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Elves in Anglo-Saxon England
- Matters of Belief, Health, Gender and Identity
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Anglo-Saxon elves [Old English ælfe] are one of the best attested non-Christian beliefs in early medieval Europe, but current interpretations of the evidence derive directly from outdated nineteenth- and early twentieth-century scholarship. Integrating linguistic and textual approaches into an anthropologically-inspired framework, this book reassesses the full range of evidence. It traces continuities and changes in medieval non-Christian beliefs with a new degree of reliability, from pre-conversion times to the eleventh century and beyond, and uses comparative material from medieval Ireland and Scandinavia to argue for a dynamic relationship between beliefs and society. In particular, it interprets the cultural significance of elves as a cause of illness in medical texts, and provides new insights into the much-discussed Scandinavian magic of seidr. Elf-beliefs, moreover, were connected with Anglo-Saxon constructions of sex and gender; their changing nature provides a rare insight into a fascinating area of early medieval European culture.
Shortlisted for the Katharine Briggs Folklore Award 2007
ALARIC HALL is a fellow of the Helsinki Collegium for Advanced Studies.
Works cited
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1 - A Medieval Scandinavian Context
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Summary
Primarily because of Icelanders’ late conversion, linguistic conservatism and readiness to transmit literature rooted in pre-conversion culture, Scandinavia has provided the basis for research into all traditional Germanic-speaking cultures. Accordingly, reconstructions of ælfe have often been shaped by evidence for the medieval Scandinavian álfar. However, it would be unwise to impose Scandinavian evidence incautiously on other cultures. If only for historiographical reasons, then, any reassessment of Anglo-Saxon ælfe must begin with the reassessment of their Scandinavian cousins. I begin here by showing how the traditional point of departure for reconstructing pre-Christian Scandinavian beliefs, Snorri Sturluson's writings, is unreliable regarding early álfar. Later-medieval Icelandic texts also afford evidence for the meanings of álfr, but these are even trickier as evidence for pre-conversion beliefs, so I include them here only on a few specific points, focusing instead on poetry which seems likely to be old or culturally conservative, and which afforded Snorri's own main primary source material.
After discussing Snorri's work, I turn to skaldic verse, the Scandinavian praise-poetry first attested from the ninth century. The association of skaldic poetry with named poets and subjects permits the cautious dating of poems, the reliability of the dates being somewhat assured by the poems’ intricate metre and diction, which inhibited recomposition in oral transmission. Next I consider Eddaic verse, whose mythological subject matter makes it in some ways more useful than skaldic verse, but whose more flexible structures permitted greater variability in transmission, so precluding precise dating. In addition to providing this primary evidence, however, Old Norse material, combined with the prominence of anthropological approaches in recent Scandinavian scholarship, affords means to assess the usefulness of linguistic evidence as evidence for mythology and its wider significance in early-medieval Scandinavian world-views. This provides models for interpreting the Old English evidence considered in the subsequent chapters, and a framework for introducing other Scandinavian evidence at appropriate junctures below.
I should admit at the outset that my investigations are male-centred. This is not (consciously) a willing choice, and I focus on gendering in an Anglo-Saxon context below. But females are comparatively poorly represented in our Norse mythological sources, partly defined in any case through their husbands, and partly functioning as units of inter-group exchange rather than as paradigmatic representatives of groups themselves. The early-medieval evidence points only towards male álfar.
Appendix 2 - Two Non-Elves
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Summary
Several occurrences of ælf have been excluded from this book. One is a scribal error, as the correction of another Anglo-Saxon scribe confirms: the form ‘se ylfa god’ (putatively ‘the god of the ælfe’) for ‘se sylfa god’ (‘God Himself’) in psalm 59 of the Paris Psalter. Some other examples of ælf, however, stand unaltered in their manuscripts, but have not been considered here because I take them to be hypercorrect forms of words in æl-. This position is worth justifying, and offers some tangential support to my arguments above. Ælfmihtig occurs three times in a short text in Corpus Christi College Cambridge MS 320, folio 117, containing formulas and directions for pastoral use, and dating from around 1000: ‘Gelyfst ðū on god ælfmihtine’; ‘Ic þē bidde & bēode þæt þū gode ælfmihtigum gehȳrsum sȳ’; ‘God ælfmihtig gefultumige ūs’ (‘Believe in God Almighty’; ‘I ask and command that you be obedient to God Almighty’; ‘May God Almighty help us’). Ælmihtig never occurs here. The provenance of this manuscript is unknown, but its language is consistently late West Saxon; there is no other instance of initial /æl-/ in the text for comparison.
