey. The elves lived on in folk belief long after the conversion to Christianity. They kept the ancient heartlessness and trickiness. And so, in the medieval Danish ballad “Elfshot,” when a knight comes upon their moonlit dance and declines to join it, he returns home a dying man.
    It was this idea of the elves to which I harked back, beautiful, entrancing, pleasure-loving, richly rewarding their human favorites—as in the border ballad of True Thomas—but ultimately without souls or much if any compassion.
    As the centuries passed, they became ever less formidable. By the time of Elizabeth I, they were the impulsive but civilized fays of A Midsummer Night’s Dream , and by the time of Victoria, they had shrunk to cutesy-poo manikins. However, those of us who love the Northern tradition remember what they once were.
    Tolkien drew on it himself, not in mere imitation but creatively. He kept trolls and ores unsympathetic. He made the dwarves less ambiguous, more reliably helpful, than they are in the old stories. The elves underwent a complete transfiguration.
    Of course he knew exactly what he was doing, and succeeded nobly. His elves are as real as everybody else in the epic, grave and brave, powerful and poetic, wonder-working and wistful, an unattainable yet incontestable ideal. In my opinion, here his source was most clearly the Bible, and he was expressing