Dökkálfar

Somewhere beneath the roots of the world there is a country with no sky. The light that pours over Álfheimr, where the bright elves live fairer than the sun, never reaches it. Down in the earth, in the dark, live the others. Snorri Sturluson called them dökkálfar, and he gave them barely a sentence: they are blacker than pitch, and they look and behave nothing like their luminous cousins above. Then he moved on, and left the rest to everyone who came after.

That half-line, in the seventeenth chapter of Gylfaginning, is very nearly the whole of what the old texts say. A disguised king named Gangleri asks the enthroned figure of High what fine places fill the heavens, and High answers with a tour. There is Álfheimr, where the light elves dwell. There are the high southern halls of Gimlé and Andlangr and Víðbláinn, where light elves alone will shelter when the fire of Surtr comes to burn heaven and earth. The dark elves get only their contrast. They live below. They are pitch-black. They are not like the bright ones. The late poem Hrafnagaldr Óðins names them once more and adds nothing. After that the dökkálfar fall silent for seven hundred years.

So what they look like is a fair question with a flat answer. No one wrote it down. “Blacker than pitch” is the single brushstroke, and it gives a color, not a face. There is no surviving word for their height, their voices, whether they are the slender beauty of the light elves rendered in negative or something with no shape worth naming at all. The texture of them is the texture of the word itself: black, like cooled tar, like the inside of a mine with the lamp gone out. Everything else ever said about how they appear was added later by people who could not bear the blank space.

The deeper question is whether they are a separate thing at all. Snorri writes twice of a place called Svartálfaheimr, the world of the black elves, and anyone who goes looking for its inhabitants finds dwarfs. When the Æsir needed a leash for the wolf Fenrir, a cord that would hold what no chain could, they sent down into that world, and the dwarfs spun the fetter Gleipnir out of things that should not exist, soft as a silk ribbon and stronger than iron. When Loki sheared the golden hair from Thor’s wife Sif as a cruel joke and had to replace it or lose his head, he climbed down into the same dark and set the sons of Ivaldi to their anvils. The ring of hammer on metal, the red heat of the forge, the smell of scorched iron: out of it came new hair of real gold that grew like the old, and the spear Gungnir, and the folding ship Skíðblaðnir. Then, in a wager that very nearly did cost Loki his head, the dwarf Brokkr and his brother Eitri worked their bellows in the black-elf world and produced three more wonders, the boar Gullinbursti, the ring Draupnir, and the hammer Mjölnir, which the gods judged the finest things ever made.

Dark elf, black elf, dwarf. The labels run together, and scholars have argued a long time about whether the blur is Snorri’s doing or the tradition’s. Some read the clean light-and-dark split as something he imported, the Christian sorting of angels into hosts of brightness and hosts of the pit laid over an older belief that never divided its spirits so tidily. Those bright upper halls where only light elves may shelter look a great deal like a borrowed heaven. Others think the division is genuinely old, that a people who buried their dead in the ground and begged the same earth for grain might well have pictured bright spirits of the air and dark spirits of the soil as two faces of one power. John Lindow says plainly that whether Snorri meant any real difference between his dark elves and his black elves is simply unknown. Jacob Grimm, unwilling to surrender his neat three classes of elf, decided Snorri must have been wrong about the pitch-black part, and that the dark elves were really only dim or dingy. The truth is that the dökkálfar are less a creature than a category.

If they are the dwarfs, their power is the power of the forge, and there is nothing modest about it. The leash that holds the wolf until the last day, the spear that never misses, the hammer that guards Asgard, treasures the gods cannot do without, all of it hauled out of a lightless workshop under the ground. Nothing the bright elves do in their sunlit heavens comes close. But the limit is written into the name and the address. The dökkálfar belong to the dark and the deep, shut away from the very light that defines everything their cousins are, and their whole identity is the absence of it. The strangest weakness of all is one of attestation. A being granted one sentence and one late poem, never described, never given a single named individual of its own, sits forever on the edge of not quite existing. The dökkálfar may be dwarfs wearing a borrowed word. They may be a tidy idea Snorri needed to balance his bright elves. Whatever is down there in the dark has never once come up to be looked at.

Frequently Asked Questions

What are the Dökkálfar?

The Dökkálfar are the dark elves of Norse mythology, subterranean beings described as “blacker than pitch” who dwell down in the earth. They appear as the shadowy counterpart to the Ljósálfar, the light elves who live in Álfheimr and are said to be fairer than the sun. Almost everything known about them comes from a single passage in Snorri Sturluson’s Prose Edda.

Are the Dökkálfar the same as dwarfs?

Many scholars think so. Snorri places dwarfs in Svartálfaheimr, the “world of black elves,” and it is there that the gods obtain the fetter Gleipnir and the treasures forged by the sons of Ivaldi and by Brokkr. Because the dark elves are also described as living underground, figures such as John Lindow regard them as very likely dwarfs under another name, though Lindow notes the distinction was never made clear.

Where do the Dökkálfar live?

The Dökkálfar live underground, deep within the earth, in contrast to the light elves who inhabit Álfheimr and the higher heavens. Snorri also names a realm called Svartálfaheimr, the world of the black elves, which his stories populate with the dwarf-smiths who craft the gods’ most important objects.

What is the difference between the Dökkálfar and the Ljósálfar?

The Ljósálfar, or light elves, are described as fairer than the sun and dwell in Álfheimr and the upper heavens, while the Dökkálfar, or dark elves, are blacker than pitch and live below the earth. Some scholars believe this light-and-dark division reflects Christian ideas about angels of light and darkness imposed on older Norse belief, rather than a distinction the pagan tradition originally made.

Did Snorri Sturluson invent the dark elves?

It is genuinely unclear. The dark elves are attested only in Snorri’s Gylfaginning and in the late poem Hrafnagaldr Óðins, so scholars cannot tell whether Snorri originated the light-and-dark split or was recording an older belief. Several, including Anne Holtsmark, have argued that his scheme was shaped by the Christian contrast between bright and fallen angels.

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