September 14, 2024 • 26 mins
(Host: Kristin) Oh no, you’ve been shot by an invisible arrow and now you’re sick. What’s a person to do? Don’t worry, we’ve got you covered this week with cures for those times when you’ve been elfshot, this week on Footnoting History.
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Episode Transcript
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(00:00):
Oh no, you’ve been shot by an invisible arrow and now you’re sick. What’s a
person to do? Don’t worry, we’ve got you covered this week with cures for those
times when you’ve been elfshot, this week on Footnoting History.
(00:23):
Hello, Footnoting History friends, it’s Kristin here, back with probably the best advice you’re
ever going to get. What to do if – okay, really when – you’ve been shot by a magical arrow wielded
by an invisible preternatural creature (00:35):
the elf. Remember, if you want to make sure you don’t miss
a thing and you’d like a captioned version of this episode, you can find it at FootnotingHistory.com
or on our YouTube channel. A very special thank you for all our Patrons who help us keep
Footnoting History open access, and further thanks to all of you who have donated to the History
(00:57):
Cause via our Ko-Fi link or by purchasing some Footnoting History merch. I’ve put in a good word
for you with the elves. You’re safe, but you still may want to stick around for this information.
This is a topic I honestly love – and it’s kinda funny in a way but also entirely serious – which
(01:19):
is the best kind of history, in my humble opinion. I am of the very sincere belief
that we have to take history seriously, but we also have to have fun with it. And elf charms
offer us a way to do both. It’s a topic that, well yeah, it does sound probably silly to most
(01:40):
modern people. Most modern people do not believe in elves. We like to think we are so much more
sophisticated than that but at the same time, a lot of us do believe in supernatural – or if
you prefer, non-natural – things in our very incredible universe – things like miracles,
(02:00):
and saints, and karma, and luck, and maybe ghosts, and you get the idea. Belief itself
isn’t so much an area for the historian, but the history of belief is – Reza Aslan put it
wonderfully and it’s stayed with me for years, he said: history and faith are two different ways of
(02:21):
knowing. They have two different criteria of proof. It is valuable for us as historians to
study what people in the past believed and think about why they believed what they did – and then
how they acted on those beliefs and how those actions influenced the world – and you can
definitely do all that with elves. Elves are great. Who doesn’t want elves? Well,
(02:46):
you might not. They apparently attacked people and animals. A lot. So much so that remedies against
elf attacks are their own unique category in some medieval medical texts. There are a lot of these
remedies, you guys. These elves weren’t Buddy the Elf elves. They were originally understood
(03:06):
to be these ambivalent, amoral creatures in Germanic, Celtic, and Scandinavian medieval
folklore. Not totally unlike the djinn in Arabic folklore – lots of cultures have
these things. But then they underwent a sort of elf evolution, if you will, in the Middle Ages.
(03:27):
Elves show historians an adaptation of folk or pagan practices to Christian ideas in the
medieval manuscripts where we find them. We’re mostly going to be sticking with early medieval
England today because that’s where we find the first written reference to elves in the
8th century – and where we find the remedies I’m going to talk about for their mischief in the 9th
(03:48):
century. That earliest written reference comes to us from a prayer book from the 700s, now held
by the British Library in London. The reference is actually part of an exorcism – a Christian
rite meant to expel a devil or a demon from a person. The reference begins “I conjure you,
devil of Satan, of the elf, through the living and true G-d … that he is put to
(04:11):
flight from that person.” The elf here is definitely not considered good and he’s not
even considered ambivalent. He’s a baaaaad bad guy. The Cotton Vitellius manuscript of
the famous poem Beowulf also mentions elves and it also categorizes them with other monsters:
it refers to them as “… ogres and elves and evil phantoms and the giants who strove with
(04:36):
G-d.” The Cotton Vitellius Beowulf manuscript is estimated to have been written around the year
1000 – but the poem is probably earlier than that and based on an oral tradition. It’s definitely
set much earlier than the year 1000. And smack in between these two written references, in the 800s,
is Bald’s Leechbook, which is probably the most awesome name ever for a primary source – and
(05:04):
where we will find our elf remedies. After I give you a just little bit more background.
So, these written references aren’t exactly painting elves in the best light, but they aren’t
the full picture of how people understood them. People didn’t always see elves are these wholly
bad creatures. They are sometimes distinguished in the source material with respect to their
(05:29):
particular associations with nature – so there are mountain elves and sea elves and wood elves and
field elves, that sort of thing. The Old English prefix ælf - is used in many positive ways,
to express light or beauty. Beautiful women are often compared to elves – there’s an Anglo-Saxon
(05:49):
poem about the Biblical heroine Judith and she is described as “ælfscinu” or “beautiful
like an elf.” As we all know, beauty doesn’t equal goodness and there is an argument that
likening beautiful women to elves was also meant to imply suspicion and some kind of deviousness,
but the positive connotations, like Judith who is an unambiguously good character, do
(06:13):
also exist. In the 9th, 10th, and 11th centuries, people in the English kingdom of West Saxony gave
their kids names that included “aelf” – presumably because they liked their kids. For example, King
Aelfred’s name means “the Wise Elf.” He’s probably the most famous example but he’s not the only one
(06:34):
who had “elf” in their name; there are lots of Ælfstans and Ælfiguses and Ælfrics and so on.
