Pseudo-poll

[lethargic_man]

How would you translate Älvsjö? "Elf-lake", or "fairy-lake"? I.e. do you consider "elf" to be equivalent to "fairy"? (I'm astonished that such Tolkien fans as livredor and ploni_bat_ploni could conflate these!)

Comments

[liv]

Nuh-uh, elf isn't equivalent to fairy, but the dictionary gives fairy for älv. The way English is, it often happens that a word doesn't mean the same thing as its cognate in a related language.

Tolkien specifically had a big thing for not mentioning fairies, I think because of the late Victorian soppy connotations of the word. But if you look at fantasy and the mythology it's based on from before Tolkien, the Fair Folk or Little People or Fae or what have you are a lot more like Tolkien's elves than like Cicely M Barker's fairies.

[lethargic-man.livejournal.com]

Nuh-uh, elf isn't equivalent to fairy, but the dictionary gives fairy for älv.

What's the opposite-way dictionary give for "elf"?

Tolkien specifically had a big thing for not mentioning fairies, I think because of the late Victorian soppy connotations of the word.

Yup, though he did originally use the word, and moved away from it.

But if you look at fantasy and the mythology it's based on from before Tolkien, the Fair Folk or Little People or Fae or what have you are a lot more like Tolkien's elves than like Cicely M Barker's fairies.

Whilst this is true, the language has moved on, and the two terms are no longer synonymous.

[darcydodo]

You can't ask about it with regards to English differentiation, I don't think; you have to ask about it in terms of Scandinavian interpretation of the two. And there's massive conflation there. If you like I'll expand on it some time when I don't have to run off and proctor a midterm. ;)

[lethargic-man.livejournal.com]

Go on (some time when you don't have to run off and proctor a midterm). (By proctor do you mean invigilate? "Proctor" to me means the Cambridge officials who until the mid-twentieth century would prowl the streets looking for students not wearing gowns, or out of college after curfew.)

[darcydodo]

Yes, by proctor I mean invigilate. :)

[liv]

Yes, please do. I think we're both getting a bit muddled here and this sounds like it would be really interesting!

[darcydodo]

Ok, let's see. You've got this basic large class of Otherworldly creatures in Scandinavian folklore, which tend to just be known as huldre, or "hidden folk." This covers both Good Sorts and Evil Sorts, as well as those who are somewhere in between. So you've got things like the Neck, which is a water spirit that usually shows up in the shape of a horse and tries to coax children onto its back (at which point it runs away with them); you've also got what we'd commonly think of as trolls, ugly lumpy creatures that live in the hills and will happily eat humans; they can also be perfectly nice-looking men and women, though, who only are realized to be supernatural when they turn around and you notice that they've got a cow's tail, or are hollow from behind, or some such. And then it includes groups like the Jolerei, which is commonly thought to mean something along the lines of "Christmas riders," and Odin rides at their head. In folkore, these are still a bunch of trolls, right? But of course in ancient times, Odin was a god. In folkloristic terms, all Scandinavian supernatural folk can be classed under this idea of huldre. (You'll be interested in the origin of huldre, if I haven't mentioned it before. At one point God ordered Eve to show him her children, and she hadn't finished washing them all, so she only showed him the clean ones, and hid the others behind her skirt or something. God asked if that was all of them, and she said yes, and so he said, "The ones that you have hidden from me shall also be hidden from you." And that was their origin, at least according to one version. There are also things like Lilith being their mother, etc etc.)

Now, there are no fairies with little wings who do nice things like granting wishes in this mythology, ancient or more modern. Álfr is the Old Norse for "elf," but we only translate it as elf because that's what it's linguistically close to in English (and it's what the English derived from, natch); it could equally be translated as "fairy." Álfheimar was the home of one set of gods — not the Æsir, but a group ruled over by Freyr; they may or may not have been the Vanir — but álfr also seems, in ancient times, to have been a word used for creatures not unlike at least a subset of the huldre, since it's an ancient word and huldufólk doesn't come in until rather later sagas. Dwarves, who make magic items and things, don't count as ölfur (I think I got that plural right, though I certainly wouldn't swear to it), and neither to jötnar, who are the Nasty Enemies of the gods whom we usually translate as something like Giants or Trolls.

Point being, I guess, that in Scandinavian conception an älv- stem is really just going to imply magical folk at large, not some distinction between, say, tiny Shakespearean fairies with names like Mustardseed and grand Tolkienesque Elves with names like Celeborn. An English translation isn't going to be exact regardless, since we have such different cultural conceptions of both those terms. (Pre-Tolkien, though, there wasn't a real separation between the two terms. For example, Puck was an elf, but he was also a fairy. Take a look at the OED definition of "elf.")

[liv]

Ooh, you so rock! Thank you for this, it's really cool. I did know that thing about Eve and the hidden children, though I'd heard it in the context of Icelandic mythology (yeah, I know, it's all Scandinavian) and had also forgotten until you reminded me.

I wonder where the tiny cute winged things came from, then?

[darcydodo]

Umm... France? :)

And on second thought, I don't think I did get the plural of álfr right. ;)

[lethargic-man.livejournal.com]

Indeed France; prior-comment-you (i.e. livredor) should read Tom Shippey's The Road to Middle-Earth, which deals with this issue, as well as being stuffed with linguistics geekery (http://lethargic-man.livejournal.com/6165.html).

[lethargic-man.livejournal.com]

Fairy nuff, and thanks for taking the time to educate me. :o)

[ploni-bat-ploni.livejournal.com]

Well, if I think about the word for fairy in my own Northern European language, it's "elf", without a doubt, almost identical to the Swedish word. Elf in my language means fairy, and *not* Elf in a Tolkienish way. Elf/fairy are cute little things and not the majestic übermenschen from Middle Earth.

Does that cut it?

[lethargic-man.livejournal.com]

Bah, all these Northern European languages with no taste. ;^b

[curious-reader.livejournal.com]

I always thought fairies are tiny and can fly. Elves are either tall or short but cannot fly.