Ælfþēod- occurs twice in Brussels, Bibliotheque Royale, MS 1650, but curiously the examples are attributed to different hands (both from about the first quarter of the eleventh century): it would appear that hypercorrection was contagious. Hand A, deriving material from the lost, early Common Recension glossary, glossed peregre (‘as though foreign’) with ‘ælfþēodelice’, for ælþēodelice (‘as though foreign’). The largely indistinguishable hands CD, deriving once more from a lost body of glosses, gloss extern peregrinationis with ‘dre ælfþēodi’, presumably for fremdre ælþēodignysse (‘foreign journey abroad’). The hypercorrect forms may or may not originate with the Brussels scribes themselves; each has a correct counterpart in Oxford, Bodleian MS Digby 146, which is textually related, but the principle of lectio difficilior could be invoked.
The hypercorrection here must relate to the fact that groups of three consonants were liable to lose their middle consonant in West Saxon, which would affect ælf-compounds whose second element began with a consonant. How widespread this was or how profound its effects were in the common lexicon is open to doubt, but it had extensive effects on personal names, where æl- for ælf- is well attested in late Old English.
Foreword
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Summary
Each time I have begun studying at another university, I have realised how much the last shaped my thought. This book is the product of three. Frequently returning to my alma mater, the Department of Anglo-Saxon, Norse and Celtic at Cambridge University, I have profited greatly from friends and acquaintances old and new. Sandra Cromey of the English Faculty Library is a pearl among librarians. I had the privilege, with the support of the ERASMUS programme, to spend 2003–4 in the Department of English at the University of Helsinki, supervised by Matti Kilpiö and Leena Kahlas-Tarkka, and subsequently to complete this book as a fellow of the Helsinki Collegium for Advanced Studies. But the core research was in and of the University of Glasgow, in the form of doctoral research funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Board, supervised by Graham Caie and Katie Lowe. There I was based in the blessedly happy Department of English Language, but the Glasgow Centre for Medieval and Renaissance Studies, the Departments of Scottish and Medieval History, and above all the Department of Celtic were communities to which this study also owes much.
Much of my most important elf-research has taken place in the company of the friends I have made in these places and I am accordingly indebted to many more people than I can mention here. To name only the most direct contributors, versions of this book have enjoyed detailed comment from my supervisors, for whose support and assistance I am grateful; my examiners Andy Orchard and Stuart Airlie; and the series editor, John Hines. Numerous other friends have commented on versions or sections, often extensively: Mike Amey, Paul Bibire, Bethany Fox, Carole Hough, Alistair McLennan, Ben Snook, Harriet Thomsett, Clive Tolley; the Process Group of Helsinki's Research Unit for Variation, Contacts and Change in English; along with several of my colleagues at the Collegium, Petter Korkman, Juha Männinen, Ilkka Pyysiäinen and Petri Ylikoski. I have benefited further from the generosity of one-time strangers who found my doctoral thesis online and chose to send me comments: Dimitra Fimi, Frog, James Wade and especially Bernard Mees. Ben Snook and Bethany Fox along with Dave Cochran, Rory Naismith and Charles West have assisted with research materials, while Richard Burian, Jeremy Harte, Simon Horobin, Katie Lowe, Rod McConchie and Mark Zumbuhl have proved assiduous elf-spotters.
Index
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2 - The Earliest Anglo-Saxon Evidence
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By investigating the Norse evidence for álfr, it has been possible to reconstruct some of álfr's earliest meanings and relationships with the main semantic fields which it bordered or overlapped. We may turn now to álfr's Old English cognate. Reconstructing pre-conversion meanings of ælf is difficult, and attempts hitherto have been either too tentative or too speculative to be useful. But ælf had a prominent place in the Old English system of dithematic personal names, and was also involved in the Old English morphological reorganisation of etymological long-stemmed masculine i-stems around the seventh century. These sources provide evidence correlating almost exactly with the early Scandinavian evidence for the meanings of álfr, the correlation in turn suggesting that we may be able to adduce other conclusions from the Norse material to early Anglo-Saxon world-views. Thus, this chapter not only provides a basic picture of the early meanings of ælf against which to seek evidence for subsequent continuity and change, but considers a key aspect of the place of ælfe in Anglo-Saxon culture. Those desiring more contextualisation of the linguistic issues discussed here will find guidance in Appendix 1 below.
