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Matthias Egeler, "Elves and Fairies: A Short History of the Otherworld" (Yale UP, 2025)
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Dr. Matthias Eagler
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Dr. Matthias Eagler
Welcome to the New Books Network.
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Dr. Miranda Melcher
Hello and welcome to another episode on the New Books Network. I'm one of your hosts, Dr. Miranda Melcher, and I'm very pleased today to be speaking with Dr. Matthias Eagler about his book titled Elves and A Short History of the Otherworld published by Yale University Press in 2025. And this is to some extent a translation of the original German version published in 2024. I don't speak German, so we are going to be talking about this newest version in English, exploring, well, elves and fairies which have some really interesting similarities across places, for example, like Iceland, Ireland and England, but also have a lot of differences between those places as well as differences over time. We're going to be going very far back in time in some places and quite up to still things that are really popular now, like Tolkien for example. So we've got a lot of things to cover here. Matthias, thank you so much for joining me on the podcast.
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Dr. Matthias Eagler
Thank you for having me.
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Dr. Miranda Melcher
Miranda, could you please start us off by introducing yourself a little bit and tell us why you decided to write this book?
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Dr. Matthias Eagler
Well, professionally I am professor of Old Norse at Frankfurt University in Germany, and if you're a Scandinavianist or any sort of medievalist, this is a period I'm working on. There is just elves everywhere. So from A professional perspective. It's not a big step to get interested in that. But the actual kind of what gave me the idea of doing this was really the lockdown period during COVID where I thought, at some point, this is just not fun. Why couldn't I do a book for a change that is delightful to research and hopefully. But I cannot judge that. Also a joy for the reader. And that was one of the goals, in addition to academic accuracy, that I set myself with this volume. And, yeah, so enjoying the magic of traditional stories and the Middle Ages, but without losing the academic rigor. That was what I wanted in that specific situation that we probably really don't want to talk about anymore.
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Dr. Miranda Melcher
That's a great ambition to combine both of those things, which isn't always easily done. So that's a useful backstory to understand, because the finished product, we do get a whole bunch of cool stories as well as, of course, the rigor as well. And so it's, I think, maybe more on that academic side that I'd love to continue our conversation thinking about some of the key decisions that any historian, any author, of course, has to make, which is around sort of where one starts a book to bring a reader in. You chose to start with medieval rural Iceland. Why?
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Dr. Matthias Eagler
Because there is so much wonderful materials there that you can see so many things on. So we've got Poetic Edda, the Lace of, and the Sagas. And later on we develop or we become to have a vast archive of traditional storytelling from the countryside. And if you have such an embarrassment of riches, you are just able to see patterns emerge. And one of those, for instance, just kind of. Kind of keep it very grounded, literally, is if you look at enough sites of elf storytelling, you start seeing that not only are the stories again and again and again versions of the same sort of storytelling, but also the places connected with them tend to have the same sort of patterning. So there's basically two types of landscape formations in Iceland that make good traditional elfils. And you only can see this because you have such a richness of data.
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Dr. Miranda Melcher
Can you give us some more examples of the kinds of key motifs that come up again and again when we're focusing on Iceland and the rural parts particularly.
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Dr. Matthias Eagler
Yeah. One, for instance, is that there is a very, very close and very specific connection to the landscape. So Icelandic traditional elves are not located in an abstract otherworld, but the traditional place where they are located is this particular rock in the vicinity of the farmstead, that particular hill in the vicinity of the farmstead. And that is something that has been there for 800 years and counting, as far as we can say. There is a medieval text, Christni saga, which describes history of the Christianization of Iceland, and that contains an anecdote there. A farmer worships a guardian spirit that's living in a stone close by the farm. And the bishop naturally takes a lot of exception to this and takes a pitcher full of holy water and pours it over that stone, which splits into driving away the resident guardian spirit. And that is something as an anecdote that illustrates both the sort of continuities that you get in Iceland and the sort of differences between the different layers historically of the material. Because the idea that elves are the closest neighbor to neighbors to an old farmstead is still a standard motif in the 19th century, early 20th century material. So typically, elves are said to dwell in either a glacial erratic or a clearly defined hill with a kind of good cliff side on at least one side that's not Farther Removed than 5 minutes Walking distance from the farm. Say, just like in the medieval story, where the stone where the guardian spirit is dwelling also is the closest neighbor to the farmstead, where the bishop objects to the peace and way of the farmer. What has changed, however, is that while in the medieval saga that being is perceived as a pre Christian entity that is exorcised by the cleric in the 19th century material, or by the 19th century, all the Icelandic elves are Christian also. So they're a Christian society of hidden farmers following the same variety of Lutheran, Protestant Christianity as the human beings. They have their own churches in the landscape. And actually in many regions that are more stone set to be elf churches than there are human churches. So the Christianization seems to have been more efficient among the hidden folk than amongst the human population. If the numbers of elf churches in the stories or anything to go by. So that's what I mean. There's both continuities and differences, which is just natural since we are looking at 800 years of development.
