There is perhaps no more confusing a question in Norse mythology than “what is an elf?” It’s so confusing in fact that this entire post will not be able to answer it. Instead, we’ll start by deciphering just one of the many pieces of the overall elf puzzle.
To begin, our pagan-era poetic sources never mention any sort of elf categories. As far as the surviving poetry is concerned, elves are just elves. The Prose Edda, on the other hand, composed by 13th-century Christian scholars, divides elves into what look like three categories on the surface, but which are probably only two categories if we pay a little closer attention. The three terms it uses are ljósálfar (light elves), døkkálfar (dark elves), and svartálfar (black elves). All of these translations are literal.
Here’s all we get about both light elves and dark elves, from Gylfaginning 17 (Faulkes transl.):
High said: ‘Many splendid places are there [in the heavens]. There is one place that is called Alfheim. There live the folk called light-elves, but dark-elves live down in the ground, and they are unlike them in appearance, and even more unlike them in nature. Light-elves are fairer than the sun to look at, but dark-elves are blacker than pitch. […] They say there is another heaven south of and above this heaven of ours, and that heaven is called Andlang; and that there is a third heaven still further above that one, and that is called Vidblain, and it is in that heaven that we believe this place to be. But we believe it is only light-elves that inhabit these places for the time being.‘
And thus here are the “facts” so far:
- Light elves live in Alfheim in the heavens
- Dark elves live down in the ground
- Light elves are fairer than the sun
- Dark elves are blacker than pitch
- Light and dark elves are different in nature (almost certainly implying some sort of benevolence versus malice)
- Light elves are the only beings inhabiting certain places in the heavens, for now.
The terms “light elf” and “dark elf” aren’t ever used again outside of this passage. And as I already mentioned, they do not occur at all in the Poetic Edda.
By contrast, we are never given an explanatory breakdown about “black elves”. They are mentioned only in passing in three different stories. Here’s everything we have on them:
From Gylfaginning 34, the gods have decided to bind the wolf Fenrir with a special fetter. In order to do this…
Þá sendi Alföðr þann, er Skírnir er nefndr, sendimaðr Freys, ofan í Svartálfaheim til dverga nökkurra ok lét gera fjötur þann, er Gleipnir heitir.
Then All-father sent someone called Skirnir, Freyr’s messenger, down into the world of black-elves to some dwarfs and had a fetter called Gleipnir made.
From Skáldskaparmál 35, Loki has just cut off the hair of Thor’s wife Sif. Thor threatens to break every bone in Loki’s body but…
…hann svarði þess, at hann skal fá af Svartálfum, at þeir skulu gera af gulli Sifju hadd þann, er svá skal vaxa sem annat hár. Eftir þat fór Loki til þeira dverga, er heita Ívaldasynir, ok gerðu þeir haddinn…
…he swore that he would get black-elves to make Sif a head of hair out of gold that would grow like any other hair. After this Loki went to some dwarfs called Ivaldi’s sons, and they made the head of hair…
From Skáldskaparmál 39, some of the gods have offered to pay a ransom for killing an otter that they didn’t realize was actually a person who had shapeshifter into an otter. The gods are to fill the otter skin with gold but they don’t have that much gold on them so…
Þá sendi Óðinn Loka í Svartálfaheim, ok kom hann til dvergs þess, er heitir Andvari. Hann var fiskr í vatni, ok tók Loki hann höndum ok lagði á hann fjörlausn allt þat gull, er hann átti í steini sínum.
Then Odin sent Loki into the world of black-elves and he came across a dwarf called Andvari. He was a fish in a lake, and Loki captured him and imposed on him as a ransom all the gold he had in his cave.
Have you noticed the common thread among all three passages? Every time a character ventures into Svartálfheimr (black-elf realm), the people they meet there are always dwarves. In the story about Sif’s hair, Loki even claims that he will get some black elves to make new hair, and the characters he contracts to do this for him are called dwarves.
In the context of the Prose Edda, svartálfr (black elf) is clearly just a synonym for dvergr (dwarf).
But in connection with this, the scant information we have also leads us to conclude that døkkálfr (dark elf) is also just a synonym for svartálfr.
Firstly, “dark elves are blacker than pitch” (døkkálfar eru svartari en bik). They are described using specifically the word svartr. Secondly, sources tend to agree that dwarves live underground or in the rocks, as is succinctly stated in Gylfaginning 14:
The dwarfs had taken shape first and acquired life in the flesh of Ymir and were then maggots, but by decision of the gods they became conscious with intelligence and had the shape of men though they live in the earth and in rocks.
Living in the earth and in rocks matches up with what we have been told about dark elves, namely that they live “down in the ground”. Additionally, when Skirnir went to get the fetter Gleipnir from some dwarves, he went “ofan í Svartálfaheim”, literally “downwards into black-elf-realm”, likely implying that Svartalfheim is down within the earth. Then, of course, there’s the issue that black elves are absent from our explanatory breakdown about elves, whereas dark elves are absent from any narratives containing elves. These clues are small, but they all point in the same direction, that dark elves are likely the same as black elves, and this category is synonymous with dwarves.
This leaves us to assume that the Prose Edda’s so-called “light elves” likely comprise the entirety of what the Poetic Edda simply calls “elves” which occupy the domain of Alfheim. The notion of black elves, and their realm Svartalfheim (again, neither of which appear in the Poetic Edda at all) might even be an invention of the Prose Edda’s author(s) looking for a way to fit Norse mythological beings into the mold of Christian angels and demons. Note the dichotomy between living in the heavens versus down below the earth, as well as the dichotomy between being bright and beautiful like the sun versus being blacker than pitch, as well as the opposing natures of the two groups.
This of course does not give us much in the way of an explanation for what an elf really is, but at least when it comes to dark or black elves, we can pretty safely drop the idea that they are unique categories of beings with some unique realm of existence. They live where the dwarves live, because that’s what they are.
