Elves

The elves of Norse tradition are a category rather than a species with fixed properties. The medieval Icelandic sources pair them repeatedly with the gods in formulaic phrases, which suggests a standing rather than an incidental place in the order of beings, and one systematic account divides them into a bright kind dwelling above and a dark kind below, the latter shading into the dwarves in a way scholars have argued over ever since.

What they do is uneven. They receive sacrifice in at least one recorded practice, they are associated with fertility and with a particular god given their world as a possession, and they are also blamed for illness — a category of ailment attributed to their shot, and charms surviving against it. Later Scandinavian and English folk tradition develops them further, generally downward in stature and upward in mischief, until the word comes to mean something quite different from what the medieval sources meant by it.

This drift is the main hazard in reading about them. A reference entry that runs the medieval álfar together with early modern fairy lore and later literary elves is stacking several centuries of quite different beings under one heading. What survives across the whole range is proximity without membership: they are near, they matter, and they are not us.

The paragraphs below are extrapolated; no source supports them.

Read as a personality, elves come across as proximate and unaccountable — beings that share the landscape closely enough to be sacrificed to and blamed, yet operate by their own standards with no obligation to explain. The pairing of blessing and affliction suggests something touchy rather than malicious: the same neighbours who give increase send sickness when slighted. Nothing in the material suggests they seek out human company; it suggests they are simply already there.