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Dr. Miranda Melcher
Yeah, no, of course there's going to be change over time, but that in many ways makes the continuity really interesting too. So now that we've looked a bit over time, I wonder if we can do some comparison over space. Because of course, Ireland and Iceland have a lot of reasons that their histories would be. Are intertwined, that stories would also be very much linked and overlapping and influencing each other. So given that, do we in fact find that Irish and Icelandic elves are really very similar in the ways that other aspects of history and culture are, or are they more different it depends.
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Dr. Matthias Eagler
They are not identical, but there is a clear family relationship. So there is quite a few motifs that recur both in Ireland and Iceland. So elves in Iceland and in Ireland have specific moving days when they move between habitations. You can hear them churning their milk and making butter inside the rocks in both countries. Both Ireland and Iceland have stories of changelings. So the abduction of children that can only return to their human parents if they have not tasted fairy food while they had been abducted. There's even whole complex stories that recur in both, on both islands. So especially what folklorists call migratory legends. For instance, the story of the brewery of the eggshells. That's a tale where Martha starts suspecting that her baby is not really her baby, but a fairy changeling. And now what does she do? She takes a tiny, tiny pot, puts it in front of the hearth and kind of takes the longest stick she can find and stirs it. And then the change. The fairy changeling is so surprised that he says something along the lines, I am 1500 years old and I've 15 children, but I have never seen anybody brewing in such a small eggshell size pot. And you get versions of that story over the whole of northwestern Europe. You get it in bales, you get it in Ireland, and you get it in, in, in Iceland. And that kind of, on this level of details, that clearly is not coincidence, but a sharing of stories, a shared storytelling culture. So there are clear connections. At the same time, there is kind of also differences, sometimes very marked one. So if you have an encounter with a fairy in Ireland, chances are pretty good it's not going to turn out well for you, whereas in Iceland generally it does. So by and large, Icelandic elves are a lot nicer to the humans they have dealings with than their Irish counterparts. This does not apply in every story, not in every case, but as a rule of thumb. So abductions of, or stories about changelings, about abduction of children are much, much rarer in the Icelandic records than in the Irish one. And also fairy food is handled differently in Ireland. It's a thing you have to stay away from. In Iceland, it's more dangerous not to eat it because generally it's given in good intent. And the elves take offense if you don't eat it because they just want to help you because you're having a fainting fit because you haven't eaten enough. So they are much nicer, by and large.
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Dr. Miranda Melcher
Well, and that's interesting to see that there is such a comparison that you can sort of see these smaller Differences. There really is kind of that family relationship you mentioned in the Iceland tradition. You gave us some really clear examples as well, that there are similarities across time. Do we see that in Ireland too? For example, do we see 19th or even early 20th century stories in Ireland being similar to medieval ones?
