Elves in Anglo-Saxon England: Matters of Belief, Health, Gender and Identity. Anglo-Saxon elves (Old English ælfe) are one of the best attested non-Christian beliefs in early medieval Europe, but current interpretations of the evidence derive directly from outdated nineteenth- and early twentieth-century scholarship. Integrating linguistic and textual approaches into an anthropologically-inspired framework, Elves in Anglo-Saxon England reassesses the full range of evidence. It traces continuities and changes in medieval non-Christian beliefs with a new degree of reliability, from pre-conversion times to the eleventh century and beyond. Adducing comparative material from medieval Ireland and Scandinavia, the book argues for a dynamic relationship between beliefs and society. In this way, it illuminates constructions of group identity in the pivotal first centuries of Anglo-Saxon culture and interprets the cultural significance of elves as a cause of illness in medical texts, affording new insights into the much-discussed Scandinavian magic of seiðr. Elf-beliefs, moreover, were connected with Anglo-Saxon constructions of sex and gender; their changing nature provides a rare insight into an intractable but fascinating area of early medieval European culture.

This book supersedes Alaric's Ph.D. thesis.

For reviews and responses see:

Further reviews forthcoming: Speculum (John D. Niles); Anglia (Karen Jolly); Folklore (Dimitra Fimi); Leeds Studies in English.

' "Þur sarriþu þursa trutin": Monster-Fighting and Medicine in Early Medieval Scandinavia' seeks evidence among our extensive Scandinavian mythological texts for an issue which they seldom discuss explicitly: the conceptualisation and handling of illness and healing. Its core evidence is two runic texts (the Canterbury Rune-Charm and the Sigtuna Amulet) which conceptualise illness as a þurs ('ogre, monster'). The article discusses the semantics of þurs, arguing that illness and supernatural beings could be conceptualised as identical in medieval Scandinavia. This provides a basis for arguing that myths in which gods and heroes fight monsters provided a paradigm for the struggle with illness. The article proceeds, more speculatively, to use the Eddaic poem Skírnismál and the Finnish Riiden synty as the basis for arguing that one cause of illness could be the transgression of moral norms.

'The Orality of a Silent Age: The Place of Orality in Medieval Studies' uses a brief survey of current work on Old English poetry as the point of departure for arguing that although useful, the concepts of orality and literacy have, in medieval studies, been extended further beyond their literal referents of spoken and written communication than is heuristically useful. Recent emphasis on literate methods and contexts for the writing of our surviving Anglo-Saxon poetry, in contradistinction to the previous emphasis on oral ones, provides the basis for this criticism. Despite a significant amount of revisionist work, the concept of orality remains something of a vortex into which a range of only party related issues have been sucked: authorial originality/communal property; impromptu composition/meditated composition; authorial and audience alienation/immediacy. The relevance of orality to these issues is not in dispute; the problem is that they do not vary along specifically oral/literate axes. The article suggests that this is symptomatic of a wider modernist discourse in medieval studies whereby modern, literate society is (implicitly) contrasted with medieval, oral society: the extension of the orality/literacy axis beyond its literal reference has to some extent facilitated the perpetuation of an earlier contrast between primitivity and modernity which deserves still to be questioned and disputed. Pruning back our conceptions of the oral and the literate to their stricter denotations, we might hope to see more clearly what areas of medieval studies would benefit from alternative interpretations.

'The Etymology and Meanings of Eldritch' argues against the traditional derivation of eldritch from Old English *ælf-rīce (‘elf’ + ‘dominion, sphere of influence’), arguing that the etymology is rather *æl-rīce~el-rīce, the first element meaning ‘foreign, strange; from elsewhere’, and the whole therefore meaning ‘other world’. The key evidence is the variant spellings of eldritch in Older Scots texts cannot regularly be accommodated by *ælf- but can be accomodated by the prefix *æl-~el-. The article develops this point by showing that the putative origin of eldritch in ælf- seems to have influenced the definitions of eldritch given both in the Dictionary of the Older Scottish Tongue and in more recent scholarship: its connotations of elves and elvishness have in some circumstances been overplayed, and the more general meaning of ‘otherworldly’ is to be preferred.

