Norse Myth Stories: Where are the Elves?

I am out of town this week! So we have a shorter Note than usual. 

As for reading/gaming update: I am starting a new urban fantasy series, October Daye–which is quite fun so far! It’s interesting to see another urban fantasy author cover the fae stuff, and also weird to see someone with a fantasy series revolving around fae courts long before the romantasy takeover of the concept.

[I mean, obviously, there were a bunch of these, it’s just now that they really took off in public awareness with that, and it’s weird.]

Still playing Assassin’s Creed II!

Norse Myth Stories: Where are the Elves?

I recently read some of the Poetic Edda, and I couldn’t help but notice something about the mythological poems presented in the collection:

There are a lot of scenes in which the Aesir and elves are just… hanging out. Like, in Lokasenna, when the gods are partying, it’s mentioned that a bunch of elves are there. And it makes me wonder where, in Norse mythology adaptations, are the elves? Some of them have elves, as figures in the story, but not very many feature them heavily. And when they do, they’re exclusively characters who are separate from everything else going on.

Which is odd. Like, okay, the Norse myths don’t have elf characters, but they’re there. The Aesir apparently hang out with them often! They go to parties together. And so many authors do nothing with them, or at the very least, don’t do much with them. The idea that the Aesir or Vanir regularly party with elves, or have them around, is generally ignored.

The closest I can think of is Tolkien, though he notably isn’t adapting Norse mythology. He’s telling his own stories in his own Legendarium, inspired by Norse mythology, among other sources. He has elves out the wazoo. And a lot of original fantasy followed his example by including elves all over the place, often trying to copy Tolkien’s ideas, and badly. 

Which is why I feel a bit weird saying this–in the early 2000s, everyone was freaking tired of elves. The way that they popped up as an obligatory fantasy idea, usually as wiser than humans and better. At the same time, they were still generally presented as a race of beings that were, ultimately, mortal, and not the type of beings that were just a couple of steps below the gods themselves.

Rick Riordan’s elves in Magnus Chase & the Gods of Asgard, which is explicitly based on Norse mythology, presents elves as being just kind of people with pointy ears. It’s an interesting subversion, seeing an elf suburb, and I kind of appreciate it for that, except that’s not what they were in the myths. 

Where are they? Where are the elves in Norse mythology pop culture? They should be all over! They should be hanging out with the gods! They should be working around Asgard! They should be throughout Vanaheim! Heck, Weyland the Smith was an elf, according to the poem in the Edda–why is that part never talked about in the myth-based fiction?

In Norse mythology-based fiction, the elves simply aren’t there in the numbers and importance that they should be, considering that the pagan Norse apparently thought they were everywhere, doing everything. Let us see more of that, then.

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