It's kind of hard to say what people thought elves themselves actually, specifically,
looked like, across the board. Medieval elf scholar extraordinaire, Karen Jolly, has shown
(06:55):
that an illustration from the Eadwine Psalter that people used to think showed elves doing
some shooting is actually demons doing pretty much what the accompanying psalm 37 is describing. The
manuscript has been digitized and you can actually see the whole thing on Trinity College Cambridge’s
website – the illustration I’m talking about is on the back of folio 66 (66r), if you’d like to take
(07:19):
a look. There is a link on the Further Reading for this episode – and it is an image that,
if you google medieval elf shot, you’re bound to come across, usually erroneously attributed. It
really is too bad that that’s not what it’s showing but … that’s not what it’s showing.
Scandinavian elves were part of the cosmological belief system and were very much associated
(07:42):
with the god Freyr who ruled over “Elfland.” The saga writer Snorri Sturluson (who wins the award
for my favorite cutest medieval author name), he draws a distinction between light and dark elves,
rather than elves who do good and bad things, he’s dividing them up into bad ones and good
ones – but historians think that this may more reflect Snorri’s own Christian influence on
(08:06):
older Scandinavian traditions rather than what those traditions looked in their pre-Christian
contact form. He was writing in the 1200s and that’s well into the process of Christianization
in Scandinavia. Because of the Viking invasions starting in the late 700s and then the permanent
settlements of Viking armies in England, there was a lot melding of traditions, some easier to
(08:28):
sort out than others. Some of Snorri’s elves are described as being ethereal and celestial – but
historians think he really was influenced by Christian ideas of what angels looked like.
The good ones are “more handsome than the sun” but the bad ones are “blacker than pitch” and
live underground … and it’s not really very explicit in terms of bodily characteristics,
(08:51):
either way. No mention of pointy ears or cute little shoes. Or being small. I can’t tell you
how many times I’ve almost called elves “those little guys” in this episode before checking
myself and being like, no, we don’t know that at all. Richard Firth Green seems to agree:
he says that he has nothing to say about “fairy taxonomy,” a term which by the way, I find utterly
(09:15):
delightful. He argues that questions about whether elves are different from fairies are different
from goblins or dwarves or pucks or luitons, or kobolde, if they’re human sized or smaller,
what color they are, how they’re “governed,” all these things are unknowable because we see just so
many different versions of these creatures in the sources – and it’s better just to think of them as
(09:37):
a “class of numinous, social, humanoid creatures who were widely believed to live at the fringes
of the human lifeworld and interact intermittently with human beings.” The French referred to them as
“fees” – English mostly called them “elves” up until the middle of the 15th century when they
started to call them fairies. The vocab choice wasn’t always consistent though. So there you go.
(10:03):
Elves may have started off as amoral or ambivalent creatures who did good and bad things,
in their pre-Christian-contact existences, but with the introduction of Christianity,
they started to change, at least from the perspective of Church writers. Vernacular
writers of romances were a little, well, romantic about their elves – but stuff like hagiographies,
(10:25):
church sermons, and pastoral manuals had a very different take. Amoral creatures
like elves were hard to combat with Christian prayers, so under the new Christian system,
elves slowly came to be demonized, and their good aspects faded. Karen Louis Jolly – who,
again, has a lot to say on the subject and who I highly recommend reading if you’re looking to
(10:48):
learn more about medieval elves – points out that elves were understood to be invisible,
they were prone to malicious attacks on humans and animals and sometimes land, and you had to
charm them away – and all this took on new meaning in the new Christian system. Elves started to be
seen more like fallen angels or demons who also were out to get humans and so it made sense to
(11:13):
conflate the elves with these other beings already in the Christian milieu. Eventually,
you start to find sermons being preached in the 1400s that heavily criticized belief in elves
as superstition and anyone who believes in elves are terrible Christians who are really pissing off
G-d. This is a bit after the time period we’re focusing on today, but it’s something to keep
(11:34):
in mind about the future of elves … so to speak. Susan Závoti writes that, in Scandinavian lore,
elves were pretty territorial and didn’t like when humans invaded their space,
and when they did, elves were likely to curse humans with diseases. Anglo-Saxon culture,
which was influenced by Scandinavian culture, also understood elves to afflict humanity with
(11:57):
illnesses – and these entities were in league with G-d’s adversaries and part of “the dark side.”
In the Middle Ages, these invisible or hard to see supernatural creatures tended to shoot their
victims – people or animals – with a similarly invisible arrow or spear. And so you needed a
cure for when this happened. Historian Joseph McGowen says that the notion that elves could
(12:21):
cause physical, mental, or spiritual illnesses seems “commonplace” in Old English texts. How
did you even know this happened if you couldn’t see the bastard who shot you or the arrow he shot
you with? It’s hard for historians to say exactly, since we don’t always get detailed descriptions of
the affliction. Many medical remedies – and this is true across the board – don’t tell
(12:44):
you what the symptoms were, the audience is just supposed to know. I mean, sometimes they do – some
elf remedies for example talk about yellowish membranes in the eyes, how the fingernails are
all messed up, or the eyes have taken on a watery look … but that’s not exactly a whole lot to go
on. Historians are left to assume that sometimes, these magical invisible arrows were the cause of
(13:07):
an affliction that had no other explanation but the specifics are left to a lot of interpretation.
