elves
if you grew up in the United States of America, then you probably think elves are those cartoonish little fools who serve Santa Claus on Christmas cards. no wonder real elves avoid us! elves, fairies, and humans are more or less of a height. elves and fairies, on average, are a little taller, a little more slender than humans. but not so much! heavens! we've fought wars against each other and alongside each other, so it's not as if they were wispy! to be clear, they fought with and against the Norsemen, so they definitely have some mass to go along with their height. but elves. they can be strong allies, they can be implacable foes. for a century or more, we thought them incapable of emotion. we ignore a lot of evidence. ah! but of course! it would have come from women or elf women. we wouldn't have known about that evidence. no one thought to ask. you see, elves, fairies, and humans can, as we prudishly used to say, intermarry. but it is more than that. there are two proverbs, but I remember neither. the gist of them is that once a man has experienced sex with an elf or with a fairy, he is ruined for human women. it may also be true of women and male elves or fairies. but that's just the sex of it. women who have been married to an elf, so I am told, almost cannot be seduced by a human man, nothing he has to say or offer compares to what she experienced, what she now needs. one can interpret that, I think, that elves express emotion quite satisfactorily. on the other side, human males married to an elf woman are intensely loyal. allegedly not even a different elf can make them stray. I interpret that as not only is the sex great, but whatever else is expressed is magnificent. a biologist claims it is just pheromones, but in his view so is what humans call love between themselves. and we do know that when Henry V died, he of Agincourt, a detachment of elves marched in the funeral, and were observed to weep when he was interred. so much for emotionless. you can tell that I appreciate elves in history and in lore and legend, but what about real elves now? I understand that elves and fairies began to avoid us humans when we went mad with our religions, around the time of Henry V for that matter. Oops, no! That wasn't when, was it? It was about three hundred years earlier, about the time of Richard I and John, wasn't it? I further understand that the stories of the Grimms and other collectors brought a surge in visits from fairies and elves, but they quickly learned that we were still insane about magic and re-exiled themselves. some say that now that we are appeased by science, a few fairies and elves have returned and live safely among us. the same some say that most infiltrators live as mates to safely human spouses. they also say that elves and fairies still hope someday we can fight and love and visit together like we once did before we went religion-mad. we shall see.
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