'Glosses, Gaps and Gender: The Rise of Female Elves in Anglo-Saxon Culture' addresses the fact that it is difficult to detect lexical change within Old English, since most of our texts derive from a relatively short period, but lexical change can afford valuable insights into cultural change. The paper identifies changes in the semantics of the Old English word ælf (‘elf’) through a rigorous analysis of two textual traditions in which Old English words based on ælf are used to gloss Latin words for nymphs. Around the eighth century, it appears that Old English had no close equivalent to words for the supernatural, feminine and generally unthreatening nymphs: words for supernatural females denoted martial, monstrous or otherwise dangerous beings, while ælf seems not to have denoted females—at least not with sufficient salience to be used as a gloss for words for nymphs. Glossators instead found ways of altering ælf’s gender in order to create a vernacular word for nymphs. By the eleventh century, however, things had changed, and ælf had come to have the female denotation which was to prove prominent in Middle English. Tracing these lexical changes allows us to trace changes in Anglo-Saxon non- Christian belief-systems, and implicitly in Anglo-Saxon gendering more generally.

'Turning your Coursework into Articles' discusses how undergraduate and master's-level coursework can be developed into academic articles. The piece begins by addressing some practical questions about publishing coursework –- about whether and where students should try to publish. It then focuses on the writing itself –- at how writer-centred coursework differs from reader-centred articles, and how professional-level writing is formatted, with a couple of hints about content.

'Constructing Anglo-Saxon Sanctity: Tradition, Innovation and Saint Guthlac' develops the unique opportunities afforded by the hagiography surrounding the Anglo-Saxon saint Guthlac for investigating the place of saints’ cults in Anglo-Saxon society. Guthlac was one of England’s first home-grown saints, and enjoyed a commensurate prominence in Anglo-Saxon culture. Besides being the subject of some of England’s earliest Latin hagiography, Guthlac is the only native saint to have received hagiography in the form of Old English poetry. Moreover, while the majority of Old English poetry was closely based on Latin sources, the long poem Guthlac A was not. The article focuses on this unusual poem, examining its combination of an Anglo-Saxon subject and medium with a Christian genre to gain access to Anglo-Saxon images of saints which are usually hidden from us. Guthlac's rite of passage is a struggle with the demons who inhabit his hermitage in the East Anglian fens; significantly, although this phase of his life is prominent in all texts, Guthlac A focuses on it almost exclusively. The article analyses this portrayal of Guthlac as a monster-fighter in the context of other Anglo-Saxon handlings of monster-fighting, principally Beowulf. Guthlac A can be seen to invert traditional Anglo-Saxon imagery and diction of monster-fighting, to emphasise that Guthlac’s peaceful invocations of God and saints are superior to traditional physical violence. Likewise, the poem situates the conflict in a space whose traditional connotations are shown by other Anglo-Saxon evidence to have been of heathenism and banishment--a situation which Guthlac overcomes, to redefine the meanings of traditional topoi in a Christian world.

'The Evidence for maran, the Anglo-Saxon "Nightmares" ' examines the Old English word mære, the etymon of nightmare, and its variants. These are attested reasonably often, and may afford us rare insights into the nature of traditional beliefs in early medieval culture. However, a number of questions arise from our basic Old English data which I address in order to underpin future efforts to interpret the Old English material. I tackle four main issues:

The wider import of beliefs concerning maran and similar beings remains to be identified, but we stand a better chance of establishing it with the clarification of our data provided here.

'The P-Celtic Place-Names of North-East England and South-East Scotland', by Bethany Fox with an interactive distribution map implemented by Alaric Hall, focuses on the region between the Firth of Forth to the north and the River Tees to the south, to gather together those names identified by past scholars as possibly p-Celtic, providing a new assessment as to whether each contains p-Celtic elements. With the identification of eighty-four names probably containing p-Celtic elements, and forty-five further possible examples, it emerges that p-Celtic toponyms in the region are more numerous than has usually been assumed. Moreover, there is reason to think that the distribution of p-Celtic names is historically significant: generally speaking, the distribution of the earliest identifiable Old English place-names (those ending in -hām and -ingahām) is mutually exclusive of p-Celtic names. The most obvious interpretation of the evidence in this study is a synthesis of mass-migration and elite-takeover models. Large-scale Anglian cultural influence, and therefore implicitly settlement, seems likely along the major river valleys south of the Lammermuir and Moorfoot hills (following the Tyne, Tees, Alne and Tweed), with slower diffusion of influence elsewhere. It seems likely that p-Celtic speech survived longest in the area between the Lammermuir and Moorfoot hills, a supposition supported by archaeological evidence. The study takes the opportunity of online publication to develop new strategies for presenting place-name evidence, including a full appendix of data hyperlinked to the main text, and an interactive distribution map.