People did look for medical or natural explanations for diseases and illnesses,
I cannot stress that enough. People were not all quick to jump on the elf train to explain diseases
(13:28):
because they were just stupid superstitious medieval people and what else can we expect
from them? You’re too smart for that and you’re not here for that simplistic nonsense. Medieval
people understood their world differently than we do ours – or at least how many of
us do. And theirs was not a world of hard divides between physical and non-physical,
(13:48):
natural and supernatural. There’s a great book called “The Magical Universe” that
really explains this in exquisite detail. Modern people tend to have clear divides
between science and religion but that’s not the way medieval people ticked and Jolly
has a fantastic Venn diagram showing the overlap between paganism, folklore, and popular religion,
(14:14):
the modes of transmission and opposition in the medieval religious worldview in her book. There’s
a lot more permeability and interchange than you may assume. In this medieval world view,
things could have natural causes or cures but illness could also be caused by a disease of
the spirit or some unseen thing and prayer or folkloric remedies might be your solution. Or
(14:39):
any mix and match of the above. A natural illness could be improved by prayer or folkloric remedies.
A supernatural illness improved with medicines. Again, you get the idea. Závoti finds infectious
diseases to be especially linked to devils and elves in the medical literature – as well as
(14:59):
illnesses that produce high fevers, like jaundice and the so-called “Lent” disease,
which historians think was maybe something like typhus. Maybe jaundice was what those
yellow membranes in the eyes were about. It’s a theory. Really high fevers can cause brain
damage and “abnormal posturing” which could be blamed on those damn elves. A lot of scholarship
(15:23):
highlights the connection between elves and possibly epileptic or epileptic-like episodes.
So. You’ve been elfshot. Great. Now what do you do? Well, a good first reference is that
Bald’s Leechbook I mentioned a little earlier. Leechbooks are a category of medieval English
(15:44):
medical texts – Bald’s wasn’t the only show in town but he’s probably the most famous of them
now. “Leech” is an Old English word for medical practitioner, sorry to disappoint all you who
thought this was going to be a book about bugs. That’s the medievalism trope about medicine:
they liked to bust out the leeches to cure you of whatevs. I’ve got to tell you, I’ve looked at
(16:09):
thousands of medieval medical recipes and I’ve seen leeches as in leeches the bugs used only
sparingly, and it’s usually in surgical texts for cleaning wounds. And hey pearl clutchers,
get this (16:23):
modern medicine also has medical grade leeches that are used for things like
very localized bleeding in difficult areas to treat, like noses that have very thin tissue.
We also use hirudin, which is something leeches produce, to prevent blood clotting. So there.
(16:43):
But anyways. Leech in this context means a medical practitioner and a leechbook
is a medical practitioner’s book of medical remedies. Bald’s Leechbook is actually bound
together in a single manuscript with two other leechbooks: Leechbook II and Leechbook III. The
manuscript is the oldest surviving collection of medical recipes for England and it was compiled
(17:08):
sometime in the mid-10th century and composed during the reign of the Wise Elf Himself,
Alfred the Great who ruled from 871-899. The whole thing is about 100 folios – or
manuscript pages. Historians count folios as a recto and a verso so it would be like 200 pages
(17:28):
for us if the manuscript were a book. This was a sizable manuscript. The texts are organized
by disease and there’s at least 4 different people’s handwriting in them. I’m not saying
“author” because the scribe isn’t necessarily the person who actually came up with the content. We
have no idea who actually composed the content of this text – but it’s not Bald. Bald is the name
(17:53):
of the medieval owner of the manuscript we call Bald’s Leechbook and Leechbook II – and we know
this because he tells us. Medieval manuscripts usually don’t have titles per se, we just title
them based off of their first line. The first line of Bald’s Leechbook is: “Bald owns this
book which he ordered Cild to compile” and then he wrote his name at the end of Book II but we don’t
(18:18):
know who he was at all – there is no reference to a person of that name in any other text of
the time that we know of. Bald’s a one-and-done. We don’t know who Cild is, either. Leechbook III
is bound with these other two texts but Bald isn’t mentioned in it and we don’t know exactly
when all these texts were all sewn together into one manuscript or why someone put them together.
(18:41):
Scholars have linked this manuscript to a male textual tradition. There are hundreds of recipes
aimed at treating the body and there is a lot of Classical medical theory in them. The speculation
is that they were written in a monastery where access to those Classical texts would have
been most likely. There are some references to medical teachers named Oxa and Dun,
(19:04):
which were male names. The text refers to “you” a lot but we don’t know much more than
that about the audience. Men were much much more likely to be literate at this time than women,
but that doesn’t mean that these remedies did not also have an oral existence or that
no women were literate or may have had access to Classical medical texts – the probability
(19:26):
leans more towards men, though, so that’s why scholars lean that way.
