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One of the biggest problems in building a world based on historically accurate Norse mythology is figuring out what the actual hell an elf is. Seriously, as much as these knife-eared bastards have such a dominating presence in all modern fantasy media, that's an extremely modern notion primarily derived from the works of J.R.R. Tolkien. When you actually go back to the Eddas and try to find references to elves, you'll get extremely sparse and extremely vague mentions which have long since been absolutely swamped in Victorian headcanons that add details and conceptions not present in the original mythos. There's only one entity in the entirety of Norse mythology who is exclusively called an "elf", Wayland the Smith, but there is absolutely nothing about him that makes him stand out from any other mythical being. In fact, while they're often made distinct creatures in modern media, it seems that elves and dwarves are just two flavors of the same "species" as it were. Snorri Sturluson mentions three words for elves: Ljósálfar ("light elves"), Dökkálfar ("dark elves"), and Svartálfar ("black elves"), and this has caused no shortage of wild speculation in need of being wrangled in by modern anthropology, so imma try my best to summarize this hellish mess that elves have splintered into.

Those of us who are fans of D&D might not see a problem with this trinity on the surface. We all know there's light elves and dark elves, right? No, actually, apparently this is entirely the invention of Jacob Grimm, who didn't take into account how much Snorri seems to treat "dökkálfar" and "svartálfar" as synonyms not just for each other, but for dwarves too. There doesn't seem to be any mythological equivalent to what we nerds would call a Drow. Dwarves are said to be "dark" as they live in underground caves and mines getting covered in soot which clings to their skin, hence why Snorri says they're "black as pitch". The home of the dwarves is also straight up called "Svartalfheim", meaning "home of the black elves". Compounding the idea that there's minimal distinction between dwarves and elves in general is our buddy Wayland. As I'm sure popular culture has bashed into your skull, dwarves are renowned as masters of the forge and skilled craftsmen, something which Wayland is obviously identified with. I guess you could argue that well Wayland learned his craft from dwarves so duh, but again, he is the only being that is called an elf and nothing else in the entire corpus. Many, many dwarves themselves also have names which include "alf" as a suffix too, including, hilariously enough, a certain Gandalf, whose name just means "magic elf".

So okay, dark elves and dwarves are the same thing, that's annoying but it's simple enough to follow. What the hell is a light elf then? Whether you think of an elf as a little underpants thief who makes toys or a tall lanky archer at one with nature, what relation do these conceptions have to the original source material? Again, not much. "Light elves", as they are so called, only seem to appear in Snorri's Prose Edda, and he doesn't bother to elaborate, because Snorri is a dick. He says that they are "bright as the sun" and dwell in the equally mysterious realm called Álfheimr, which… honestly the way that most manuscripts read, it kinda just sounds like he sees Álfheimr as the southern portion of Asgard and not actually distinct from the realm of the gods. This doesn't exactly help distinguish these "light elves" from the other divinities that they share the heavens with. The goddess Iðunn is sometimes identified as an elf depending on the manuscript, but she is also said to be a daughter of Ivaldi… who fathered the dwarves who made the treasures of the gods. Again, it really seems like elves and dwarves were just two flavors of the same creature.

Some have attempted to tie the enigmatic elves to the equally mysterious Vanir family of gods. On the one hand, it's not the most outlandish theory. In Grímnismál, the Vanir god Freyr was said to have been given Álfheimr as a teething gift, but this is kind of just a throwaway line that's never brought up again. To me, these theories always read as another case of lumping things we don't understand or just don't have a lot of information about into one box which they may or may not actually belong in. Personally, I'm actually quite fond of the way that Jacob Grimm divides the gods and elves, even if I don't think that's how they would've been seen in historical times. He distinguishes the Vanir as gods who embody raw magical prowess, while elves are more about the "science" of magic, being masters of tinkering, utility, and experimentation. I like this a lot since it's a subtle but tidy distinction between our classic elves and the more hit-it-til-it-works dwarves. At the very least, it's a nice distinction to use in a D&D setting.

