Elf are fictional creatures that resemble humans that came from Anglo-Saxon England is has been estimated around the 10th century. Likely, they existed as an oral tradition before it made it’s way into writing. Elves, ever since their arrival on the scene have been used in movies, fiction, comics, toys, etc. Almost everyone familiar with elves knows them to be fantasy creations. But when they first arrived on the scene many adults believed they were much more than stories and used elf charms as religious solutions to problems they could not solve on their own.
Karen Louise Jolly is the author of Popular Religion in Late Saxon England: Elf Charms in Context lists a AEcerbot ritual, or a field remedy that was used for land that was not producing a crop. The spell starts out with “Here is the remedy, how you may better your land, if it will not grow well, or if some harmful thing has been done to it by a sorcerer” (Jolly).
What follows is a rather ridiculous set of rituals that seem from a modern perspective dreamt up by someone using drugs. It involves an elaborate ceremony of waking up before town and taking soil samples from various parts of the field, taking milk from animals on the land, leaf from plants, and bringing it all to church. The ceremony goes on, and it is clearly an all day ceremony, not something you want to be wasting your time on if you are, starving from not being able to grow food.
People turned to elf charms and spells and magic because they did not have the tools of science at their disposal to explain things other ways. Simply doing nothing seemed unbearable. They were afraid for their lives if they did not grow food. So waiting for rain, or hoping was not enough. These rituals helped at least distract them from and allay these fears.
Bibliography
Karen Louise Jolly, Popular Religion in Late Saxon England: Elf Charms in Context (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1996), pp. 6-8
