One of nature’s most elusive creatures, elves are now a rare sight in UK woodlands. John Wright explains the best way to spot these mysterious little beings
Illustration: Lynn Hatzius
It is always with a profound frisson of delight that I recall my first encounter with an elf. A few days after Christmas 1955, my maternal grandmother took me on an elf-watch. Dawn glimmered only faintly, and it was cold, with frost thick on the ground. We entered the woods opposite our house and, after what seemed like a great deal of walking, found small footprints in the frosty sheen on the path. We stopped to sit quietly on a log and waited.
After 20 shivering minutes, we heard a faint rustling and glimpsed a small figure, barely 38 centimetres high, darting behind a hollow oak. I have been fortunate enough to have seen elves on three further occasions, at least beating my record for ball-lightning, which I have encountered only twice. (Some things it has never been my privilege to see, despite years of searching, notably the cannon-ball fungus, Sphaerobolus stellatus, famous for propelling small balls of spores at eyeball-threatening velocities, and which by all accounts is common.)
ELVES IN HISTORY
Just because you have never seen something does not mean that it does not exist or even that it’s rare. Sometimes things are just elusive. Despite the secrecy of elves, humans have been aware of the creatures for hundreds of years, though most European records go back only to the 10th century. That they were known much earlier is testified in names. Old English Ælfwine (elf-friend), Ælfrēd (elf-advised) and ‘Elgar’ (originally Ælfgar, ‘elf-spear’) make the point well. Earlier still are the names of places. Elvendon in Oxfordshire (the hill of the elves), the Alden Valley (valley of the elves) and Eldon Hill all testify to the existence of elves and, indeed, their preferred habitat types.
APPEARANCE AND ORIGIN
Perhaps because elves are so elusive and rarely observed for long, early descriptions of elves vary considerably. Elves were known as the ‘hidden people’, the ‘huldra’ of Nordic tradition.
Nevertheless, a characterisation of them has developed over time. They are small (zwerg, the German name for dwarf, began life as a synonym for alf, the Norse word for elf), stealthy, magical, beautiful and ambivalent in their relationships with humans (the wo
