Dark and Black Elves are Just Dwarves

Dispelling the confusion around light elves, dark elves, black elves, and dwarves

You may have heard that there are different kinds of elves in Norse mythology. But did you know that there are no sources from the pre-Christian era that mention different kinds of elves at all? As far as the surviving, old poetry is concerned, an elf is just an elf.

The Prose Edda, on the other hand, composed by 13th-century Christian scholar(s), seems at face value to divide elves into 3 groups: light elves (ljósálfar), dark elves (døkkálfar), and black elves (svartálfar). The Prose Edda is a solid source overall¹, even if its author(s) lived two centuries after the conversion, can be a little confusing sometimes, and certainly don’t get everything right. So let’s see if we can figure out what’s going on here.

What follows is 100% of the information we have about both light elves and dark elves. It’s from Gylfaginning 17 in the Prose Edda (Faulkes’ translation²):

High said: “Many splendid places are [in the heavens]. There is one place that is called Alfheim. There live the folk called light-elves, but dark-elves live down in the ground, and they are unlike them in appearance, and even more unlike them in nature. Light-elves are fairer than the sun to look at, but dark-elves are blacker than pitch. […] But we believe it is only light-elves that inhabit [certain heavens] for the time being.”

You may be interested to learn that the terms “light elf” and “dark elf” are never used again outside of this passage (except in later works that draw upon this passage as their source). And as I already mentioned, they do not occur at all in eddic poetry.

Strangely, the Prose Edda provides an explanation of "dark elves" here, but never mentions them in any narratives. By contrast, it mentions "black elves" in three narratives, but never provides an explanation for them. This fact alone makes it pretty clear (and most scholars agree³) that these two terms are supposed to be synonymous. The previous quote even describes so-called “dark elves” with the same word for black (svartr) that appears in the term “black elf” (svartálfr).

With this link established, there is something interesting to note about all three mentions of black elves. Try to pick out a common thread shared by all of them as you read. I will be providing the Old Norse source text as well as my own translations for each passage along with some hints in bold:

Gylfaginning 34

The gods have just decided to bind the wolf Fenrir with a special fetter. In order to do this…

Þá sendi Alfǫðr þann, er Skírnir er nefndr, sendimaðr Freys, ofan í Svartálfaheim til dverga nǫkkurra ok lét gera fjǫtur þann, er Gleipnir heitir.

Then All-father sent he who is named Skirnir, Frey’s messenger, down into Black-Elf-Home⁴ to some dwarves and had that fetter made which is called Gleipnir.

Skáldskaparmál 35

Loki has just cut off the hair of Thor’s wife Sif. Thor threatens to break every bone in Loki’s body but…

…hann svarði þess, at hann skal fá af Svartálfum, at þeir skulu gera af gulli Sifju hadd þann, er svá skal vaxa sem annat hár. Eftir þat fór Loki til þeira dverga, er heita Ívaldasynir, ok gerðu þeir haddinn…

…[Loki] swore this, that he would get black-elves to make Sif that head of hair out of gold which would grow like other hair. After this, Loki went to those dwarves which were called Ivaldissons, and they made the head of hair…

Skáldskaparmál 39

The gods have offered to pay a ransom for killing an otter that they didn’t realize was actually a shapeshifting person. Unfortunately, they don’t have enough gold on them so…

Þá sendi Óðinn Loka í Svartálfaheim, ok kom hann til dvergs þess, er heitir Andvari. Hann var fiskr í vatni, ok tók Loki hann hǫndum ok lagði á hann fjǫrlausn allt þat gull, er hann átti í steini sínum.

Then Odin sent Loki into Black-Elf-Home, and he came to that dwarf which is called Andvari. He was a fish in a lake, and Loki captured him in hand and laid a ransom for his life upon him of all that gold which he had inside his stone⁵.

Have you noticed the common thread among all three passages?

Every time a character ventures into Svartalfheim (Black-Elf-Home), the people they meet there are always dwarves. In the story about Sif’s hair, Loki even claims that he will get “black elves” to make the new hair, and the characters he enlists for the task are subsequently called “dwarves”.

In the context of the Prose Edda, the term “black elf” (while already a synonym for “dark elf”) is also clearly just a synonym for “dwarf”.

In fact, there is more information linking these terms together. Keep in mind that dwarves live underground and in rocks, as stated in Gylfaginning 14 (Faulkes’ translation⁶):

The dwarfs had taken shape first and acquired life in the flesh of Ymir and were then maggots, but by decision of the gods they became conscious with intelligence and had the shape of men though they live in the earth and in rocks.

This matches what we have already learned about dark elves from Gylfaginning 17, namely that they live “down in the ground”. The connection is further strengthened by a detail in the account of Skirnir’s journey to get the fetter Gleipnir, wherein he travels ofan í Svartálfaheim, literally “downwards into Black-Elf-Home”, seemingly implying that the entire realm of Svartalfheim is down within the earth.

This realization leaves us to assume that the Prose Edda’s so-called “light elves” likely comprise the entirety of what eddic poetry simply calls “elves”. In fact, the base word álfr “elf” here descends from an early Proto-Indo-European word, either *albʰós or *h₂elbʰós, whose reconstructed meaning is simply “white.”⁷

The notion of dark/black elves, as well as their realm Svartalfheim, might therefore be a feature of post-conversion folklore, or alternatively an invention of the Prose Edda’s author(s) looking for a way to fit Norse mythological beings into the Christian mold of angels and demons. Note the dichotomy between living in the heavens versus down below the earth, the dichotomy between being bright and beautiful like the sun versus being blacker than pitch, and even the opposing natures of the two groups (likely implied to be some form of good versus evil).

This, of course, does not give us much in the way of an explanation for what an elf or a dwarf really is⁸, but at least when it comes to dark or black elves, we can pretty safely drop the idea that these are unique categories of beings with some unique realm of existence in the pre-Christian system. Instead, they live where the dwarves live, because that’s what they are.

1. For more information on Snorri and the Prose Edda, see my post “Why You Should (Mostly) Trust the Prose Edda”.

2. Faulkes, A., trans., Snorri Sturluson: ‘Edda’ (London: J. M. Dent, 1987), http://vsnrweb-publications.org.uk/EDDArestr.pdf, pp. 19-20.

3. See, for example, the treatments of all of these terms in both Simek and Lindow:

Simek, Rudolf. Dictionary of Northern Mythology. Translated by Angela Hall, Boydell & Brewer, 2008.

Lindow, John. Norse Mythology: A Guide to the Gods, Heroes, Rituals, and Beliefs. Oxford University Press, 2002.

4. For more information on words that end with –heim, see my post “Norse Cosmology Part I: The Nine Realms Are Wrong”.

5. Presumably the gold is in a stone because dwarves live inside rocks according to Gylfaginning 14. The stone here is probably the dwarf’s home.

6. Faulkes 1987, p. 16.

7. Different sources will provide slightly different reconstructions. But see, for example, Harper, Douglas. "Etymology of elf." Online Etymology Dictionary, https://www.etymonline.com/word/elf. Accessed 18 April, 2025.

8. Additionally, we have no reason to believe that elves or dwarves were thought to deviate from anthropomorphism in any significant way. Physical features that have appeared in modern fantasy material such as pointy ears, horns, sharp teeth, claws, wings, etc., are not drawn from mythological sources. There are a few hints at the potential ugliness of dwarves, as well as a few hints that they had at least come to be thought of as physically small by the post-pagan era, though it is not clear whether the characteristic of small size is a holdover from pre-Christian tradition.