Product Description

Elves, Trolls, and Wights is the most complete study yet made of the various beings with whom the Vikings shared their world, from the smallest spirits of stones and plants to the great giants who strive against or aid the Norse gods. Elves, dwarves, giants, wights dwelling in rocks, streams, and oceans: these beings have been friends, foes, and even lovers of humans, and often worked more closely with farming and fishing folk on a daily basis than did the gods themselves. In this book, Kveldulf Gundarsson, long-famed scholar of Old Norse religion and Heathen leader, looks closely at the history and folklore of these beings and offers a practical guide for dealing with them. Elves, Trolls, and Wights also includes Kveldulf’s new translation of the little-known Icelandic skaldic poem “Berg-Dweller’s Song”, in which the giant Hallmundr tells of his own folk and world-faring.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #138936 in Books
• Published on: 2007-03-04
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 184 pages

About the Author
Kveldulf Gundarsson has been writing about Germanic magic and religion since 1989. He received a Ph.D. in Old Norse from Cambridge, and has taught at Uppsala University. He currently lives in Ireland with Ságadís (the Viking Lady Trader) and Etienne, writing and designing Celtic and Norse jewelery for JewelryIreland.

Customer Reviews

A Long Needed Book
This book on the lore, folklore, and most importantly practical interaction with the spirits of Germanic religion is long needed. The author combines both ancient and modern lore about elves, land-spirits, and jotuns, and includes a few anecdotes of his own personal experiences to round the whole out. I would have liked to see a little more information about regional differences in the folklore between England, Scotland, Sweden, Iceland, Norway, etc. and the author glosses over the problem of connecting the wight-lore of pre-Christian times with that of recent times, sometimes juxtaposing 19th and 10th century sources without consideration of the time differential (a problem for which there is an elegant solution, to be named later).

But the problems with this book are minor. It is most certainly required reading for any Asatruar or Theodsman wishing to expand their religion beyond the honoring of the Aesir. The plethora of practical examples and advice, culled from a variety of sources not ordinarily available to English-speaking audiences, is well worth the price alone.

I hope that the next volume in this series will deal as thoroughly with the house-spirits as this deals with the spirits of stone, spring, and tree. It is well worth the money; buy this book.

Not for the novice
WARNING, this book is not for the novice Heathen/Asatru reader! Having said that you should buy it anyway and put it on your bookshelf for later use, (considering the bad habit Mr. Gundarsson's books have of going out of print and then showing up on ebay for 10 time's their original cost). This is by far the most comprehensive work on the subject of Land Wights, (of all types), that I have read so far. While I do not consider myself to be novice in Norse Lore, I found myself running for the reference books on more than one occasion while reading this work. Gundarsson has tightly packed more credible information in these 160 or so pages than most authors can in books three times this size. `I say to the Author, Well done Sir! I await Vol. II.


In Frith,
Spence the Elder

"Sic gorgiamus allos subjectatos nunc"
M. Addams

Good information, poorly written
The author suffers, ironically, from knowing too much about the subject. The job of any writer isn't to put every single piece of information they could possibly conceive onto paper but to inform the listener in a way that assures the ideas will be absorbed, remembered and useful. Failing that, the author's job is to be entertaining. This book fails on all counts since it is tiresome to read and easy to lose track of what you're even reading about.

Common problems include:

1. The author partially translates words (maretorn means mara-thorn. Ah, of course! so what's a mara?)
2. He tries too hard to find cohesiveness about myths that aren't even consistent with themselves. He said towards the beginning that concepts about wights, alfs, trolls, et al greatly overlap and he should've left it at that.
3. Worst of all: each section will have countless information about the subject at hand, aspects of the subject often being separated into paragraphs! It makes the text hard to follow.
4. Use of parenthesis breaks up what are already long sentences. I personally would've preferred if those parenthetical statements, along with bottom-of-the-page captions, were all just numbered notes at the end of each chapter. But any system is better than the one that was used.
5. Since the author condenses so many stories into so little space, we are given only a taste of what are each, individually, very fascinating stories! The more I read the book, the more I feel all the author has to do is clean excesses out and expand on a smaller number of stories to illustrate his points.

Weak readability aside, this books is packed with information that any scholar of the history of religion or of Germanic peoples would find interesting. This book represents, in my opinion, the most prevalent and important aspect of ancient Germanic spirituality that is, at the same time, the most neglected. With countless books about the Gods and Goddesses, it's good that there's a book out about what people truly spent most of their time honoring.

The author shows a very complete knowledge of his field through a wide variety of sources (though I must complain that some of the more miraculous recent stories are hard to find in his sources.. I really want to know more about the story of the building of the Keflavik Air Base). Overall, this belongs in any heathen's bookshelf or that of anyone interested in the history of religion, particularly earth-based and animistic religions.

I dearly hope that the author of the book reads this review and makes a more readable next edition (pictures would be nice, too.. seriously!)