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Message: <blockquote data-quote="EzekielRaiden" data-source="post: 9714519" data-attributes="member: 6790260">Main counterpoint: remember that the Keebler cookie-makers are elves. They're tiny. "Elf", "sprite", "pixie", etc. were more or less synonyms. "Elf" could sometimes verge up toward "gnome" territory, as in "child-sized as adults" or the like. But the point was that they were usually understood to be that size.I didn't say he invented them from nothing at all. But he absolutely did reinvent what "elf" meant to us in general. He actively defied conventional wisdom of his day, completely reinventing something from its existing context that had a clear, well-established character and nature.If it's impermissible to make that many changes, then why were Tolkien's fine? Changes that transform "humanoid from child-sized to thumb-sized working sprite-like being that hides from humans and conducts both mischief and miracles depending on how they've been propitiated" into "adult-human-sized humanoid who is literally as old as the world, ancient and full of power, longing for ancient days and a society that can no longer exist in this fallen world". Clearly, Bloodtide not only accepts but highly approves of what Tolkien flagrantly changed with only the slimmest of mythological support--snippets and fragments and heavily suspect records. Why is it then unacceptable to do that now? Tolkien isn't somehow uniquely permitted to rewrite mythology in ways that suit him. I quoted his own Mythopoeia for a reason: "We make still by the law in which we're made."Big problem: There aren't any. Or near as.Like this is genuinely a serious problem with scholarship of Norse mythology. We basically don't have sources.We have exactly two sources, both of which are inherently suspect: the Poetic Edda and the Prose Edda. Both are suspect because they weren't written down until after all Norse lands had been Christianized for something like 100-200 whole years. The ancient/medieval Norse had their own writing system, the Elder Futhark, they just...never USED it to write down their myths. And, unfortunately, the Alfar are almost never mentioned in the works we have. Snorri Sturluson literally recharacterized them as angels, like literally Christian angels, which we can be preeeetty confident that any appearance of theirs in the Prose Edda is heavily tainted. And then the Poetic Edda? Yeah it mentions them in passing maybe a dozen times at most, and has exactly one story about them (Völundarkviða, the tale of one of the only named alfar, Völundr.)Almost everything we "know" about Norse alfar is speculation built on flimsy splinters of information and extensive inference. So, sure, one can say that Tolkien took inspiration from the alfar! And we can also see that...you could do literally almost anything with the Norse alfar, because they're so completely character-free that we have no real way of knowing what they were or weren't. Some even theorize that "Alfar" was just an alternative name for the Vanir in ancient times, hence why Freyr had "lordship of the Alfar", a title that (these people theorize) survived the otherwise overall renaming of "Alfar" to "Vanir".</blockquote>

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