3 - Female Elves and Beautiful Elves

Summary

If asked to survey medieval English elves, scholars might reasonably look first to the Wife of Bath's ‘elf-queene, with hir joly compaignye’ who ‘Daunced ful ofte in many a grene mede’, or to Sir Thopas's decision that ‘An elf queene shal my lemman be … An elf queene wol I loue, ywys’. They would find a precedent for Chaucer's beautiful female elves in the early fourteenth century, in the description in the Fasciculus morum of ‘reginas pulcherrimas et alias puellas tripudiantes cum domina Dyana, choreas ducentes dea paganorum, que in nostro vulgari dicitur elves’ (‘very beautiful queens and other girls dancing with their mistress Dyana, leading dances with the goddess of the pagans, who in our vernacular are called elves’); around 1300 in our earliest attestation of elf-ring, ‘a ring of daisies caused by elves’ dancing’; and in the late thirteenth century in the South English Legendary, which descibes angels who neither fought for nor against God and were banished to the earth:

ofte in forme of womman •

in mony deorne weie

Me sicþ of hom gret companie •

boþe hoppe & pleie

þat eleuene beoþ icluped •

often in the form of woman

on many a hidden path

men see a great company of them

both dance and play,

that are called eluene [following other MSS]

Parallels in Latin lead back into the twelfth century, along with Lazamon's characterisation of the queen Argante as ‘aluen swiðe sceone’ (‘a very beautiful alue’) and ‘fairest alre aluen’ (‘the most beautiful of all aluen’); and they run on into the early-modern period when, for example, Milton wrote of

. . . Faery Elves,

Whose midnight Revels, by a Forest side

Or Fountain some belated Peasant sees,

Or dreams he sees, while overhead the Moon

Sits Arbitress, and nearer to the Earth

Wheels her pale course, they on their mirth and dance

Intent, with jocund Music charm his ear. . .

Nor need we take these descriptions merely as literary fantasies: at any rate, in 1598 an Aberdeenshire healer, Andro Man, was executed for, amongst other things, confessing to encounters with ‘the Quene of Elphen’.

However, it has been traditional to characterise such ideas of elves as the product of post-Conquest ‘Celtic’ literary influence, directly on Old French and Anglo-Norman literature and, indirectly through this, on English.