Lecouteux - The hidden history of elves and dwarfs: avatars of invisible dreams

THE HIDDEN HISTORY OF
ELVES AND DWARFS

In The Hidden History of Elves and Dwarfs Claude Lecouteuxs wide-ranging knowledge and insights are focused upon a significant part of European magical tradition and mythology, the realm of what he calls lower mythology, of which the dwarfs are the best-known and most persistent characters. In Northern Tradition mythology, dwarfs are best known for making precious and magical artifacts such as Odins spear, Thors hammer, Freyas necklace, and the golden-bristled boar of the gods. Apart from making jewelry, weapons, and armor for the gods, the dwarfs have their own magical attributes. Aubron has a bow whose arrows always hit the target, an impenetrable chain-mail coat, a horn, and magic cup.

Dwarfs are remembered in ancient Scandinavian place-names, and folktales from all over Europe embed the memory of dwarfs in the fabric of storytelling. Emerging from dense forests, mysterious lakes, burial mounds, and hollow mountains, sometimes they aid humans, but often they are unreliable assistants, for they have their own agendas. They exist within a world of fluid boundaries where transformation plays a major role.

Denizens of an otherworld that interpenetrates the human world, dwarfs and elves were demonized by churchmen and conflated with Biblical evil powers. The realm of elves and dwarfs was much wider and far more diverse than that. Claude Lecouteux defines the real difference between sprites, elves, dwarfs, duses, trolls, and various forms of giants that existed in human perception before their demonization. The Hidden History of Elves and Dwarfs is essential reading for everyone who has ever wondered exactly what dwarfs are and where they come from.

NIGEL PENNICK, AUTHOR OF THE PAGAN BOOK OF DAYS

FOREWORD

BY RGIS BOYER

What is so interesting in the books by Claude Lecouteux (I am thinking, for example, of his Fantmes et Revenants au Moyen ge, also published by this house) is not only his vast erudition, his critical method, and the scrupulous respect he accords to the texts themselves before making any interpretation of themit is his gift for comparing cultures, for suddenly making an unexpected leap, but one perfectly pertinent to the train of thought, from continental Germanic culture, of which he is a great expert, to Celtic, Medieval Latin, or ancient Scandinavian cultures, among others. This not only creates, in one fell swoop, decompartmentalizationsthose unexpected but revealing enlargements that should ideally be the result of all genuine multidisciplinary approachesbut it also and most importantly makes us feel suddenly at ease. After all, without any need to exceed ourselves, like the author, with formidable erudition, it is enough to scratch a bit into the compost of age-old ideas, just below the surface of things, as he does, and all of us will find, in our personal or collective unconscious, several of these marvelous creatures that he has spent years tracking down, cataloging, classifying, analyzing, and explaining. In this book he will be speaking to us about dwarfs. And speaking extremely well, I might add. He draws forth a host of them from our childhood memories, because our young hearts cherished them by the hundreds, and they suddenly come back to us, in stories that more or less have folk tales underlying them, and which contain imagery that isalas!too often puerile in its reinforcement, offering a thousand sure depictions, or at least we think they are. Dwarfs are the ones we know best, as comic strips and cartoons will attest. Our certainties about elves are less secure. But dwarfs...

Yes, this is definitely it: Claude Lecouteuxs major merit is his gift for demonstrating to us, in an unrivaled way, that our ideas with respect to what is called lower mythology are quite different from what shallow people might imagine. The question he raises constantly is the same one that Mauric Fombeure posed concerning the duck-billed platypus:

But do you know the duck-billed platypus?

Do you know it well enough?

And no, we do not know the dwarfs and elves (assuming they are not one and the same!) well enough. What is more, they do not even remotely correspond to the idea we have constructed of them. If there were only one piece of praise we could give to the author, it would be this: he is a demystifier of the highest order. This is because he is a peerless investigator who has resolved, once and for all, to rebut all received ideas and conventional assumptions and go straight to the sources, the primary texts, and the discoveries he has made are simply exhilarating.

For example, here is something that few specialists know: not all dwarfs are small or good, at least originallywhich is to say, before the onset of the slow work of devaluation and degradation that the Church and its clerics patiently undertook over the course of the centuries. But the Church also cannot be exclusively blamed for this process. By their nature, the extremely archaic creations of our religious imagination tend to gradually erode and fall to a lower level, from where they eventually reappear in a certain kind of fauna with countless names. It is a situation that always ends up driving mythologists, folklorists, and other scholars of popular traditions to despair.

But no one should say: too bad for the poet or dreamer who, in every way and by the grace of God, will never abdicate their rights. Because, when we read studies like this one, we find that the foundations of our, shall we say, romantic reveries are quite deep, rich, and sure in another way, which is capable of revitalizing a much more fruitful train of thought! Not only are Snow Whites seven dwarfs, as we have become accustomed to see them today, merely a pitiful, sugarcoated version of a far more grave reality, but our regrets over all the connotations and overtones that we have caused them to lose are fully justified. And the dancing elves of Leconte de Lisle are so removed from their archetypes that it would honestly be better to see them petrified in cold Parnassian marble.

There are several presuppositions, or starting principles, adopted here that deserve our attention. First, it is important to make a clear-cut distinction between literature on the one hand, and beliefs (or mythology, for it is often the case that beliefs are merely the dregs of myth) on the other. Second, we need to recognize that these beliefs have always evolved and even continue to evolvedespite the snickering of the rationalists, materialists, positivists, structuralists, and so forthin a double world, but ultimately these two worlds are not alien to one other. There are footbridges that are quite real and offer inductive supports, even though memory of them can be cause for offense. The essential task of the vast majority of what we call literature is specifically to recuperate the immortal mythical or legendary themes that managed to survive in oral tradition before they found favor in the pen of the first person to write them down, who was himself followed by a countless series of imitators. To sum up: the present book deserves our attention because the teachings to be drawn from a study like this are legion, and because there are few studies that are as equally enthusiastic and fruitful as this work of archaeology applied to the mentalities of ancient cultures.