For some reason, and it has always been like this I have seen things that no one else can. Some things are images of demons, and some are of nice spirits checking up on there family and close friends. But this one experience has got my mind going crazy for a long time.

I was at the beach last summer. I was waiting for the elevator on the first floor and I was reading one of the pamphlets they had on the rack, when I saw this man running into the hotel. Like seriously though, no one even put their head up to see the man. He was screaming and running like super fast and no one even bothered looking at him. When I turned to say, hey you ok he was gone. After that the elevator came down, I kept thinking I only turned around for 2 seconds and I would of heard the man take off but it was like he vanished into thin air. By the time I got up to my floor I was shaking. When I was walking through the hall I looked through the big glass window that stretches from the elevator and the end of the hall. While I was standing there I saw that same man run across the street and when he crossed the trolley lane, SMACK! He had hit the side of the trolley and went through the whole thing. I could not believe it he actually walked through the trolley.

The next day when we were at the beach that same man came walking down the beach and he was all dressed in black. He asked me where the nearest funeral home was and I said well I don't live here I am just a visitor from Pennsylvania. He said ok, thank you anyway. I said why do you ask? He replied because I have to go to my funeral. I nearly spit out my soda when he said that, I was that scared I ran into the ocean and was so focused on what happened I stumbled over the wave. And got salt water in my eyes. I got up and my dad said hey you ok? I said I am fine, but I just well wasn't paying attention. He said just be careful. I never saw the ghost man again.

It was a dark, rainy afternoon in Bamberg, Germany, but Fr. G. Ronald Murphy wasn’t about to let inclement weather thwart his quest. The Jesuit priest, a professor in Georgetown University’s German Department and scholar of medieval literature, was not looking for an obscure manuscript or a quiet refuge in which to spend his sabbatical. Rather, he was seeking the single object that has had the power to capture the imaginations of men and women for centuries, a relic which has inspired works of art ranging from the Arthurian legend and The Da Vinci Code to Indiana Jones and Monty Python. He was looking for the Holy Grail.

The prize, which Murphy believed to be held in Bamberg’s diocesan museum, wasn’t just any Grail—it was the object which, he believes, inspired Wolfram von Eschenbach’s Middle High German epic Parzival, which he dates to approximately 1210 AD. According to Wolfram’s tale, the Grail was not a serving dish or a chalice, as it has often been portrayed, but rather a green gemstone embedded in a portable Catholic altar.
“But what is the Holy Grail?” Murphy asks in his book Gemstone of Paradise: The Holy Grail in Wolfram’s Parzival, published in 2006 by Oxford Press. A fine question indeed, considering the dozens—perhaps hundreds—of objects which faithful have claimed to be the one true Holy Grail over the years.

Widely considered the greatest Crusades historian in the world, Cambridge University professor Jonathan Riley-Smith identified the Grail in an email as “a creation of Chrétien de Troyes,” who wrote the original Arthurian myth on the subject of the mysterious relic.

In his masterpiece Perceval ou Le Conte du Graal (Perceval or The Story of the Grail), written between 1180 and 1185 AD, Chrétien identified the holy object as a golden serving dish studded with jewels which magically served the inhabitants of a mysterious castle under a curse, Murphy writes in Gemstone. The French epic, which fused Christian tradition with Celtic myth, would inspire storytellers (including Wolfram himself) for centuries to come—even though Chrétien died before he could finish it.

Many authors later attempted to bring Chrétien’s story to a conclusion by supplying their own “continuations,” Murphy writes, the most influential of these writers being Robert de Boron. Robert’s Joseph d’ Arimathie (Joseph of Arimathea), written between 1200 and 1210 AD, not only changed the Grail from a dish to the chalice used at the Last Supper, it tied the legend to Joseph of Arimathea who, according to Robert, used the vessel to collect the blood seeping from Jesus’s wounds as he hung from the cross.
Father Murphy and his Viking ship is setting sail for history
Lynn Kirshbaum

Unlike the French-language epics of Chrétien and Robert, Murphy explains in his book that Wolfram’s Parzival, written in German, was not read “in France, England, and beyond,” preventing it from achieving the widespread popularity across Medieval Europe of the other two narratives. Despite the story’s lack of popularity, however, Murphy, along with most Grail scholars, believes Wolfram’s narrative is the best of all because it focuses the reader’s attention not on a physical relic that must be discovered, but on the Sacramental mystery of the Holy Communion which was already present.

