So You've Been Elfshot - podcast episode cover

So You've Been Elfshot

Sep 14, 202426 minEp. 2688
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Episode description

(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. 

 

For further reading suggestions and more, please visit: https://www.footnotinghistory.com

Transcript

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. 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: 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 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 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

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,

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

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, 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 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.

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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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

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 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 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, 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

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 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. 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, 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 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 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 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 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 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

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 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 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, 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,

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 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 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 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 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 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

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. 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 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

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 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 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. 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, 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 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 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 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, 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.

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. 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: 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: “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.

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.” 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

to dismiss the leechbooks entirely. But  consider this remedy for an eye ailment, also from Bald’s Leechbook: “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,

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, 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 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 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 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, 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 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, like us on Facebook and subscribe to us on YouTube  and social media. If you’d like to help keep Footnoting History open access, please consider  supporting us through our Patreon, Ko-Fi, or

merchandise links. When you join our Patreon, you  get access to our newsletter and miniepisodes! We appreciate our supporters and Patrons so much. And  remember, the best stories are in the footnotes.

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