[HPforGrownups] Re: Dobby

[Amanda]

No: HPFGUIDX 36758

I will not expound upon this, because it strayeth off topic, except for one
clarification.

> > That's news to me. Who are those pre-short tall elves? In what
> > mythology do they make an appearance?
>
> Norse mythology, and by derivation the little bit of English
> mythology we have. In fact, these are the original elves, since "ylf"
> is from the Norse.

Germanic. Norse is a subset thereof, but it is the Germanic mythos you seek.
I believe there are elf-like beings in Slavic mythology as well, but I don't
recall precisely. England counts as Germanic, but the roots of English myth
and legend, like the English language, span at least two major
groups--Germanic and Romance (Latinate). This, all grafted onto an island
that had been thoroughly settled by Celtic peoples, who had in turn
supplanted a misty, little-known pre-Celtic population. The English faerie
are small, but it's been speculated that this was based on myth remnants
from the Celtic population of the isles; they came into contact and probably
conflict with the pre-Celtic population, which if memory serves, were not
physically large. These ethnic memory remnants, filtered through a couple
layers of language and culture, could have been a source of the mythos type
of smaller otherbeings.

The point is, I suppose, that unless you dabble in linguistics or
comparative mythology, and you're of English or English-derived extraction,
you expects your elf-y and goblin-y types to be small, you does. So
house-elves and goblins are.

So I expounded. So sue me.

--Amanda, who will *not* recommend that this very OT thread go to Chatter
because that would be the responsible and mature thing to do, and she's got
an image as a poltergeist to protect, nyah, nyah  :::soft "ploof" as
anonymous water balloon is dropped on the head of Moderator with Rock:::