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Dr. Matthias Eagler
The situation is, in looking for continuities over time in Ireland is really difficult because the social context of the material that we have is so very different between say, the 10th or 12th century and the 19th, early 20th century. Because while Ireland has one of the largest and richest vernacular literatures of the whole European Middle Ages, this very much always is a literature about the interests of the aristocratic upper class. And that is reflected also in how this literature deals with otherworld. Whereas the storytelling of the 19th century from, from the Gaelic regions has been collected from an impoverished peasantry that was fighting, often struggling to get the daily bread. So that means that the whole outlook of the storytelling tradition is different. And while the medieval material very much focuses on the splendor and the glory of the other world, 19th century stories, or early 20th century stories like those in the collection of Lady Gregory, very often foregrounds the suffering that's caused by the intervention of the fairies, which just contributes to the general suffering you have to put up with anyway. But that being said, there also are some clear instances of really striking continuity. So Halloween is coming up, and there is one medieval story extraneary from the 10th century, maybe it can't be dated to exactly. And that tells how Queen Maeve and King Alil are sitting around the cauldron together with their whole household and their warriors. And on the evening of seven, on the evening of Halloween, and the king, King Alil sets his warriors a challenge. If somebody manages to go out and tie a vithy around the foot of a criminal that had been hanged earlier that day, he would get a sword with a golden hilt. And one after another, the warriors stand up, walk outside, and then very quickly come back inside again and very quietly sit down until Nera the hero stands up and he goes outside, he takes a vizy, he tries to put it around the foot of the hanged man, and it jumps off again and again and again until the hanged man takes pity on him. And so being dead, tells him that, you know, Nera, you need to put a peg through there in order to make that whole lawn, because otherwise it's just going to jump off again and again and again. And so Nera does that. He takes a peg, he fixes the vivi around the foot of the dead hanged man on the gallows. And then the hanged man is impressed. He says, manfully done, Nera. But now I have helped you to solve this challenge. Are you going to do me a favor? Because I was very thirsty when I was executed. I would really like to have a drink. And so Nera takes the hanged man on his back and they walk out into the countryside and they reach the first house and it's surrounded by a lake of water. And the hanged man says, no, he can't enter there because the people living there have thrown all the wash water out out before going to bed. And then they continue, and then they find a house that has no lake around it. And the dead man says, now that's the right sort of place for me. I can find a good drink here. And he goes inside, he finds the wash tubs still filled with the dirty water from the evening's washing. He has a sip from them, he spits the rest of the water into the faces of the inhabitants of the house and the people all die. And then he goes back to Nera, who carries him back to his gallows and replaces him there and then goes into. And that, that way ends the adventure of the hanged dead man. Is the interesting thing about this. This is, as I said, a story of maybe the 10th, 11th, 12th century that in folkloristic records from the early 20th century, we still get a whole lot of attestations that where people said that the old folk always says you really have to throw out the wash water in the evening because otherwise attract the spirits of the dead and the fairies. So basically the whole same story was still told 800 years later.
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Dr. Miranda Melcher
That is a very cool example. Thank you for telling us about it. And of course, telling us the story too. Great. As you said, combination of the goal at the beginning of you want to tell us the stories and have the academic analysis to go with it. So if we continue then our search for some of the key aspects that we might still have across space and time, in this realm of elves and fairies, for example, the fairy queen turns up in a whole bunch of places across time. When do we find it first? How far back do we have to go? And where does this come up? Why might it not be where we expect?
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Dr. Matthias Eagler
Yeah, that is a very surprising one, isn't it? I mean, given how omnipresent fairy queens are in modern day fantasy and what a sort of archaic sort of concept having kings and queens is, one would think that this is a very old motif. But actually it doesn't seem to be at least I have not really come across it in any prominent way before the late medieval early modern period. So it pops up prominently in the story of Thomas the Rhymer from Scotland from the 15th century onward, and the story of Tamlin again from the Scottish borders from the 16th century onwards. But that really seems to be where it starts rather than as something that is kind of old established. So in earlier high medieval texts, especially Arthurian texts, of course there's a lot of powerful female fairy figures, aristocrats who decide the fate of knights who decide the fate of countries. But those do not think of Morgan le Fay in the Arthurian cycle or the faith in Marie de France's narrative lays. But those fairies really do not ever seem to be called queens. Or let's be more careful, they are not generally called queens. There may be odd exceptions here and there, but they are kind of just upper class, aristocratic, powerful females that do not have a royal title and that get this today. So pervasive royal title only in the 15th, 16th century. And then it starts to become really prominent in storytelling and in literature.
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Dr. Matthias Eagler
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Dr. Miranda Melcher
Do we have an idea of why it might be later than we'd expect?