A lot of the Bald elf remedies include methods like salves, drinks, purgatives,
and many use herbs common in England, like lupin, betony, fennel, or cropleek. What cropleek is
exactly is anyone’s guess though. Is it garlic? It is onion? Scallion? Leek-leek? That’s the
(19:52):
fun of reading medieval recipes. They know what they meant, but you don’t. And even if you did,
you don’t know that the onion growing in Alfred’s Wessex is the same one that grows there today.
There are some completely mysterious herbs that are named too. No clue what – and I’m
sure I’m butchering the pronunciation Old English scholars, I am so sorry, I’m trying - oweohumelan
(20:15):
is or haransprecel or githrife are. Wish I did. But many of the items in elf remedies are
medical elements that we might recognize – and the specific things I just named, a lot of those are
purgatives and have an identifiable, measurable, therapeutic effect. But there are other things,
(20:38):
like oral charms or parts of the Christian liturgy that were thought to work just as well,
or as an integral part of a greater medical remedy that also included botanical ingredients.
In case you need it someday, I’ll give you a remedy for a horse who has been elfshot. It
works for anyone, so the skills are transferable, don’t worry. Here we go: “If a horse is elfshot.
(21:04):
Take then the knife of which the haft [that means handle] is a fallow ox’s horn, and on which are
three brass nails. Write then on the horse’s forehead Christ’s mark [meaning the cross],
and on each of the limbs that you can press. Take then the left ear, prick through [it] in silence.
(21:24):
This you must do. Take one staff, strike on the back. Then the horse will be whole. And write
on the knife’s horn these words (21:30):
Benedicte omnia opera domini dominorum.[Blessed be all the works
of the lord of lords.] Whatever elf is on him, this can be a remedy for him.” This is from Bald.
Also, there’s this from Leechbook III (21:46):
“Take oewohumelan [I still don’t know what that is and
I’m still probably not saying it right], wormwood, bishopwort, lupin, ashthroat, henbane, harewort,
haransprecel [that guy again], heathberry plants, cropleek, garlic, hedgerife grains,
githrife, fennel. Put these herbs into one cup, set under the altar, sing over them nine masses.
(22:12):
Boil in butter and sheep’s grease, add much holy salt, strain through a cloth. Throw the herbs
in running water. If any evil temptation, or an elf or nightgoers, happen to a man,
smear his forehead with this salve, and put on his eyes, and where his body is sore,
cense him [with incense], and sign [the cross] often. His condition will soon be better.”
(22:36):
How do you know your horse has been elfshot? What does it mean for an elf to “happen to a
man”? Who’s saying those nine masses, don’t you need a priest for that? If you know,
you’re reading more into these recipes than what’s there,
and I got news for you, you don’t know. But it is fascinating to think about.
If you just read these elf remedies, you’d probably be tempted
(22:58):
to dismiss the leechbooks entirely. But consider this remedy for an eye ailment,
also from Bald’s Leechbook (23:03):
“Take cropleek and garlic, both of equal quantities,
pound them together, take wine and a ballock’s gall, of both equal quantities, mix with leek,
put this then into a brazen vessel, let it stand nine days in the brass vessel,
wring out through a cloth and clear it well, put it into a horn, and about night time,
(23:27):
apply it with a feather to the eye.” It’s an eye salve, which is a type of medical application we
use today and it has herbs and naturally occurring ingrediets that we might be more inclined to think
have medically active properties. Science has long verified the therapeutic benefits
of garlic and leeks and onions – especially garlic which has anti-fungal, anti-viral,
(23:51):
anti-parasitic, anti-microbial properties. I’m not sure I’d want to stick it in my eye though.
But get this. Scientists at the University of Nottingham found that this eye salve from
Bald … works. They ma de – what they think – it the recipe and found it to be affective against
MRSA – that antibiotic resistant superbug – at the same level of Vancomyocin. And I know what
(24:16):
you’re thinking, this is all very exciting … and it is … but we need to think about it a little
more. Researchers don’t know why Bald’s recipe works – they did find that you had to use all the
ingredients he said; alone they did nothing … but … how do you really know what those ingredients
were? Bald is very pre-Linnaean taxonomy. Also you don’t know exactly what Bald was trying to
(24:41):
treat. And an earlier study done at Wheaton College showed the same recipe had no effect.
We have a tendency – as modern people – to discount something like an elf remedy or to
look for it only for signs of “superstition” and hey look at all that crazy stuff medieval people
used to do. We are more likely to accept something like the garlic/eye remedy from Bald and not the
(25:06):
elf stuff, when really, they are part of the same medieval medical tradition. Botanicals
are more likely to be medically efficacious, you can test them in labs, eye ailments are
real things. Leechbook recipes may have had active ingredients that had genuine effects on pathology,
recipes also may have worked because they were emblematic of healing and the words,
(25:28):
the herbs, the stones, were operative agents because people expected them to
work. They’re all part of the same system – and all of these were considered solid
remedies for medieval people, even in the formal, literate traditions.
And now you know what to do if you – or your horse – are ever elf shot or afflicted
(25:49):
by elves. Godspeed my Footnoters. Go forth and spread the knowledge.