Overall, it seems "elf", in the broadest strokes, refers to a broad spectrum of supernatural, quasi-divine creatures which clearly have some capacity for magic, creation, manipulation, and trickery, somewhere between gods and men. They were certainly powerful enough that sacrifices to them were considered appropriate. The skaldic poem Austrfararvísur tells of a Swedish woman who came out of her house to shoo away a traveling band of Christians because she was in the middle of an "álfablót", or ritual to the elves, though we never get the details of such a ceremony. If I had to make an approximation, I'd say elves sort of hold the same slot as angels do in Christian mythology: these extremely powerful things which might as well be gods but for whatever cultural reason are identified as lower beings. Some have even suggested that Snorri shat the idea of light elves out of his own ass to emulate a pagan version of angels, which I personally think is a bit of an overcorrection based on what we've seen in these other poems. Then again, I'm not the kind of Heathen that gets too hung up on the dreaded "Christian influence", so it may be a case of me not staring hard enough at such a proposition. Unfortunately, there's just not enough information that survives to say one way or another, so the elves remain as elusive as they ever had.

Design notes, this was certainly a challenge. On the one hand, modern media has a very clear image of what your average fantasy elf looks like, but these are all obviously inspired by D&D and by extension Tolkien. I decided I wanted to avoid this. I didn't want my elves to be these psuedo-Celtic fairy things that the Victorians turned them into, nor did I want them to be the stuck-up tree huggers of Middle Earth. Thinking back to Snorri's comments that elves are bright as the sun, that called to mind the famous Trundholm Sun Chariot from the Nordic Bronze Age, so I started experimenting with designs based on Bronze Age clothing. The most prominent example of this is the design for the elite, which was heavily inspired by Mycenaean plate armor. Their weapons meanwhile were inspired by the Rørby swords, an archaeological find from Denmark which I really like because it has the silhouette of your stereotypical elf shoe. As someone who didn't get into fantasy until later in life, the baseline elf in my head will always be Santa's little sweatshop workers with bells all over their uniforms, so I decided to lean more into that vibe to make mine stand out a little. Overall, it's a little messy, but I'm happy enough with the end result. I think they cut a unique figure that stands out from your typical high fantasy elf, and it gives me an opportunity to sink my teeth into the linguistic antics of Jacob Grimm, so I think the experiment was worth it.

Description
One of the biggest problems in building a world based on historically accurate Norse mythology is figuring out what the actual hell an elf is. Seriously, as much as these knife-eared bastards have such a dominating presence in all modern fantasy media, that's an extremely modern notion primarily derived from the works of J.R.R. Tolkien. When you actually go back to the Eddas and try to find references to elves, you'll get extremely sparse and extremely vague mentions which have long since been absolutely swamped in Victorian headcanons that add details and conceptions not present in the original mythos. There's only one entity in the entirety of Norse mythology who is exclusively called an "elf", Wayland the Smith, but there is absolutely nothing about him that makes him stand out from any other mythical being. In fact, while they're often made distinct creatures in modern media, it seems that elves and dwarves are just two flavors of the same "species" as it were. Snorri Sturluson mentions three words for elves: Ljósálfar ("light elves"), Dökkálfar ("dark elves"), and Svartálfar ("black elves"), and this has caused no shortage of wild speculation in need of being wrangled in by modern anthropology, so imma try my best to summarize this hellish mess that elves have splintered into.

Those of us who are fans of D&D might not see a problem with this trinity on the surface. We all know there's light elves and dark elves, right? No, actually, apparently this is entirely the invention of Jacob Grimm, who didn't take into account how much Snorri seems to treat "dökkálfar" and "svartálfar" as synonyms not just for each other, but for dwarves too. There doesn't seem to be any mythological equivalent to what we nerds would call a Drow. Dwarves are said to be "dark" as they live in underground caves and mines getting covered in soot which clings to their skin, hence why Snorri says they're "black as pitch". The home of the dwarves is also straight up called "Svartalfheim", meaning "home of the black elves". Compounding the idea that there's minimal distinction between dwarves and elves in general is our buddy Wayland. As I'm sure popular culture has bashed into your skull, dwarves are renowned as masters of the forge and skilled craftsmen, something which Wayland is obviously identified with. I guess you could argue that well Wayland learned his craft from dwarves so duh, but again, he is the only being that is called an elf and nothing else in the entire corpus. Many, many dwarves themselves also have names which include "alf" as a suffix too, including, hilariously enough, a certain Gandalf, whose name just means "magic elf".

