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448 WIGHTS AND ELVES.
teaze men but ; they are not therefore devils, not even the black
ones, but often good-natured beings. It appears even that to these
black elves in i.e. mountain
particular, spirits, who in various
ways came into contact with man, a distinct reverence was paid,
a species of worship, traces of which lasted down to recent
times. The clearest evidence of this is found in the Kormaks-
saga pp. 216-8. The hill of the elves, like the altar of a god,
is to be reddened with the blood of a slaughtered bull, and of
the animal s flesh a feast prepared for the elves : Hull einn er
he^an skamt i brott, er dlfar bua i (cave that elves dwell in) ;
grafting ]?ann, er Kormakr drap (bull that K. slew), skaltu fa, ok
rifrSa blo<5 graMngsins a holinn utan, en gera alfum veizlu (make
the elves a feast) af slatrinu, ok mun j?er batna/ An actual
dlfablot.
With this I connect the superstitious custom of cooking
food for angels, and. setting it for them (Superst. no. 896). So
there is a table covered and a pot of food placed for home-smiths
and kobolds (Deut. sagen, no. 37. 38. 71) ; meat and drink for
domina Abundia (supra, p. 286) ; money or bread deposited in
the caves of subterraneans, in going past (Neocorus 1, 262. 560). *
There are plants named after elves as well as after gods : alpranke,
alpfranke, alfsranke, alpkraut (lonicera periclymen., solanum dulcam.),
otherwise called geissblatt, in Denmark troldbar, in Sweden
trullbar; dweorges dwosle, pulegium (Lye), Moneys authorities
spell dwostle, 322 a
; dvergeriis, ace. to Molbech s Dial. Lex. p. 86,
the spartium scoparium. A latrina was called lit.
dlfrek, genios
fugans, Eyrb. saga, cap. 4 (see Suppl.).
Whereas man grows but slowly, not attaining his full stature
till after his fifteenth year, and then living seventy years, and a
giant can be as old as the hills ; the dwarf is already grown up
in the third year of his life, and a greybeard in the
2
seventh ;
the Elf-king is commonly described as old and white-bearded.
1 The Old Pntss. and Lith. parstuJc (thumbkin) also has food placed for him,
conf. Lasicz 54. The Lett. Ichrstuhki is said to mean a child s doll, Bergm. 145.
2
Emp. Ludwig the Bavarian (1347) writes contemptuously to Markgraf Carl of
Moravia : Kecollige, quia nondum venit hora, ut pigmei de Judea (1. India) statura
cubica evolantes fortitudine gnauica (1. gnanica, i.e. nanica) terras gygantium de-
trahere debeant in ruinas, et ut pigmei, id est homines bicubitales, qui in anno
tercio crescunt ad perfectam quantitatem et in septimo anno senescunt et moriuntur,
imperent gygantibus. Pelzel s Carl IV. 1 urk. p. 40. Conf. Bohmer s Font.
1, 227. 2, 570. Yet this description does not look to me quite German ; the more
the dwarfs are regarded as elves, there is accorded to them, and especially to elfins
(as to the Greek oreads), a higher and semi-divine age conf. the stories of ;
change
lings quoted further on. Laurin, ace. to the poems, was more than 400 years old.