Elfshot
I wanna talk about the Celts. We all know and love the Celts, AKA the Gauls if you’re a Roman. They too noticed the inexplicable shooting pains that sometimes occur in the body. Like a bolt of electricity, it shoots through a muscle or joint with no obvious source or reason. The Celts attributed this to elfshot. They literally believed that this pain came from an elf shooting you with an invisible arrow. Honestly, for 2000 years ago, this is some sound logic.
This belief morphed in the UK into a folk belief that prehistoric arrowheads (also called elfshot) were those very arrows, now visible. They were collected and used as amulets to protect the wearer against illness, more elfshot, or witchcraft. These flint arrowheads were used in folk medicine for centuries and are still called elfshot in the UK today.
This interaction between the past and the distant past opens up a window into human imagination. 2000 years ago, when the Celts were found from Ireland to Turkey, they had no real evidence or scholarly study of the peoples that came before them in prehistory. How could they? The most logical explanation then for these arrow heads was to attribute them not to ancient humans but to something “real” that they could imagine: elves.
The world of the ancient Celts was difficult and fraught with many unexplained phenomena. And yet elves were a very real danger. They saw evidence of them when a crop failed or livestock died. When a strange illness took someone away, or when the weather behaved out of the ordinary. Elves were something that they saw evidence of and reliable stories about. A far cry from the elegant elves of modern fantasy, these primordial creatures were chaotic, otherworldly, and occasionally dangerous. When put into that perspective, something that we consider uninformed folklore makes perfect sense.
This belief of elfshot continued into the Anglo-Saxon age, but eventually got left behind when medicine started to advance and provide answers. How would this belief have continued if some of those advancements hadn’t happened? I can see elves moving from nature spirits to tiny beings found in the body and in the blood. This small piece of folklore could have spun out of control and made flint arrowheads a black-market commodity, like rhino horn. And yet they are artefacts from our ancestors. It makes you think about the millions of pieces of plastic we are leaving behind and what they might spawn in the minds of future generations 2000 years from now.
[originally posted to Patreon on 13/4/25]