This has been Footnoting History. If you like the podcast, please be sure to visit our website,
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(26:09):
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appreciate our supporters and Patrons so much. And remember, the best stories are in the footnotes.
Oh no, you’ve been shot by an invisible arrow and now you’re sick. What’s a
person to do? Don’t worry, we’ve got you covered this week with cures for those
times when you’ve been elfshot, this week on Footnoting History.
(00:23):
Hello, Footnoting History friends, it’s Kristin here, back with probably the best advice you’re
ever going to get. What to do if – okay, really when – you’ve been shot by a magical arrow wielded
by an invisible preternatural creature (00:35):
the elf. Remember, if you want to make sure you don’t miss
a thing and you’d like a captioned version of this episode, you can find it at FootnotingHistory.com
or on our YouTube channel. A very special thank you for all our Patrons who help us keep
Footnoting History open access, and further thanks to all of you who have donated to the History
(00:57):
Cause via our Ko-Fi link or by purchasing some Footnoting History merch. I’ve put in a good word
for you with the elves. You’re safe, but you still may want to stick around for this information.
This is a topic I honestly love – and it’s kinda funny in a way but also entirely serious – which
(01:19):
is the best kind of history, in my humble opinion. I am of the very sincere belief
that we have to take history seriously, but we also have to have fun with it. And elf charms
offer us a way to do both. It’s a topic that, well yeah, it does sound probably silly to most
(01:40):
modern people. Most modern people do not believe in elves. We like to think we are so much more
sophisticated than that but at the same time, a lot of us do believe in supernatural – or if
you prefer, non-natural – things in our very incredible universe – things like miracles,
(02:00):
and saints, and karma, and luck, and maybe ghosts, and you get the idea. Belief itself
isn’t so much an area for the historian, but the history of belief is – Reza Aslan put it
wonderfully and it’s stayed with me for years, he said: history and faith are two different ways of
(02:21):
knowing. They have two different criteria of proof. It is valuable for us as historians to
study what people in the past believed and think about why they believed what they did – and then
how they acted on those beliefs and how those actions influenced the world – and you can
definitely do all that with elves. Elves are great. Who doesn’t want elves? Well,
(02:46):
you might not. They apparently attacked people and animals. A lot. So much so that remedies against
elf attacks are their own unique category in some medieval medical texts. There are a lot of these
remedies, you guys. These elves weren’t Buddy the Elf elves. They were originally understood
(03:06):
to be these ambivalent, amoral creatures in Germanic, Celtic, and Scandinavian medieval
folklore. Not totally unlike the djinn in Arabic folklore – lots of cultures have
these things. But then they underwent a sort of elf evolution, if you will, in the Middle Ages.
(03:27):
Elves show historians an adaptation of folk or pagan practices to Christian ideas in the
medieval manuscripts where we find them. We’re mostly going to be sticking with early medieval
England today because that’s where we find the first written reference to elves in the
8th century – and where we find the remedies I’m going to talk about for their mischief in the 9th
(03:48):
century. That earliest written reference comes to us from a prayer book from the 700s, now held
by the British Library in London. The reference is actually part of an exorcism – a Christian
rite meant to expel a devil or a demon from a person. The reference begins “I conjure you,
devil of Satan, of the elf, through the living and true G-d … that he is put to
(04:11):
flight from that person.” The elf here is definitely not considered good and he’s not
even considered ambivalent. He’s a baaaaad bad guy. The Cotton Vitellius manuscript of
the famous poem Beowulf also mentions elves and it also categorizes them with other monsters:
it refers to them as “… ogres and elves and evil phantoms and the giants who strove with
(04:36):
G-d.” The Cotton Vitellius Beowulf manuscript is estimated to have been written around the year
1000 – but the poem is probably earlier than that and based on an oral tradition. It’s definitely
set much earlier than the year 1000. And smack in between these two written references, in the 800s,
is Bald’s Leechbook, which is probably the most awesome name ever for a primary source – and
(05:04):
where we will find our elf remedies. After I give you a just little bit more background.
So, these written references aren’t exactly painting elves in the best light, but they aren’t
the full picture of how people understood them. People didn’t always see elves are these wholly
bad creatures. They are sometimes distinguished in the source material with respect to their
(05:29):
particular associations with nature – so there are mountain elves and sea elves and wood elves and
field elves, that sort of thing. The Old English prefix ælf - is used in many positive ways,
to express light or beauty. Beautiful women are often compared to elves – there’s an Anglo-Saxon
(05:49):
poem about the Biblical heroine Judith and she is described as “ælfscinu” or “beautiful
like an elf.” As we all know, beauty doesn’t equal goodness and there is an argument that
likening beautiful women to elves was also meant to imply suspicion and some kind of deviousness,
but the positive connotations, like Judith who is an unambiguously good character, do
(06:13):
also exist. In the 9th, 10th, and 11th centuries, people in the English kingdom of West Saxony gave
their kids names that included “aelf” – presumably because they liked their kids. For example, King
Aelfred’s name means “the Wise Elf.” He’s probably the most famous example but he’s not the only one
(06:34):
who had “elf” in their name; there are lots of Ælfstans and Ælfiguses and Ælfrics and so on.