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Dr. Matthias Eagler
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Dr. Miranda Melcher
Who knows, maybe someday we'll get to find out. It's certainly very intriguing that that's where you've located it in time. Another thing that I found intriguing in terms of kind of the time coincidence, I suppose that you highlight in the book Is Shakespeare, obviously, is another one of the places where we see lots of fairy queens going on, lots of fairies all over the place. And obviously those sorts of things are not going to be popular on the stage unless there's demand from the audience for stories like that. So he was into fairies, audiences were into fairies. This is, of course, though, at the same time that we've got some pretty violent witch trials in Scotland, which is obviously not that far away. And things like fairies turn up in the witch trials, and they're not for, like, fun audience consumption. They're like matters of literally life and death. Why might we see these two things at the same time in very similar places?
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Dr. Matthias Eagler
I think, kind of you already put your finger on it with the fun audience consumption remark, because, I mean, we kind of. We are talking like 1590s, early 1600s here. And you get people burned at the stake for being witches that had dealings with fairies in Scotland. And Shakespeare has his fairies in his Midsummer Night's Dream, which was his, probably his most successful play. But I think that the difference is that the fairies in the play are not believed in the literary figures. They're playfully used for entertainment, whereas the fairies that appear in the witch trials are sort of elements of folk belief that, at least by those who did the persecutions were treated as an element that was believed in, that did not agree with church doctrine. And pursuing popular belief that did not agree with church doctrine was something that took on considerable momentum, especially in the early modern period. So during this time, generally in Europe, there was an increasing gap between the ideas held by the common people and the ideas held by the elites that are in power with aristocracy, the upper parts of the church hierarchy. And during this time, we not only see those two drift apart, but also an increasing crackdown by the elites in power on the, from their perspective, deviant ideas of the commoners. And the reason why there was no crackdown on Shakespeare, whereas there was a crackdown on traditional healers in Scotland, was that Shakespeare did not use it and he was from a higher social stratum. So he was kind of allowed to play with things that people of lower status were not allowed to believe in.
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Dr. Miranda Melcher
Class comes into so many things definitely worth highlighting there. So this is helpful to understand the differences between Scotland and England at this point in terms of fairies. But. But we should probably clarify what we mean by fairies, because today they often have wings. Did they back then? When do we start to see fairies having wings?
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Dr. Matthias Eagler
No, they most definitely did not have wings. That is something that was stated very vehemently. And correctly already by the Brothers Grimms, in one of the very first studies of fairy lore, that a genuine tradition never gives wings to the fairies. How it came about that we all imagine fairies, we think these days, was elucidated with a lot of research by the historian Simon Young. And what, what he found is that this really is a. It's a bit like chocolate. The Swiss are to blame, because just as the Swiss invented chocolate making, they also created the foundation for why the fairies, how the fairies were to become wings. So one has to go one step backwards in the first half of the 16th century. So 1500s, one of the most famous natural philosophers was Theophrastus von Bastos von Hohenheim, from the canton of Schwitz in Switzerland, also known as Paracelsus. And he developed a very grand system of elemental spirits which he invented, including sylves, which he invented to be the spirit of the air. So when those sylves that were invented by Paracelsus in the 1600s, early in the 1500s, then made it in very, very broad career in continental European literature, made it to France, made it into some novels there, and those, and now we are approaching the same 1700s, were read by Alexander Pope, who, of course, was one of the most famous British poets in the early 18th century. And when Pope wrote this wonderfully ironic, mock heroic poem, the Rape of the lock, from 1712, he inserted a long scene in which sylphs fly around. And those sylphs in the Rape of the Loch have insect wings. And that's the first time that sylphs get wings. So now we have sylphs as elemental spirits of the air with wings. And in the course of the 18th century, those were in English literature and the arts, and especially painting, identified with fairies. So when it became fashionable to produce Shakespeare editions with illustrations and to create art exhibitions on Shakespearean themes, the idea of the wigging fairies was taken up by artists working in London in the 1780s or thereabouts. And that is now the point where we can say now, for the first time, fairies, namely to Shakespearean fairies, have wings. And this is the birth of the idea of the wing fairy from where it was to spread everywhere.
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Dr. Miranda Melcher
Very interesting to be able to trace the origins like that. Of course, around this time, we've got more broadly urbanisation and industrialization happening in lots of places. Are there any other ways that these processes impacted fairies hugely or hugely?
