As I emphasised in the foreword to this book, it is the product of study in three different countries: Scotland, England and Finland. Working in Scotland was to work at a mid-way point between two extremes in folklore research, which provide a context for reflecting on how this book has used and developed existing paradigms for studying medieval beliefs. Despite the seminal importance of the English Folklore Society for the establishment of folklore as a discipline in Europe – such that even Finns today study folkloristiikka – folklore has never gained more than a marginal position in English academia, whereas Finland has been at the forefront of folklore studies since the nineteenth century. The reasons for this must be numerous, but England's nineteenth-century self-image as the acme of progress, and its concern to situate itself culturally in contradistinction to its colonies, contrasts with the concurrent nation-building in what was then the Grand Duchy of Finland, within the Russian Empire, which had no previous history of nationhood. Scotland, as I perceive it, offered an academic culture historically dominated by British / Southern English agendas, but shaped also by moves towards distinctively national agendas like those of Finland or (more self-consciously) Scotland's neighbouring ex-colonies, Ireland and Norway. I have, of course, been at pains here to emphasise that the present study cannot claim to be a study of folklore in any obvious sense – our evidence for ælfe comes from educated and, by inference, probably generally aristocratic men – but historiographically the field has been perceived otherwise, and the position of folklore in English academia partly explains why ælfe have generally found only a marginal place in Anglo-Saxon historiography, and then usually only as a curiosity. One hundred and fifty years after Thomas Keightley's admission that ‘writing and reading about Fairies some may deem to be the mark of a trifling turn of mind’, one notes a certain satisfying continuity with ælfe's capacity a millennium before to destabilise the rational, masculine mind; but one also shares his concern.

Medieval Europe, not being a well-represented field in Finnish source-material, has not attracted a great deal of attention from Finnish folklorists.