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.