So okay, dark elves and dwarves are the same thing, that's annoying but it's simple enough to follow. What the hell is a light elf then? Whether you think of an elf as a little underpants thief who makes toys or a tall lanky archer at one with nature, what relation do these conceptions have to the original source material? Again, not much. "Light elves", as they are so called, only seem to appear in Snorri's Prose Edda, and he doesn't bother to elaborate, because Snorri is a dick. He says that they are "bright as the sun" and dwell in the equally mysterious realm called Álfheimr, which… honestly the way that most manuscripts read, it kinda just sounds like he sees Álfheimr as the southern portion of Asgard and not actually distinct from the realm of the gods. This doesn't exactly help distinguish these "light elves" from the other divinities that they share the heavens with. The goddess Iðunn is sometimes identified as an elf depending on the manuscript, but she is also said to be a daughter of Ivaldi… who fathered the dwarves who made the treasures of the gods. Again, it really seems like elves and dwarves were just two flavors of the same creature.

Some have attempted to tie the enigmatic elves to the equally mysterious Vanir family of gods. On the one hand, it's not the most outlandish theory. In Grímnismál, the Vanir god Freyr was said to have been given Álfheimr as a teething gift, but this is kind of just a throwaway line that's never brought up again. To me, these theories always read as another case of lumping things we don't understand or just don't have a lot of information about into one box which they may or may not actually belong in. Personally, I'm actually quite fond of the way that Jacob Grimm divides the gods and elves, even if I don't think that's how they would've been seen in historical times. He distinguishes the Vanir as gods who embody raw magical prowess, while elves are more about the "science" of magic, being masters of tinkering, utility, and experimentation. I like this a lot since it's a subtle but tidy distinction between our classic elves and the more hit-it-til-it-works dwarves. At the very least, it's a nice distinction to use in a D&D setting.

Overall, it seems "elf", in the broadest strokes, refers to a broad spectrum of supernatural, quasi-divine creatures which clearly have some capacity for magic, creation, manipulation, and trickery, somewhere between gods and men. They were certainly powerful enough that sacrifices to them were considered appropriate. The skaldic poem Austrfararvísur tells of a Swedish woman who came out of her house to shoo away a traveling band of Christians because she was in the middle of an "álfablót", or ritual to the elves, though we never get the details of such a ceremony. If I had to make an approximation, I'd say elves sort of hold the same slot as angels do in Christian mythology: these extremely powerful things which might as well be gods but for whatever cultural reason are identified as lower beings. Some have even suggested that Snorri shat the idea of light elves out of his own ass to emulate a pagan version of angels, which I personally think is a bit of an overcorrection based on what we've seen in these other poems. Then again, I'm not the kind of Heathen that gets too hung up on the dreaded "Christian influence", so it may be a case of me not staring hard enough at such a proposition. Unfortunately, there's just not enough information that survives to say one way or another, so the elves remain as elusive as they ever had.

Design notes, this was certainly a challenge. On the one hand, modern media has a very clear image of what your average fantasy elf looks like, but these are all obviously inspired by D&D and by extension Tolkien. I decided I wanted to avoid this. I didn't want my elves to be these psuedo-Celtic fairy things that the Victorians turned them into, nor did I want them to be the stuck-up tree huggers of Middle Earth. Thinking back to Snorri's comments that elves are bright as the sun, that called to mind the famous Trundholm Sun Chariot from the Nordic Bronze Age, so I started experimenting with designs based on Bronze Age clothing. The most prominent example of this is the design for the elite, which was heavily inspired by Mycenaean plate armor. Their weapons meanwhile were inspired by the Rørby swords, an archaeological find from Denmark which I really like because it has the silhouette of your stereotypical elf shoe. As someone who didn't get into fantasy until later in life, the baseline elf in my head will always be Santa's little sweatshop workers with bells all over their uniforms, so I decided to lean more into that vibe to make mine stand out a little. Overall, it's a little messy, but I'm happy enough with the end result. I think they cut a unique figure that stands out from your typical high fantasy elf, and it gives me an opportunity to sink my teeth into the linguistic antics of Jacob Grimm, so I think the experiment was worth it.