It's kind of hard to say what people thought elves themselves actually, specifically,
looked like, across the board. Medieval elf scholar extraordinaire, Karen Jolly, has shown
(06:55):
that an illustration from the Eadwine Psalter that people used to think showed elves doing
some shooting is actually demons doing pretty much what the accompanying psalm 37 is describing. The
manuscript has been digitized and you can actually see the whole thing on Trinity College Cambridge’s
website – the illustration I’m talking about is on the back of folio 66 (66r), if you’d like to take
(07:19):
a look. There is a link on the Further Reading for this episode – and it is an image that,
if you google medieval elf shot, you’re bound to come across, usually erroneously attributed. It
really is too bad that that’s not what it’s showing but … that’s not what it’s showing.
Scandinavian elves were part of the cosmological belief system and were very much associated
(07:42):
with the god Freyr who ruled over “Elfland.” The saga writer Snorri Sturluson (who wins the award
for my favorite cutest medieval author name), he draws a distinction between light and dark elves,
rather than elves who do good and bad things, he’s dividing them up into bad ones and good
ones – but historians think that this may more reflect Snorri’s own Christian influence on
(08:06):
older Scandinavian traditions rather than what those traditions looked in their pre-Christian
contact form. He was writing in the 1200s and that’s well into the process of Christianization
in Scandinavia. Because of the Viking invasions starting in the late 700s and then the permanent
settlements of Viking armies in England, there was a lot melding of traditions, some easier to
(08:28):
sort out than others. Some of Snorri’s elves are described as being ethereal and celestial – but
historians think he really was influenced by Christian ideas of what angels looked like.
The good ones are “more handsome than the sun” but the bad ones are “blacker than pitch” and
live underground … and it’s not really very explicit in terms of bodily characteristics,
(08:51):
either way. No mention of pointy ears or cute little shoes. Or being small. I can’t tell you
how many times I’ve almost called elves “those little guys” in this episode before checking
myself and being like, no, we don’t know that at all. Richard Firth Green seems to agree:
he says that he has nothing to say about “fairy taxonomy,” a term which by the way, I find utterly
(09:15):
delightful. He argues that questions about whether elves are different from fairies are different
from goblins or dwarves or pucks or luitons, or kobolde, if they’re human sized or smaller,
what color they are, how they’re “governed,” all these things are unknowable because we see just so
many different versions of these creatures in the sources – and it’s better just to think of them as
(09:37):
a “class of numinous, social, humanoid creatures who were widely believed to live at the fringes
of the human lifeworld and interact intermittently with human beings.” The French referred to them as
“fees” – English mostly called them “elves” up until the middle of the 15th century when they
started to call them fairies. The vocab choice wasn’t always consistent though. So there you go.
(10:03):
Elves may have started off as amoral or ambivalent creatures who did good and bad things,
in their pre-Christian-contact existences, but with the introduction of Christianity,
they started to change, at least from the perspective of Church writers. Vernacular
writers of romances were a little, well, romantic about their elves – but stuff like hagiographies,
(10:25):
church sermons, and pastoral manuals had a very different take. Amoral creatures
like elves were hard to combat with Christian prayers, so under the new Christian system,
elves slowly came to be demonized, and their good aspects faded. Karen Louis Jolly – who,
again, has a lot to say on the subject and who I highly recommend reading if you’re looking to
(10:48):
learn more about medieval elves – points out that elves were understood to be invisible,
they were prone to malicious attacks on humans and animals and sometimes land, and you had to
charm them away – and all this took on new meaning in the new Christian system. Elves started to be
seen more like fallen angels or demons who also were out to get humans and so it made sense to
(11:13):
conflate the elves with these other beings already in the Christian milieu. Eventually,
you start to find sermons being preached in the 1400s that heavily criticized belief in elves
as superstition and anyone who believes in elves are terrible Christians who are really pissing off
G-d. This is a bit after the time period we’re focusing on today, but it’s something to keep
(11:34):
in mind about the future of elves … so to speak. Susan Závoti writes that, in Scandinavian lore,
elves were pretty territorial and didn’t like when humans invaded their space,
and when they did, elves were likely to curse humans with diseases. Anglo-Saxon culture,
which was influenced by Scandinavian culture, also understood elves to afflict humanity with
(11:57):
illnesses – and these entities were in league with G-d’s adversaries and part of “the dark side.”
In the Middle Ages, these invisible or hard to see supernatural creatures tended to shoot their
victims – people or animals – with a similarly invisible arrow or spear. And so you needed a
cure for when this happened. Historian Joseph McGowen says that the notion that elves could
(12:21):
cause physical, mental, or spiritual illnesses seems “commonplace” in Old English texts. How
did you even know this happened if you couldn’t see the bastard who shot you or the arrow he shot
you with? It’s hard for historians to say exactly, since we don’t always get detailed descriptions of
the affliction. Many medical remedies – and this is true across the board – don’t tell
(12:44):
you what the symptoms were, the audience is just supposed to know. I mean, sometimes they do – some
elf remedies for example talk about yellowish membranes in the eyes, how the fingernails are
all messed up, or the eyes have taken on a watery look … but that’s not exactly a whole lot to go
on. Historians are left to assume that sometimes, these magical invisible arrows were the cause of
(13:07):
an affliction that had no other explanation but the specifics are left to a lot of interpretation.
