Elfish, elfin, elvish…

Names, naming and words by Lois

I was busy writing when I had to stop to think whether I meant elfin or elfish… was there a difference? If there was, what was it? What I meant was that a character had a strange sort of smile, like an elf might have. I am not very up on fairies and elves and pixies, and other such creatures; what I do know mostly comes from when I was in the Brownies and we were divided up into ‘sixes’ each with a different name – I was fairy and we had to sing a little song ‘We’re the fairies bright and gay, helping others every day’… I somehow think that lyric might not still be sung today! The elves in my Brownies sang ‘here we come the laughing elves, helping others not ourselves’. This clearly shows the plural of elf to be elves, but does that mean the adjective should be elvish?

The word ‘elf’ comes from distant times and is Germanic, meaning originally a supernatural being; it appears in Old English meaning a sprite or a fairy, and there are quite a few Anglo-Saxon names which include it,   Alfred, Alvin, Alfric, for example. There might have been another meaning ‘white’, someone with pale skin or pale hair, maybe.  From the sixteenth century it began to have a human connotation, meaning a troublesome person.

A big change in the understanding of the word happened when Tolkien published his work; suddenly not only did elves come to prominence in our consciousness, but they had a language too, created by Tolkien. This language is Elvish… maybe that is where I am getting in a confusion between elfish and elvish; I think I will describe my character as ‘elfin’… I’m sure bno=-one will comment on it!

 

 

 

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