I contextualise my findings with reference to Beowulf. Beowulf explicitly situates ælfe in a vividly realised world of men and monsters. The poem provides remarkable insights into how supernatural beings could feature in Anglo-Saxon constructions of the world, in large part consolidating the arguments which I make on the basis of early Old English and Norse evidence. However, the early evidence for the meanings of ælf also makes it possible to argue that Beowulf was to some extent innovative: specifically, its alignment of ælfe with monsters and demons can be seen to reflect demonisation following Christianisation in Anglo-Saxon culture.
Etymology
Both cognate and internal Old English evidence demands a masculine Common Germanic nominative singular */AlBi-z/ (alongside a variant */AlBA-z/) denoting some kind of supernatural being (see Appendix 1). Grimm observed that its obvious Indo-European cognates, deriving from a base */Albh-/, are connected semantically by whiteness, and it must originally have meant ‘white one’. Close relatives are Latin albus (‘(matt) white’); Old Irish ailbhín (‘flock’); Albanian elb (‘barley’); and Germanic words for ‘swan’ such as Old English ylfetu. However, the etymology is not in itself very revealing: innumerable explanations could be hypothesised for the association of supernatural beings with whiteness.
Frontmatter
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Introduction
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One assumes that when, around the end of the tenth century or the beginning of the eleventh, somewhere in the south-west of England, the scribe began what was probably the last stint on his manuscript of medical recipes, he did not guess that it would remain in use for over six hundred years – more or less until it came into the hands of Reverend Robert Burscough, who, passing it on to his friend Humphrey Wanley, transformed it from a practical text into an object of scholarship. His parchment stiff, his script functional and the finished codex portable, the scribe was making a practical reference work for day-to-day use. Having already copied the Old English Herbarium and Medicina de quadrupedibus, he was concluding a large, miscellaneous collection of medical texts, known since Cockayne's edition as Lācnunga (‘remedies’). One wonders whether, having reproduced the conventional prose direction ‘Wið fǣrstice feferfuige ד sēo rēade netele ðe þurh ærn inwyxð ד wegbrāde wyll in būteran’ (‘For a violent, stabbing pain: feverfew and the “red nettle” [L. Lamium purpureum] that grows through the ?corn, and plantain. Boil in butter’), he registered any surprise as he proceeded to copy a long metrical charm on to folios 175–6v. It has, at any rate, intrigued and challenged scholars since the nineteenth century:
Hlūde wǣran hȳ lā hlūde ðā hȳ ofer þone hlǣw ridan
wǣran ānmōde ðā hȳ ofer land ridan
scyld ðū ðē nū þū ðysne nīð genesan mōte
ūt lȳtel spere gif hēr inne sīe
stōd under linde under lēohtum scylde
þǣr ðā mihtigan wīf hyra mægen berǣddon
ד hȳ gyllende gāras sændan
ic him ōðerne eft wille sændan
flēogende flāne forane tōgēanes
ūt lȳtel spere gif hit hēr inne sȳ •
sæt smið slōh seax
lȳtel īserna wund swīðe
ūt lȳtel spere gif hēr inne sȳ
syx smiðas sǣtan wælspera worhtan
ūt spere næs in spere
gif hēr inne sȳ īsenes dǣl
hægtessan geweorc hit sceal gemyltan
gif ðū wǣre on fell scoten oððe wǣre on flǣsc scoten
oððe wǣre on blōd scoten
oððe wǣre on lið scoten nǣfre ne sȳ ðīn līf ātǣsed
gif hit wǣre ēsa gescot oððe hit wǣre ylfa gescot
oððe hit wǣre hægtessan gescot nū ic wille ðīn helpan
þis ðē tō bōte ēsa gescotes ðis ðē tō bōte ylfa gescotes
ðis ðē tō bōte hægtessan gescotes ic ðīn wille helpan
flēo [?MS fled] þǣr on fyrgenhǣfde[…]
3 - Female Elves and Beautiful Elves