People did look for medical or natural explanations for diseases and illnesses,
I cannot stress that enough. People were not all quick to jump on the elf train to explain diseases
(13:28):
because they were just stupid superstitious medieval people and what else can we expect
from them? You’re too smart for that and you’re not here for that simplistic nonsense. Medieval
people understood their world differently than we do ours – or at least how many of
us do. And theirs was not a world of hard divides between physical and non-physical,
(13:48):
natural and supernatural. There’s a great book called “The Magical Universe” that
really explains this in exquisite detail. Modern people tend to have clear divides
between science and religion but that’s not the way medieval people ticked and Jolly
has a fantastic Venn diagram showing the overlap between paganism, folklore, and popular religion,
(14:14):
the modes of transmission and opposition in the medieval religious worldview in her book. There’s
a lot more permeability and interchange than you may assume. In this medieval world view,
things could have natural causes or cures but illness could also be caused by a disease of
the spirit or some unseen thing and prayer or folkloric remedies might be your solution. Or
(14:39):
any mix and match of the above. A natural illness could be improved by prayer or folkloric remedies.
A supernatural illness improved with medicines. Again, you get the idea. Závoti finds infectious
diseases to be especially linked to devils and elves in the medical literature – as well as
(14:59):
illnesses that produce high fevers, like jaundice and the so-called “Lent” disease,
which historians think was maybe something like typhus. Maybe jaundice was what those
yellow membranes in the eyes were about. It’s a theory. Really high fevers can cause brain
damage and “abnormal posturing” which could be blamed on those damn elves. A lot of scholarship
(15:23):
highlights the connection between elves and possibly epileptic or epileptic-like episodes.
So. You’ve been elfshot. Great. Now what do you do? Well, a good first reference is that
Bald’s Leechbook I mentioned a little earlier. Leechbooks are a category of medieval English
(15:44):
medical texts – Bald’s wasn’t the only show in town but he’s probably the most famous of them
now. “Leech” is an Old English word for medical practitioner, sorry to disappoint all you who
thought this was going to be a book about bugs. That’s the medievalism trope about medicine:
they liked to bust out the leeches to cure you of whatevs. I’ve got to tell you, I’ve looked at
(16:09):
thousands of medieval medical recipes and I’ve seen leeches as in leeches the bugs used only
sparingly, and it’s usually in surgical texts for cleaning wounds. And hey pearl clutchers,
get this (16:23):
modern medicine also has medical grade leeches that are used for things like
very localized bleeding in difficult areas to treat, like noses that have very thin tissue.
We also use hirudin, which is something leeches produce, to prevent blood clotting. So there.
(16:43):
But anyways. Leech in this context means a medical practitioner and a leechbook
is a medical practitioner’s book of medical remedies. Bald’s Leechbook is actually bound
together in a single manuscript with two other leechbooks: Leechbook II and Leechbook III. The
manuscript is the oldest surviving collection of medical recipes for England and it was compiled
(17:08):
sometime in the mid-10th century and composed during the reign of the Wise Elf Himself,
Alfred the Great who ruled from 871-899. The whole thing is about 100 folios – or
manuscript pages. Historians count folios as a recto and a verso so it would be like 200 pages
(17:28):
for us if the manuscript were a book. This was a sizable manuscript. The texts are organized
by disease and there’s at least 4 different people’s handwriting in them. I’m not saying
“author” because the scribe isn’t necessarily the person who actually came up with the content. We
have no idea who actually composed the content of this text – but it’s not Bald. Bald is the name
(17:53):
of the medieval owner of the manuscript we call Bald’s Leechbook and Leechbook II – and we know
this because he tells us. Medieval manuscripts usually don’t have titles per se, we just title
them based off of their first line. The first line of Bald’s Leechbook is: “Bald owns this
book which he ordered Cild to compile” and then he wrote his name at the end of Book II but we don’t
(18:18):
know who he was at all – there is no reference to a person of that name in any other text of
the time that we know of. Bald’s a one-and-done. We don’t know who Cild is, either. Leechbook III
is bound with these other two texts but Bald isn’t mentioned in it and we don’t know exactly
when all these texts were all sewn together into one manuscript or why someone put them together.
(18:41):
Scholars have linked this manuscript to a male textual tradition. There are hundreds of recipes
aimed at treating the body and there is a lot of Classical medical theory in them. The speculation
is that they were written in a monastery where access to those Classical texts would have
been most likely. There are some references to medical teachers named Oxa and Dun,
(19:04):
which were male names. The text refers to “you” a lot but we don’t know much more than
that about the audience. Men were much much more likely to be literate at this time than women,
but that doesn’t mean that these remedies did not also have an oral existence or that
no women were literate or may have had access to Classical medical texts – the probability
(19:26):
leans more towards men, though, so that’s why scholars lean that way.