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Dr. Matthias Eagler
And not at all. It did not, or it did not, in the first sense, impact rural storytelling in those places where people had always told stories about fairies. But what did happen was that there was a change in audience or the emergence of a new audience. Suddenly, with the rise of Romanticism, suddenly the urban wealthy elites became interested in fairies and at adopted, because they are not poor farmers, but wealthy industrialists, adopted a different outlook on fairies, which kind of corresponded to their outlook on the world in general and their interests and preoccupations in particular. So suddenly they become associated with a bucolic countryside life that is never quite that bucolic for the actual countryside population, and thus also develop into a image that forms sort of a cultural counterpoint to the belief in progress via industrialization. So to become a symbol for a nostalgia, looking back to an imagined, more peaceful, more simple life on the country, which went so far, that it became kind of a real topos of Victorian literature that the whistle of the steam engine drove away the fairies, and that the fairies are only left in those places where the steam engine never goes.
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Dr. Miranda Melcher
That's really interesting, where that changes and how it changes. So thank you for explaining that to us. If we're talking then about ways in which fairies become more recognisable to us now, we've got a bunch of the elements, We've got fairy queens, we've got wings, we've got the kind of idyllic countryside that is sort of drawing broad brushstrokes over a reality of countryside. Where and when do we get fairies becoming sort of cutesy? You were talking earlier about tales that really make fairies sound pretty nasty. When do they become twee and adorable?
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Dr. Matthias Eagler
That is, that associates thrice of the adorable little harmless fairies really tied to the emergence of a specific, specific dedicated children's literature in the middle of the 19th century, where kind of you get kind of watered down, nice, cute stories told to children that are not meant, not supposed to be burdened with the cruelties of the world. And then you introduce fairies as part of that debt are cute. This kind of never entirely ousts the nasty fairies, but it creates a paradigm that because in China, because it never went away, because they all grew up with this kind of fairies, through kind of later versions of this 19th century Children's literature and its continuations, these have become the fairies that we all meet in our formative little years. And they seem so dominant, but they never were quite standing by themselves. And people started complaining about the silliness and the sugary cuteness quite early on.
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Dr. Miranda Melcher
Okay, because that definitely sounds a lot more familiar now. Was this uniformly adopted, though? Were there any sort of pushbacks or counter narratives that tried to resist the adorable tiny little winged thing.
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Dr. Matthias Eagler
Yes, absolutely. So already Andrew Lang, who is known probably best through those colored fairy books, the red fairy books, the blue fairy books, the lilac fairy book, was most despicable in his four words about cute little moralizing children's book fairies. Tolkien despised them. Even James Matthew Barry, who wrote Peter Pan, did. Tinkerbell, has, through her own process of being watered down into the image of the cutesy fairy, sort of become the archetype of the cute fairy. But if you read Barry's original texts, his fairies are adorably nasty, mean, vicious little creatures. So there is a broadband reaction against that in literature as early as the late 18th, late 19th century at the latest, certainly by the 20th century. And then what was probably the most important single counter movement was Tolkien's Hobbit and the Lord of the Rings, where kind of in his disgust with the cutesy fairy, he consciously went back to medieval heroic fairies and thus created heroic and anthropomorphic figures most emphatically without wings, like Legolas and his kin.
- [33:34]
Dr. Miranda Melcher
Yeah, Legolas and Tinkerbell being in the same category is definitely something of a strange grouping. But your explanation has helped us understand how we get to that point in the early 20th century. What about as we move later into the 20th century? What sorts of things did you notice were developing with how fairies were portrayed in fiction at this point point?
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Dr. Matthias Eagler
One thing that's characteristic for the 20th century is that we have access to, or 20th century authors had, we have access to so much more earlier literature than was available in the past that the writers engaging with fairies had a much broader range of materials that they could write about, because in principle, everything that had gone before could be tapped into as a source for inspiration. And a lot of it also was. But that being said, all this material always was transformed into the image of the 20th century. And so one thing that changed quite commonly was that while traditional rural fairy stories tend to be located or kind of tied to specific places in the agricultural landscape. So it's that hill, that stone. It's not some abstract otherworld, but very specific real world places in 20th century fiction, in 21st century fiction, for that matter, fairies are moved into an otherworld that is separated from kind of our world, from. From the real material world. And something that goes hand in hand with this is that the countryside setting of a lot of traditional fairy law is transformed into an occupation with not just a countryside as a place where one just happens to be, but with an abstract of nature which needs to be protected so we see the rise of the conservationist fairy and with the preoccupation of environmental protection, but again, not in the old sense of the fairies will punish you if you harm that stone or that hill or that particular piece of grassland, which the fairies need, but in the sense of nature in general needs to be protected because it is the dwelling place of otherworldly beings that are located in general, in nature in general. So it's very much obstructed from real places and loses the concreteness of traditional storytelling.