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If asked to survey medieval English elves, scholars might reasonably look first to the Wife of Bath's ‘elf-queene, with hir joly compaignye’ who ‘Daunced ful ofte in many a grene mede’, or to Sir Thopas's decision that ‘An elf queene shal my lemman be … An elf queene wol I loue, ywys’. They would find a precedent for Chaucer's beautiful female elves in the early fourteenth century, in the description in the Fasciculus morum of ‘reginas pulcherrimas et alias puellas tripudiantes cum domina Dyana, choreas ducentes dea paganorum, que in nostro vulgari dicitur elves’ (‘very beautiful queens and other girls dancing with their mistress Dyana, leading dances with the goddess of the pagans, who in our vernacular are called elves’); around 1300 in our earliest attestation of elf-ring, ‘a ring of daisies caused by elves’ dancing’; and in the late thirteenth century in the South English Legendary, which descibes angels who neither fought for nor against God and were banished to the earth:
ofte in forme of womman •
in mony deorne weie
Me sicþ of hom gret companie •
boþe hoppe & pleie
þat eleuene beoþ icluped •
often in the form of woman
on many a hidden path
men see a great company of them
both dance and play,
that are called eluene [following other MSS]
Parallels in Latin lead back into the twelfth century, along with Lazamon's characterisation of the queen Argante as ‘aluen swiðe sceone’ (‘a very beautiful alue’) and ‘fairest alre aluen’ (‘the most beautiful of all aluen’); and they run on into the early-modern period when, for example, Milton wrote of
. . . Faery Elves,
Whose midnight Revels, by a Forest side
Or Fountain some belated Peasant sees,
Or dreams he sees, while overhead the Moon
Sits Arbitress, and nearer to the Earth
Wheels her pale course, they on their mirth and dance
Intent, with jocund Music charm his ear. . .
Nor need we take these descriptions merely as literary fantasies: at any rate, in 1598 an Aberdeenshire healer, Andro Man, was executed for, amongst other things, confessing to encounters with ‘the Quene of Elphen’.
However, it has been traditional to characterise such ideas of elves as the product of post-Conquest ‘Celtic’ literary influence, directly on Old French and Anglo-Norman literature and, indirectly through this, on English.
6 - Anglo-saxon Myth and gender
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This book has focused primarily on reconstructing Anglo-Saxons’ beliefs concerning ælfe. In this process, I have sought to preserve evidence for variation and change, but also to use comparative material to show that our disparate Anglo-Saxon data may be surface manifestations of more cohesive underlying concepts. I have also been able, at various stages, to suggest how beliefs concerning ælfe may have been important in the construction of social identity, health and healing. One theme, however, relating both to questions of cohesiveness and of the relationships between belief and society, has been left to one side as I have accumulated the scattered evidence for it: ælfe's gender, and particularly their feminine characteristics. It seems that early Anglo-Saxon ælfe were prototypically male – my key arguments here being in chapter 3 – but that they were associated with traits which Anglo-Saxons considered effeminate. In chapter 1, I reassessed the evidence for Vǫlundr, a Scandinavian álfr with Anglo-Scandinavian connections, arguing that his masculinity is compromised throughout Võlundarkviða, and specifically that his white neck connotes feminine beauty. In chapter 3, I showed that Anglo-Saxon ælfe were paradigmatically associated with seductive, feminine beauty, and in chapter 5 that they were intimately linked with sīden, whose Scandinavian counterpart seiðr could not be conducted by men without compromising their masculinity and which was itself associated with seduction. Gender issues prove prominent in comparative medieval texts relating to othervorldly beings. What, then, does ælfe's effeminacy mean? Moreover, by the eleventh century, ælf seems comfortably to have denoted females as well as males, a development which also demands interpretation. This chapter draws these issues together to make a more integrated case for change in Anglo-Saxon non-Christian beliefs, and some more specific suggestions as to how these beliefs may have related to Anglo-Saxon society. I read ælfe's effeminacy as part of a systematic gender inversion in early Anglo-Saxon mythologies. This approach helps us to key the textual and linguistic evidence for ælfe into a wider history of Anglo-Saxon society and cultural change.
