Light Elves and Dark Elves

“one of them is named Elf-home (Alfheim), wherein dwell the beings called the Elves of Light; but the Elves of Darkness live under the earth, and differ from the others still more in their actions than in their appearance. The Elves of Light are fairer than the sun, but the Elves of Darkness blacker than pitch.”

2. “Of their arms converse, and of their martial fame, the sons of the triumphant gods. Of the Æsir and the Alfar that are here within not one has a friendly word for thee.”

Only Snorri divides elves into two kinds. In Gylfaginning the elves of light live in Álfheimr among the dwellings of heaven and are fairer than the sun. The elves of darkness live under the earth, blacker than pitch and unlike the others in what they do as well as how they look. The poems do not use this division.

What the poems do is name the Æsir and the elves together. Lokasenna speaks of “the Æsir and the Alfar” present in Ægir’s hall, and in Völuspá the question “How is it with the Æsir? How with the Alfar?” is asked as the end comes. Alvíssmál lists different words for the same thing among Æsir, Vanir, giants, elves and dwarfs. None of these says the groups share a land.

The light and dark elves are Snorri’s names, in Old Norse ljósálfar and dökkálfar. A third term, svartálfar, “black elves”, appears in the sources and its relation to the dark elves, and to dwarfs, is uncertain; the entry for Svartálfaheimr treats the world of that name.

Because the division comes from one thirteenth-century writer, it should not be projected onto the older poems. The elves of the poems stand beside the gods as a group and are sometimes called by poetic words of their own, as in Alvíssmál. Hávamál also lists Æsir and Alfar together as beings whose distinctions the singer knows.