This book has focused primarily on reconstructing Anglo-Saxons’ beliefs concerning ælfe. In this process, I have sought to preserve evidence for variation and change, but also to use comparative material to show that our disparate Anglo-Saxon data may be surface manifestations of more cohesive underlying concepts. I have also been able, at various stages, to suggest how beliefs concerning ælfe may have been important in the construction of social identity, health and healing. One theme, however, relating both to questions of cohesiveness and of the relationships between belief and society, has been left to one side as I have accumulated the scattered evidence for it: ælfe's gender, and particularly their feminine characteristics. It seems that early Anglo-Saxon ælfe were prototypically male – my key arguments here being in chapter 3 – but that they were associated with traits which Anglo-Saxons considered effeminate. In chapter 1, I reassessed the evidence for Vǫlundr, a Scandinavian álfr with Anglo-Scandinavian connections, arguing that his masculinity is compromised throughout Võlundarkviða, and specifically that his white neck connotes feminine beauty. In chapter 3, I showed that Anglo-Saxon ælfe were paradigmatically associated with seductive, feminine beauty, and in chapter 5 that they were intimately linked with sīden, whose Scandinavian counterpart seiðr could not be conducted by men without compromising their masculinity and which was itself associated with seduction. Gender issues prove prominent in comparative medieval texts relating to othervorldly beings. What, then, does ælfe's effeminacy mean? Moreover, by the eleventh century, ælf seems comfortably to have denoted females as well as males, a development which also demands interpretation. This chapter draws these issues together to make a more integrated case for change in Anglo-Saxon non-Christian beliefs, and some more specific suggestions as to how these beliefs may have related to Anglo-Saxon society. I read ælfe's effeminacy as part of a systematic gender inversion in early Anglo-Saxon mythologies. This approach helps us to key the textual and linguistic evidence for ælfe into a wider history of Anglo-Saxon society and cultural change.

The prospect of using the evidence for ælfe as evidence for the history of Anglo-Saxon gendering is daunting, not least because it involves projecting closely reasoned conclusions drawn from difficult evidence into another evidentially problematic, and ideologically charged, area.