The prospect of using the evidence for ælfe as evidence for the history of Anglo-Saxon gendering is daunting, not least because it involves projecting closely reasoned conclusions drawn from difficult evidence into another evidentially problematic, and ideologically charged, area.
7 - Believing in Early-Medieval History
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As I emphasised in the foreword to this book, it is the product of study in three different countries: Scotland, England and Finland. Working in Scotland was to work at a mid-way point between two extremes in folklore research, which provide a context for reflecting on how this book has used and developed existing paradigms for studying medieval beliefs. Despite the seminal importance of the English Folklore Society for the establishment of folklore as a discipline in Europe – such that even Finns today study folkloristiikka – folklore has never gained more than a marginal position in English academia, whereas Finland has been at the forefront of folklore studies since the nineteenth century. The reasons for this must be numerous, but England's nineteenth-century self-image as the acme of progress, and its concern to situate itself culturally in contradistinction to its colonies, contrasts with the concurrent nation-building in what was then the Grand Duchy of Finland, within the Russian Empire, which had no previous history of nationhood. Scotland, as I perceive it, offered an academic culture historically dominated by British / Southern English agendas, but shaped also by moves towards distinctively national agendas like those of Finland or (more self-consciously) Scotland's neighbouring ex-colonies, Ireland and Norway. I have, of course, been at pains here to emphasise that the present study cannot claim to be a study of folklore in any obvious sense – our evidence for ælfe comes from educated and, by inference, probably generally aristocratic men – but historiographically the field has been perceived otherwise, and the position of folklore in English academia partly explains why ælfe have generally found only a marginal place in Anglo-Saxon historiography, and then usually only as a curiosity. One hundred and fifty years after Thomas Keightley's admission that ‘writing and reading about Fairies some may deem to be the mark of a trifling turn of mind’, one notes a certain satisfying continuity with ælfe's capacity a millennium before to destabilise the rational, masculine mind; but one also shares his concern.
Medieval Europe, not being a well-represented field in Finnish source-material, has not attracted a great deal of attention from Finnish folklorists.
Appendix 1 - The Linguistic History of Elf
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Several of my arguments in this book rely on details in the linguistic form and history of ælf. Although ælf is mostly regular in its development in Old English, it was affected by a number of sound-changes, some of whose details have been the subject of debate, and this has led to frequent misunderstandings and misreportings. Fortunately, the relevant processes are clear enough for present purposes. As both an aid to the reader unfamiliar with linguistics or the history of Old English, and to the informed reader faced with mistaken accounts, I include here a history of elf up to early Modern English.
The expected, regular sound-changes which ælf must have undergone according to standard accounts of Old English phonology are laid out as Figure 7. I use the International Phonetic Alphabet, except that as the phonetic value of the West Saxon spelling <ie> is unclear, I simply repeat the spelling where it is required.
Reconstructing lost forms
As Figure 7 shows, we must reconstruct the etymon of ælf as the long-stemmed masculine i-stem */AlBi-z/. The meanings of this statement and the underlying evidence are:
Long-stemmed: this means that the root syllable contains a long vowel and/or ends in two consonants. In this case, it ends in two consonants, as all Germanic dialects attest.
i-stem: most Germanic noun-stems consisted of a root syllable followed by a vowel, known as a stem-vowel. These stem-vowels were usually lost by the time of our attested Old English, but sometimes caused sound-changes elsewhere in the word which were retained. The root-vowels of prehistoric Old English i-stem nouns underwent a development known as i-mutation, which had different effects in different dialects. The i-mutation of */alC-/ (where C stands for any consonant) is the only way to explain the various attested Old English forms of elf through regular sound-changes. Old Norse álfr and some medieval German plurals do not show the expected i-mutation, demanding the reconstruction of early a-stem variants (*/Alβa-z/), but */Alβa-z/ is not an etymon of the English word.
Masculine: this is a largely arbitrary grammatical category. Ælf is never, in Old English, coupled with a determiner or adjective which might corroborate its gender.