A lot of the Bald elf remedies include methods like salves, drinks, purgatives,
and many use herbs common in England, like lupin, betony, fennel, or cropleek. What cropleek is
exactly is anyone’s guess though. Is it garlic? It is onion? Scallion? Leek-leek? That’s the
(19:52):
fun of reading medieval recipes. They know what they meant, but you don’t. And even if you did,
you don’t know that the onion growing in Alfred’s Wessex is the same one that grows there today.
There are some completely mysterious herbs that are named too. No clue what – and I’m
sure I’m butchering the pronunciation Old English scholars, I am so sorry, I’m trying - oweohumelan
(20:15):
is or haransprecel or githrife are. Wish I did. But many of the items in elf remedies are
medical elements that we might recognize – and the specific things I just named, a lot of those are
purgatives and have an identifiable, measurable, therapeutic effect. But there are other things,
(20:38):
like oral charms or parts of the Christian liturgy that were thought to work just as well,
or as an integral part of a greater medical remedy that also included botanical ingredients.
In case you need it someday, I’ll give you a remedy for a horse who has been elfshot. It
works for anyone, so the skills are transferable, don’t worry. Here we go: “If a horse is elfshot.
(21:04):
Take then the knife of which the haft [that means handle] is a fallow ox’s horn, and on which are
three brass nails. Write then on the horse’s forehead Christ’s mark [meaning the cross],
and on each of the limbs that you can press. Take then the left ear, prick through [it] in silence.
(21:24):
This you must do. Take one staff, strike on the back. Then the horse will be whole. And write
on the knife’s horn these words (21:30):
Benedicte omnia opera domini dominorum.[Blessed be all the works
of the lord of lords.] Whatever elf is on him, this can be a remedy for him.” This is from Bald.
Also, there’s this from Leechbook III (21:46):
“Take oewohumelan [I still don’t know what that is and
I’m still probably not saying it right], wormwood, bishopwort, lupin, ashthroat, henbane, harewort,
haransprecel [that guy again], heathberry plants, cropleek, garlic, hedgerife grains,
githrife, fennel. Put these herbs into one cup, set under the altar, sing over them nine masses.
(22:12):
Boil in butter and sheep’s grease, add much holy salt, strain through a cloth. Throw the herbs
in running water. If any evil temptation, or an elf or nightgoers, happen to a man,
smear his forehead with this salve, and put on his eyes, and where his body is sore,
cense him [with incense], and sign [the cross] often. His condition will soon be better.”
(22:36):
How do you know your horse has been elfshot? What does it mean for an elf to “happen to a
man”? Who’s saying those nine masses, don’t you need a priest for that? If you know,
you’re reading more into these recipes than what’s there,
and I got news for you, you don’t know. But it is fascinating to think about.
If you just read these elf remedies, you’d probably be tempted
(22:58):
to dismiss the leechbooks entirely. But consider this remedy for an eye ailment,
also from Bald’s Leechbook (23:03):
“Take cropleek and garlic, both of equal quantities,
pound them together, take wine and a ballock’s gall, of both equal quantities, mix with leek,
put this then into a brazen vessel, let it stand nine days in the brass vessel,
wring out through a cloth and clear it well, put it into a horn, and about night time,
(23:27):
apply it with a feather to the eye.” It’s an eye salve, which is a type of medical application we
use today and it has herbs and naturally occurring ingrediets that we might be more inclined to think
have medically active properties. Science has long verified the therapeutic benefits
of garlic and leeks and onions – especially garlic which has anti-fungal, anti-viral,
(23:51):
anti-parasitic, anti-microbial properties. I’m not sure I’d want to stick it in my eye though.
But get this. Scientists at the University of Nottingham found that this eye salve from
Bald … works. They ma de – what they think – it the recipe and found it to be affective against
MRSA – that antibiotic resistant superbug – at the same level of Vancomyocin. And I know what
(24:16):
you’re thinking, this is all very exciting … and it is … but we need to think about it a little
more. Researchers don’t know why Bald’s recipe works – they did find that you had to use all the
ingredients he said; alone they did nothing … but … how do you really know what those ingredients
were? Bald is very pre-Linnaean taxonomy. Also you don’t know exactly what Bald was trying to
(24:41):
treat. And an earlier study done at Wheaton College showed the same recipe had no effect.
We have a tendency – as modern people – to discount something like an elf remedy or to
look for it only for signs of “superstition” and hey look at all that crazy stuff medieval people
used to do. We are more likely to accept something like the garlic/eye remedy from Bald and not the
(25:06):
elf stuff, when really, they are part of the same medieval medical tradition. Botanicals
are more likely to be medically efficacious, you can test them in labs, eye ailments are
real things. Leechbook recipes may have had active ingredients that had genuine effects on pathology,
recipes also may have worked because they were emblematic of healing and the words,
(25:28):
the herbs, the stones, were operative agents because people expected them to
work. They’re all part of the same system – and all of these were considered solid
remedies for medieval people, even in the formal, literate traditions.
And now you know what to do if you – or your horse – are ever elf shot or afflicted
(25:49):
by elves. Godspeed my Footnoters. Go forth and spread the knowledge.
This has been Footnoting History. If you like the podcast, please be sure to visit our website,
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