Each time I have begun studying at another university, I have realised how much the last shaped my thought. This book is the product of three. Fre quently returning to myalma mater, the Department of Anglo-Saxon, Norse and Celtic at Cambridge University, I have profited greatly from friends and acquaintances old and new. Sandra Cromey of the English Faculty Library is a pearl among librarians. I had the privilege, with the support of the ERASMUS programme, to spend 2003–4 in the Department of English at the University of Helsinki, supervised by Matti Kilpiö and Leena Kahlas-Tarkka, and subsequently...

One assumes that when, around the end of the tenth century or the beginning of the eleventh, somewhere in the south-west of England, the scribe began what was probably the last stint on his manuscript of medical recipes, he did not guess that it would remain in use for over six hundred years – more or less until it came into the hands of Reverend Robert Burscough, who, passing it on to his friend Humphrey Wanley, transformed it from a practical text into an object of scholarship.¹ His parchment stiff, his script functional and the finished codex portable, the scribe was...

Primarily because of Icelanders’ late conversion, linguistic conservatism and readiness to transmit literature rooted in pre-conversion culture, Scandinavia has provided the basis for research into all traditional Germanicspeaking cultures. Accordingly, reconstructions ofælfehave often been shaped by evidence for the medieval Scandinavianálfar. However, it would be unwise to impose Scandinavian evidence incautiously on other cultures. If only for historiographical reasons, then, any reassessment of Anglo-Saxonælfemust begin with the reassessment of their Scandinavian cousins. I begin here by showing how the traditional point of departure for reconstructing pre-Christian Scandinavian beliefs, Snorri Sturluson’s writings, is unreliable regarding early...

By investigating the Norse evidence forálfr, it has been possible to recon struct some ofálfr’searliest meanings and relationships with the main semantic fields which it bordered or overlapped. We may turn now toálfr’sold English cognate. Reconstructing pre-conversion meanings ofælfis difficult, and attempts hitherto have been either too tentative or too speculative to be useful. Butælfhad a prominent place in the Old English system of dithematic personal names, and was also involved in the Old English morphological reorganisation of etymological long-stemmed masculine i-stems around the seventh century. These sources provide evidence correlating...

If asked to survey medieval English elves, scholars might reasonably look first to the Wife of Bath’s ‘elf-queene, with hir joly compaignye’ who ‘ Daunced ful ofte in many a grene mede’, or to Sir Thopas’s decision that ‘An elf queene shal my lemman be . . . An elf queene wol I loue, ywys’.¹ They would find a precedent for Chaucer’s beautiful female elves in the early fourteenth century, in the description in theFasciculus morumof ‘reginas pulcherrimas et alias puellas tripudiantes cum domina Dyana, choreas ducentes dea paganorum, que in nostro vulgari diciturelves’ (‘very beautiful queens...

Medical texts comprise the Old English genre which attests most often toælf. At the beginning of this book, I sketched the image extracted from this material in the early twentieth century, which characterised ælfe as small, mischievous spirits who caused illness by shooting arrows (a phenomenon called ‘elf-shot’). I have now also assembled the evidence for a quite different conception ofælfe: male, beautiful, human(-like), and otherworldly. It would be possible to square these conclusions with the medical texts simply by proposing that the medical texts exhibit the kind of demonisation ofælfeattested in Beowulf and the Royal...

Ælfsidenoccurs in three different remedies, each in a different collection, though of these two must be textually related: one of the two remedies inLacnungawhich containælf(section 29, ff. 137r–138r); section 41 of Leechbook III (ff. 120v– 121r); and a related remedy in Book I of Bald’s Leechbook (section 64, ff. 52v–53r). Unfortunately, the textual contexts ofalfsidenprovide little unequivocal evidence for its meaning, while the wordsidenoccurs only inalfsiden. However,sidenis almost certainly cognate with the Old Norse strong verbsíða(to give a broad and advised translation, ‘work magic’),...

This book has focused primarily on reconstructing Anglo-Saxons’ beliefs concerningælfe. In this process, I have sought to preserve evidence for variation and change, but also to use comparative material to show that our disparate Anglo-Saxon data may be surface manifestations of more cohesive underlying concepts. I have also been able, at various stages, to suggest how beliefs concerningælfemay have been important in the construction of social identity, health and healing. One theme, however, relating both to questions of cohesiveness and of the relationships between belief and society, has been left to one side as I have accumulated...

As I emphasised in the foreword to this book, it is the product of study in three different countries: Scotland, England and Finland. Working in Scotland was to work at a mid-way point between two extremes in folklore research, which provide a context for reflecting on how this book has used and developed existing paradigms for studying medieval beliefs. Despite the seminal importance of the English Folklore Society for the establishment of folklore as a discipline in Europe – such that even Finns today study folkloristiikka – folklore has never gained more than a marginal position in English academia, whereas Finland has...