Before World War I, they were like this:
They were called Elfs, Fairies, Goblins, Gnomes interchangeably.
Then J. R. R. Tolkien managed to survive WWI, probably because he got Trench Fever.
Convalescing and dealing with the death of friends, he wrote stories about Elves that looked like this:
By the way. This is a very good book, but it is rather long and sometimes hard to follow. It doesn’t cover Tolkien’s whole life, though it does arguably compensate for the amount of attention devoted to the “Inklings” stage in Tolkien’s career.
By the way (again), I’m writing a short biography of Tolkien myself. Will let you know when there is more to know.
Not to pick on your historical analysis, but, well, to pick on your historical analysis:
Tinkerbell was from the 1950’s, was she not? And she was a fairy, not an elf. I really don’t think the words “fairy, elf, gnome,” etc. were perfectly interchangeable — there were some conceptions of each that didn’t lend themselves to be called by the other names, though there was some overlap in what they were called. Nobody would ever have called Tinkerbell a gnome, for example, or Rumplestiltskin a fairy. Fairies are still cute, even when they make mischief, except for the naughty one in Sleeping Beauty.
Meanwhile, check out what medieval Scandinavians thought elves were. Hint: not cute things that made shoes for starving tailors. Not physically imposing warriors, either, but definitely not cutesie-pies sitting on toadstools. More like “angels of light” luring innocent men and maidens to their everlasting doom. They were definitely more Tokien-ish in the sense that they were more human-like and less “fanciful,” but of a different spiritual nature. Magical, in the old scary sense.
I don’t actually think what you have here is a historically-influenced shift so much as Tolkien picking one strain (or more likely combining elements of certain strains) of elf-concept over others. That was definitely influenced by his personal history, but it wasn’t really a definite break with a single generally held prior concept.
Anyway, I think you had powerful/creepy elves before and after WWI, and you have cutesie elves and fairies to this day. It wasn’t The Great War that changed things, it was Tolkien who changed. And men have been changed like that by every big and little war that’s ever been fought. Besides, do we know what Tolkien’s conception of the fantastic was before his war experiences? Do we know that he didn’t have a concept of elves as powerful and dangerous before then? If he’d studied the ancient Britons, he surely did.
“Before WWI” meant England in the early 1900s, and TinkerBell, thought from the 1950s, was pretty close, though perhaps not the bathing suit outfit. I wasn’t making a comment on previous cultures.
The play, Peter Pan, was in fact a big hit in Edwardian England. And fairies were used in recruitment propaganda.
Tolkien’s poetry (pre-WWI), I believe, used terms interchangeably in some cases. His poem “Goblin Feet” reads like a poem about fairies and he uses the line “Down the crooked fairy lane.” Maybe goblins were using the lane that fairies made. But it sounds like he wasn’t making much of a distinction.
BTW, yes, Tolkien changed. But he changed the ethos with him. I think there were fairies in modern fairy tales before him, that resembled grown-up humans. But they were more otherworldly and ghostly (I can’t bring myself to use the term “spiritual” in this context). I think nyads and dryads would count as elves in other fantasy literature. Tolkien made them into an immortal biological race. I think he did this to provide a model for human heroism.
I think he only changed the ethos for those for whom such a change would resonate, though you do have a point that within a certain sphere, he did change things.
But there are still plenty of depictions of ghostly, sugary sweet, feminine, delicate, humorous, morally or intellectually insignificant and otherwise un-Tolkien-like fantastic beings around. I think crediting Tolkien with changing the conception of elves as such is too great of a claim, but you’re right that he definitely did create a powerful new strain within the conception.
I don’t know, Mark. The Silmarillion paints a pretty fallen view of Elves. Sure there are some heroes, but as a race they don’t provide a great model for humans. In fact, the human heroes are the models. The Elves seem to me to be a people that were created with everything, and didn’t do enough with it. And men were limited and do more with less. And ultimately, this idea of man doing more with less, and with the risk and inevitability of death, is elevated to a high place. The Age of Elves wanes and they make way for the Age of Men. In some sense I guess they are a model of heroism for men, but in another sense, heroism cannot be the same if the stuff and situation is different. Death is different for each, so is the future, and their glory.
I’ve always seen the Elves as Tolken’s answer to the question of, “How would it work if there were gods and monsters in a Christian world. Tolkien has his Olympians
(Manwe, Melkor, and the like), and the Elves are like the demi-gods. And its all under the one creator God, Eru. But men are treated like the climax of creation. The Elves aren’t a superior race, but different. It is sort of like the knowledge and culture of the world was initiated, cultivated, and preserved by the Elves. But it was all a first act to be passed on to men to see what they did with it. Even the first men, as glorious as they were, are judged. Paradoxically, the glorious bloodlines that make the heros of Middle Earth are from a mixed bag of heroes and selfish failures. And in the end, the new age begins with all those lines run out. And the new lines are of almost ordinary folk that we relate to and see our own potential in.
As far as the shift goes, Tolkien definitely made a bold stroke in asserting such a detailed and distinct recasting of Elves. I haven’t looked much into the motives of this, but off hand I think it was so because it had to be so. There is not really a way to fit the fanciful creatures into a “real” world. I guess he could have named them something else, but Elves are an almost universal race in Northern mythology, I suspect he wanted to explain and redeem that element and connect his mythology into the larger mythological tapestry.
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