#alfs

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Excerpts from the major arcana of al-Fazari Station characters

Painting by Johann August Malmström (1866)

Reading interesting things about elves lately.

There's this fantastic article on the Uppsala site by Wayland Skallagrimson  and there's also Ármann Jakobsson essay 'Beware of the elf' which appeared in Folklore magazine a couple of years ago, among others.

This speaks to me, because elves are beings of the land, which should be a big deal to anyone who follows a nature religion. We are of the land, and therefore in a way closely connected with its spirits, whether you like it and agree with it or not. By the way, I don not think that elves look like Tinkerbell or Legolas. My belief goes more towards animism, and the human need to give what we experience a human form.

There's also the categorization of elves, which is what Jakobsson touches on and it's a subject that has bothered me quite a bit. The way we modern pagans categorize elves seems to me as if we're trying to categorize flowers in a botanical garden. But can these elves be so neatly divided into subsets or subspecies? Elves come in all shapes and sizes, but when do they stop being elves and become something else like gods or ghosts? And what's the difference between a dwarf and a fairy? When you look at ancient sources, they're not always as clear as we'd like them to be. One reason this is an issue to me is because a couple of times I met or experienced a being that left me wondering what the heck they are. Gods? Elves? Demons? Is it even important?