- [36:30]
Dr. Miranda Melcher
Yeah, that's an interesting sort of similarity and difference all rolled up together. Is that why that sort of idea of continuity and change, you then conclude the book by going back to Iceland. Is that sort of. You're aiming for a full circle type thing?
- [36:44]
Dr. Matthias Eagler
Yes. Or at least the horseshoe sort of type thing. Because what I found fascinating about what has been happening, at least in the outward representation of elf beliefs in Iceland, is that they got into the grip of the tourist industry. So Some, in late 20th century, it suddenly became somebody realized that you can get people to pay for being told elf stories, preferably by going to a specific location and spending money there. And this was very, very successful. So you can still buy elf maps of parts of Iceland. There are elf schools and elf courses. And the way how the elves are presented on said elf maps takes up an interesting middle ground between traditional Icelandic elf stories and international Anglophone elf stories. So you see how we started, kind of when we started our conversation, you mentioned the close connections between Ireland and Iceland. So already into the Middle Ages, in the early phases of Icelandic history, there was an influence from Ireland and Scotland that reached Iceland and transformed what was to become traditional Icelandic storytelling. And now, in the late 20s and 21st century, we see again how influences from the now English speaking world come to Iceland, again transform the fairies, interact with how fairy ideas had changed over the preceding centuries in Iceland. And so we see this story of change and continuity and intercultural exchange and contact, people talking to each other and people telling each other stories and other people loving those stories and retelling them. We see how this circle continues because everybody likes fairies, even though some people passionately hate winged, sugary fairies while liking fairies. And this kind of success is reflected in continuing transformations and continuing exchange.
- [39:21]
Dr. Miranda Melcher
And it certainly seems like it's going to be interesting to pay attention to how this continues to develop. Right. It's not a static thing. That's very much what you've been telling us. So is this an area you're continuing to research on or do you have different upcoming projects you want to give us a sneak preview of?
- [39:37]
Dr. Matthias Eagler
Yes and no. So one thing that I am working on at the moment is a biography, inadvertently commas, a history of the figure of Merlin from the circle of Arthurian legend. But there is another fairy book in the making, or elf book in the making, because together with an Icelandic colleague, Jon Jonsson, I am currently editing the text and a translation of a really fascinating Icelandic book from the 1830s, where an old island farmer who lived on a small island farm in the fjord of Brae, the fjord Olafur Svenston, decided that he now what he wants to do in his old age was to write a book about why a rational human being and good Protestant has to believe in elves. And that book is extant in his own hand, in his own manuscript, and gives us a really fascinating glimpse into what happens if somebody really believes folk believe. Because kind of looking at the historical record, we can always say kind of. It's not a question of the countryside population or the medieval population believed in fairies. There were always some people who did and probably a vast majority who didn't. And over time there may have been a fluctuation of how many people believed and how many people did not believe, but it never was just a given. Fairy stories in the first instance are stories and were used as stories and were not simply naively believed. But in the case of this writer, Olaf Russ Velnsson, it's really clear he fully subscribed to it all. And because he was able to write about this himself, get and maybe unprecedented view kind of into a pre industrial cosmos of a living fairy mythology where somebody completely filled his lift in environment with the supernatural, but without ever losing the necessary grounding to work very efficiently as a farmer and to make his life work in a very, very challenging environment. So he did not escape into a dream world, but he took the harsh realities of life on the edge of the Arctic Circle and transformed them into a cohabitation with myth.
- [42:21]
Dr. Miranda Melcher
Okay, that sounds like a really interesting project. Of course, Merlin as a subject too. So best of luck with both of those.
- [42:28]
Dr. Matthias Eagler
Thank you very much and thank you for having me. It was great talking to you.
- [42:32]
Dr. Miranda Melcher
It was very fun to talk about elves and fairies. And any listeners who want to learn more can of course read the book titled Elves and A Short History of the Otherworld, published by Yale University Press in 2025. Matthias, thank you so much for joining me.
- [42:47]
Dr. Matthias Eagler
Thank you.