Abbreviations
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4 - Ælfe, Illness and Healing (1): The ‘Elf-Shot’ Conspiracy
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Medical texts comprise the Old English genre which attests most often to ælf. At the beginning of this book, I sketched the image extracted from this material in the early twentieth century, which characterised ælfe as small, mischievous spirits who caused illness by shooting arrows (a phenomenon called ‘elf-shot’). I have now also assembled the evidence for a quite different conception of ælfe: male, beautiful, human(-like), and otherworldly. It would be possible to square these conclusions with the medical texts simply by proposing that the medical texts exhibit the kind of demonisation of ælfe attested in Beowulf and the Royal Prayerbook. However, the need for a detailed and sustained reassessment of the medical texts, to see what evidence they really afford, is clear – and the resultant picture is both more complex and more interesting than what has hitherto been perceived. An important part of this revision has been done already: subsequently to her 1996 book, Jolly showed that the illustration to psalm 37 in the Eadwine Psalter, long imagined to depict ‘elf-shot’, is really a conventional depiction of demons, straightforwardly illustrating the psalm: ‘the later iconography of elves as delightfully mischievous little figures playing tricks on people has caused scholars such as Grattan and Singer to read an Anglo-Saxon elf into this picture of demonic affliction’. The present chapter focuses, then, purely on texts.
Three Anglo-Saxon medical manuscripts attest to ælf, usually in somewhat peripheral contexts, suggesting a certain ambivalence about the appropriateness of the material. I have discussed the late-tenth- or early-eleventh-century manuscript Harley 585 (in connection with Wið fǣrstice), and return to Wið fǣrstice at the end of this chapter; ælf occurs in Harley 585 once otherwise, in an attestation of ælfsīden considered in chapter 5. Likewise, I have discussed in chapter 2 the Royal Prayerbook's earlier, demonising attestation of ælf. Falling between these manuscipts in date is BL Royal 12 D. xvii, which contains the collections known as Bald's Leechbook (in two books) and Leechbook III. The manuscript is handsome if plain, written by the scribe who entered the batch of annals for 925–55 into the Parker Chronicle. This suggests that the manuscript was produced at Winchester in the mid-tenth century, the political bias of the Chronicle entries consolidating the obvious assumption of links to King Edmund's court.
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Dedication
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5 - Ælfe, Illness and Healing (2): Ælfsīden
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Summary
ÆLfsīDen occurs in three different remedies, each in a different collection, though of these two must be textually related: one of the two remedies in Lācnunga which contain ælf (section 29, ff. 137r–138r); section 41 of Leechbook III (ff. 120v–121r); and a related remedy in Book I of Bald's Leechbook (section 64, ff. 52v–53r). Unfortunately, the textual contexts of ælfsīden provide little unequivocal evidence for its meaning, while the word sīden occurs only in ælfsīden. However, sīden is almost certainly cognate with the Old Norse strong verb síða (to give a broad and advised translation, ‘work magic’), and its derivatives seiðr (the magic worked) and síði (the magic-worker): it derives from the infinitive stem of síða's Germanic ancestor *sīþanam, with the deverbative nominal suffix -en. Síða is, as a strong verb, a priori likely to have an Indo-European origin. It has phonologically and semantically convincing Indo-European cognates in Welsh hud (‘magic’), hudo (‘work magic, work by magic’) and Lithuanian saĩsti (‘intepret a sign, prophesy’). The word síða and probably its basic meaning originate, then, in a pre-Germanic ancestor found in other Western Indo-European languages. These words probably derive from an Indo-European root concerning binding. As with ælfādl, discussed in the last chapter, the determiner ælf- in ælfsīden probably denotes the source of the sīden; if so, ælfsīden probably meant something along the lines of ‘the magic of ælfe’. Sīdsa, also attested in an ælf-remedy (in Bald's Leechbook II, section 65, f. 106r), is another cognate, with the deverbative suffix -sa, and is accordingly considered here too. I begin by analysing the texts which attest to sīdsa and ælfsīden in detail, in ascending order of complexity; I then proceed to the textually related remedy Wið ælfcynne (Leechbook III, section 61, f. 123). Having re-assessed our core Old English evidence for sīdsa and ælfsīden, I then broaden the scope to draw in a comparative context: primarily Scandinavian material concerning seiðr, but also medieval Irish and Middle English material. This allows us to develop a sense of the narratives with which ælfsīden is likely to have been associated in Anglo-Saxon culture – and their possible social meanings.