'Folk-healing, Fairies and Witchcraft: The Trial of Stein Maltman, Stirling 1628' is the first full publication of a trial record which is particularly valuable in the history of Scottish popular belief, that of Stein Maltman, of Leckie, about twelve kilometres to the West of Stirling. Although our text has itself been edited from the original transcripts of depositions and confessions by the seventeenth-century scribe, it provides important information about folk-healing practices, maleficium, and the role of fairies in the construction of illness in early modern Scotland. The case seems to be representative of endemic rather than epidemic witchcraft-trials, and the mentions of fairies attributed to Stein and which he is himself recorded to make may closely reflect his professional construction of healing practices.

'Elves on the Brain: Chaucer, Old English, and Elvish' discusses the precise meanings of the Middle English word elvish. These have attracted a fair amount of commentary before, because Chaucer, through the mouthpiece of Harry Bailey, described himself as elvish in the prologue to The Tale of Sir Thopas. Richard Firth Green has recently emphasised that to understand the reference in the prologue to Sir Thopas, we must also consider the semantics of elvish elsewhere in Chaucer’s work, in lines 751 and 842 of The Canon’s Yeoman’s Tale. He argued further that Chaucer’s usage of elvish is liable to have drawn connotations from the meanings of its root elf--and ably elucidated these. However, some useful evidence for the meanings of elvish has been passed over. Besides a revealing Middle English attestation, Old English attests once to elvish’s etymon ælfisc, as well as to another adjectival derivative of the elf-word, ylfig. The evidence of these Old English words is more complex, but also more revealing, than has been realised. Taken together, this new evidence affords new perspectives on the history of elvish, on what it may have meant to Chaucer, and on the significance of elves in medieval English-speaking cultures. In particular, while Chaucer doubtless kept elves in mind as he used elvish, in ways which Green’s research illuminates, the word seems certainly in Old and Middle English to have had developed senses not strictly related to its literal meaning, along the lines of ‘delusory’, while the apparent sense of elvish in the prologue to Sir Thopas, ‘abstracted’, finds parallels in the Old English ylfig.

'Hygelac's Only Daughter: A Present, a Potentate and a Peaceweaver in Beowulf'. The women of Beowulf have enjoyed extensive study in recent years, but one has escaped the limelight: the only daughter of Hygelac, king of the Geats and Beowulf’s lord. But though this daughter is mentioned only fleetingly, a close examination of the circumstances of her appearance and the words in which it is couched affords new perspectives on the role of women in Beowulf and on the nature of Hygelac’s kingship. Hygelac’s only daughter is given as part of a reward to Hygelac’s retainer Eofor for the slaying of the Swedish king Ongentheow. Beowulf refers to this reward with the unique noun ofermaðmas, traditionally understood to mean “great treasures”. I argue, however, that ofermaðmas at least potentially means “excessive treasures”. Developing this reading implies a less favourable assessment of Hygelac’s actions here than has previously been inferred. I argue further that the excess in Hygelac’s treasure-giving derives specifically from his gift of his only daughter, and the consequent loss to the Geats of the possibility of a diplomatic marriage through which they might end their feud with the Swedes. The article offers new perspectives on the semantics of ofermaðum, on Hygelac’s kingship, and on women in Beowulf.

