ingenuous and vulgar. There are good reasons to assume that these thirteenth- and
fourteenth-century texts mirror the genres and expressions of an elite well in touch with
the learned and courtly modes of the Continent, as opposed to the provincial religion
more followed as rural everyday religion. This dichotomy lingers in most scholarly
overviews of the Nordic religion: ‘In folklore there is a belief in beings such as dwarfs,
elves, trolls and giants which is on the whole independent from the higher forms of
religion and actual mythological concepts’ as Rudolf Simek states ( 1993 : 67 ).
Some of the mythological characters appearing in Old Norse texts have resided
in folk-narratives of various genres: dwarfs, giants and elves appear more frequently in
texts written after the medieval period, but in these they almost exclusively take up
jocular and/or obtuse roles. In the nineteenth century these beings were transposed into
the angelic fairyland of children’s literature, where they remain petrified for all time in
roles they were never meant to occupy in the ancient myths.
Dwarfs for example appear only in mythological narratives and in metaphors based
upon myths, and seem not to have been recipients of any cult. Whereas spirits like the
dísir, a female collective associated with fertility and warfare, emerge as acting char-
acters, elements in metaphors and symbolism; there are also hints indicating they were
receivers of cult.
DWARFSThe dwarfs (sg. dvergr) in Old Norse mythology do not represent a clear-cut category
of supernatural beings, and they are not considered to be any particularly active
collective in the narratives. For the most part, dwarfs make their appearance in listings
of names. Some of these names have meanings that are comprehensible; while others
have meanings that are not, their etymological origins having been obscured by the
passage of time.
Regardless of what their original roles might have been in Old Norse mythology,
dwarfs lived on as creatures of wisdom in the later Christian folklore of northern Europe,
and from there entered the realm of artistic fairy tales and children’s literature.
The dwarfs have diffuse origins. According to Snorri’s Skáldskaparmál ( 39 ) some
dwarfs are understood to be a sub-group of the ‘black elves’ (svartálfar) with whom they
are thought to share dwellings in the underworld.
In the Poetic Edda the lay Vo ̨luspá (‘The Prophecy of the Seeress’) relates in stanza 8
that the lord of the dwarfs is formed of the blood and bones of the primordial giant and
in the following stanza dwarfs are described as ‘manlike’. But in this particular lay of the
creation and final destruction of the universe, the dwarfs play no further role. Stanzas
143 and 160 of the Hávamál (‘The Sayings of the High One’) speak of dwarfs as
individual agents with unique insight and wisdom. In stanza 160 , which is part of the
catalogue wherein Óðinn (‘the High One’) imparts his extraordinary potentials in terms
of acumen and might, we can read:
I know a fifteenth, which the dwarf Tiodrerir
chanted before Delling’s doors:
powerfully he sang for the Æsir and before the elves,
wisdom to Sage
(trans. Carolyne Larrington)–– Catharina Raudvere––