'Are there any Elves in Anglo-Saxon Place-names?' reassesses those place-names so far etymologised to contain ælf, the Old English etymon of elf, to establish which if any can reliably be used in research on Anglo-Saxon beliefs. The key problem for identifying ælf in place-names lies in its phonological similarity to Anglo-Saxon personal names, at three levels: in place-names, etymological dithematic personal names like were sometimes reduced to forms which resemble forms of ælf; there was probably a simplex personal name Ælf which can also appear in placenames; and there was likewise possibly a simplex personal name Ælfa. Additional difficulties are caused by the possibility that some place-names which might plausibly derive from Anglo-Saxon ones containing ælf were in fact coined in the Middle English period. However, although no ælf-place-name can be identified for Anglo-Saxon England with complete confidence, two reasonably reliable examples are identified: ælfrucge ('elf-ridge') in Kent and ylfing dene ('elf-place valley') in Berkshire. Moreover, other names which could plausibly derive from ælf also tend to show second elements denoting hills and valleys. In this, they are similar to place-names containing names of pagan gods, but unlike names denoting monstrous supernatural beings (which tend to be associated with bodies of water and smaller depressions). Though conclusions must be tentative, our evidence hints at wider roles for beliefs in supernatural beings in the construction of Anglo-Saxon space.

'Calling the Shots: The Old English Remedy Gif hors ofscoten sie and Anglo-Saxon "Elf-Shot" ' re-examines the evidence for the concept of 'elf-shot' in Anglo-Saxon England, a concept prominent in the secondary literature on Anglo-Saxon medicine and magic. A major text for those claiming to find 'elf-shot' is a medical remedy Gif hors ofscoten sie ('If a horse be ofscoten'), which mentions elves (ylfe). I argue, however, that ofscoten merely means something like 'badly pained, suffering pains in the torso region', and indeed that the text's earliest editor, Cockayne, realised this, but that his translation 'elf-shot' has since been misinterpreted. I demonstrate that the remedy considers ylfe to be only one possible source of the ailment, and that they appear in a note which is probably an addition to the text. There is no convincing evidence for how they caused the ailment. Various other Old English remedies for ofscoten or gescoten animals which do not mention ylfe have been assumed to attest to 'elf-shot', but my arguments show that this reasoning is faulty, and that what seemed like a large body of evidence is in fact a very small one. However, I argue that the word ælfsogoða, hitherto little understood, also means 'pain in the torso region caused by elves'. This shows that the association of ofscoten with ylfe in Gif hors ofscoten sie is paralleled elsewhere in Old English and may have been well-established.

'Getting Shot of Elves: Healing, Witchcraft and Fairies in the Scottish Witchcraft Trials' re-examines the evidence of the Scottish witchcraft trials for beliefs associated by scholars with 'elf-shot'. Some supposed evidence for elf-shot is dismissed, but other material illuminates the interplay between illness, healing and fairy-lore in early modern Scotland, and the relationships of these beliefs to witchcraft itself. In all, I accept ten printed trials to pertain meaningfully to elf-shot in some sense. This is a small corpus, though widely spread geographically. Despite the small sample, some patterns are apparent. It emerges that the schot of elf-schot denotes sharp pains rather than projectiles in our early evidence, and that compounds of elf with words for ailments--such as elf-schot (noun and past participle) and elf-grippit--occur in or imply narratives about members of human communities healing harm probably thought to be done by fairies. By contrast, four of the five trials mentioning elf-arrow-heidis concern their use by human witches in maleficium. The differences in vocabulary in the trials reflect differences in their narratives. I have interpreted material from as early as 1576 to suggest a system in which healers acted from within the community against illness caused by an external, more powerful group, the fairies. Meanwhile, the use of elf-arrow-heidis in witches’ maleficium is attested from 1590 (with reference to 1576-77). These two systems for the aetiology of illness--fairies and witches--must have co-existed for centuries, but the evidence hints that over time, fairy-beliefs were incorporated into witchcraft-beliefs. The later accounts reorientate the construction of supernatural disease from deriving primarily from outside the community to deriving primarily from within: fairies, it can be argued, which in older belief-systems were an independent, external threat, became in these trials an adjunct of witches. By paying close attention to the language of our texts we can revise old assumptions about the character of Scottish beliefs at the time of the witchcraft trials. By situating this linguistic evidence in its narrative contexts, and adducing appropriate interpretative models, we can tell stories about Scottish fairy-belief quite different from those which dominate the narrative sources. These provide convincing, if only occasional, alternative perspectives on the culture in which the Scottish witchcraft trials took place.

'Changing Style and Changing Meaning: The Medieval Redactions of Heiðreks saga' addresses a question of growing prominence in saga-studies: the significance of fornaldarsögur in the medieval Icelandic context. This approach is useful both to appreciate most fornaldarsögur as literature, since their literary concerns are usually much removed from those of professional literary critics, and for using them to illuminate medieval Icelandic thought and society. Heiðreks saga provides a case-study for this, since it survives in three medieval redactions: an early text, R, a revision thereof, U, and a third version which makes use of both R and U-type texts, H (preserved in Hauksbók).

These analyses provide evidence for the theory that fornaldarsögur were important to Icelanders as statements of their cultural vitality in the face of political and cultural pressure from mainland Scandinavia (and so also that they were not merely late, poor, 'popular' stories), but also suggest numerous subtleties behind this reading, with implications for our understanding of saga style and genre.

'The Images and Structure of The Wife's Lament' finds that despite the extensive critical writing on this difficult poem, there is a substantial corpus of medieval evidence which bears usefully on its interpretation and which has yet to be considered. One set of evidence is derived from images of landscape on the Franks Casket and in Middle English, the Bible, and the Old Icelandic poetic Edda which are similar to those in The Wife's Lament. The Wife's Lament is unusual among Old English poems in providing two detailed descriptions of landscapes, and to interpret these as some vague pathetic fallacy does not account for their distinctiveness. The analogues adduced instead suggest fairly precise connotations for both locations: both are Hellish, and the location of the speaker herself, in a cave beneath an oak tree, has fairly close analogues in the poetic Edda, where the motif is associated with (female) heathenish monsters, and more general analogues suggesting connotations of sites of pagan worship. The second corpus of evidence derives from the manuscript punctuation of The Wife's Lament. While this is hard to interpret, the long debates over sentence division and paragraphing in the poem justify a close consideration of this important and long-neglected evidence. Careful consideration of punctuation in conjunction with rhetorical patterning in the poem produces a strong case for resolving certain disputes, and suggests a verse-paragraph structure of 5, 12, 12, 12 and 12 lines. The implications of these analyses are combined in a literary reading of the poem which seeks to take account of its meaning to a Christian Anglo-Saxon audience.

'Old MacDonald had a Fyrm, eo, eo, y: Two Marginal Developments of < eo > in Old and Middle English' uses the new possibilities for linguistic research afforded by the Dictionary of Old English Corpus to help show phonological developments in Old and Middle English. South-Western Middle English texts often show the letter u for Old English eo, which had normally become /ø(:)/ or /e(:)/. Despite the general likelihood that u should represent /y(:)/ (through the influence of Anglo-Norman spelling), it has been interpreted throughout the twentieth century as /ø(:)/. This interpretation is shown to be wrong by three means:

Alaric concludes that /i(:)u/ was maintained in (low-prestige) dialects of south-western Old English, and was becoming /y(:)/ by c. 950AD. However, /beor/ and later /eor/ were becoming /yr/ in a more prestigious dialect from at least c. 900AD.

'Gwyr y Gogledd? Some Icelandic Analogues to Branwen Ferch Lyr' seeks to situate this most popular of the Four Branches of the Mabinogi in a medieval literary context other than the Celtic and folkloric ones through which the Four Branches are usually approached. Previous arguments for Germanic influence on Branwen Ferch Lyr are criticised. However, observing growing evidence for Scandinavian cultural involvement in early medieval Wales, the article argues for the likelihood of mutual influence between Branwen and Scandinavian literatures by expounding a dense group of similarities between Branwen and the Old Icelandic Hrólfs saga kraka. The literary ramifications of this association are pursued, and are intended to stand whether or not a direct connection between Welsh and Norse texts is accepted. The character and behaviour of Efnisien, who is the character who causes most of Branwen's plot developments, have hitherto been considered inconsistent and perplexing by critics. Here, his character and role is approached by comparing him with the Scandinavian literary figure of the Óðinn-hero, with whom he shares most of his characteristics. The medieval cultural and literary context which this reading provides shows Efnisien's actions and character to be focused and internally logical. Branwen emerges in consequence as a more tighly and effectively constructed narrative, while interesting implications are raised for the history of the Scandinavians in Wales, and for critical approaches to medieval Welsh literature.