“Where Chrétien wove together Celtic and Christian motifs,” Murphy explains in Gemstone, “Wolfram wove together Muslim and Christian, husband and wife, astronomy and medicine, the contemporary and the ancient, into an incredibly rich medieval humanistic Christian tapestry.”

Chrétien’s myth was written in France in the 1180s while the Christians had control of Jerusalem, Murphy noted in an interview with the Voice. Wolfram, on the other hand, wrote Parzival after 1187, when Muslim forces recaptured Jerusalem, which created a vastly different historical context for his narrative.

Christendom had fallen into a “slump,” he says, and by the Fourth Crusade, the Christian soldiers were frustrated and needed money. So they attacked Constantinople, the capital of the Christian East.

Initially, “one of the two purposes for crusading was to help the Easterners,” Murphy said. “The other was to recover the Holy Sepulcher.”

This “fratricide” on the part of the crusaders, Murphy argues in his book, explains why Wolfram changed the nature of the Grail from a dish to a stone.

Roughly the size of a cigar box, a medieval altar stone cutout housed the relics of saints and three pieces of the Holy Communion—the Body of Christ—covered by a lid. This stone was called the “Sepulchrum,” Murphy explained, a sort of miniature Holy Sepulcher.

“Every priest and chaplain among the crusaders had one in his saddle bags—that’s my argument,” Murphy said. “There’s no need to go to Jerusalem and to kill Muslims to acquire the Holy Sepulcher.”

According to Murphy, Wolfram uses a “frame story” to further his argument against crusading: a man has two sons, one by a black Muslim woman and another (Parzival, knight of the round table) by a Christian queen. Years later, the two brothers, blinded by their helmets, fight and nearly kill each other. They quickly realize their folly, however, recognizing that they have a common father—symbolic of Christianity and Islam’s common father of Abraham and, ultimately, God.
This altar stone may be the inspiration for Wolfram’s Perzival
courtesy Father Murphy

“So, it’s a powerful argument that going to Jerusalem and attempting to kill to recover the Holy Sepulcher is unnecessary and unwanted, because you and the Muslims are brothers. You have a common father,” Murphy explained. “To kill kin is a serious sin.”

Gemstone of Paradise is not the first book Murphy has written on German literature, a passion he attributes to his upbringing in Trenton, N.J., “the only U.S. city to be occupied by a German army,” he quips, referring to the Hessian mercenaries employed by Great Britain in 1776.

The joke doesn’t end there. While searching for the former home of the Brothers Grimm in the Hessian town of Hanau, Murphy gave the same dry-witted introduction to a man who lived in the village.

“Which regiments?” the German villager asked. Murphy told him the two he could remember, to which the man replied that the soldiers were from a village 15 kilometers away.

“I thought these people really have a sense of history being still present,” he said. “More than we do, more than we do.”
A kind, soft-spoken man quick to find the positive, spiritual meanings of all things, Murphy would have fit in well in such a village. Even his sparsely decorated office exuded a German spirit in its cleanliness and functionality.
An interest in astronomy early in his life prompted Murphy to study German, the de rigueur foreign language of budding American scientists at the time.

“It was like learning early English….It seemed like I was being taught my mother tongue,” he said.

After joining the Society of Jesus, Murphy was forced to choose between astronomy and German for his Ph.D. studies. He chose the latter, realizing that it was his true passion.
Murphy’s earliest interest in German literature, he explained, was the celebrated dramatist Bertolt Brecht, who became the focus of his dissertation at Harvard. In the paper, Murphy argued that Brecht, an avowed communist, used Biblical imagery and quotations not always to satirize Christianity, as many believed at the time, but often to make his plays more appealing and grabbing. Thus, Brecht was more than just “a good communist”—he was a good human being as well, Murphy said. The dissertation eventually became Murphy’s first book, Brecht and the Bible: A Study of Religious Nihilism and Human Weakness in Brecht’s Drama of Mortality and the City, which provoked a hailstorm of both praise and criticism.

Murphy then set his sights on the oldest known epic in German literature, The Heliand, which couches the Gospel in Beowulf-like terms for its Saxon audience, casting Jesus as a chieftain and his apostles as warriors. His insights into the epic’s adaptation of Christian language into terms popular with the Saxons formed the basis for The Saxon Savior: The Germanic Transformation of the Gospel in the Ninth-Century Heliand, published in 1989, and The Heliand: The Saxon Gospel, published in 1992.

Such adaptations of Biblical images and language are “aimed at moving you as a person … speaking in your categories,” he said. Parzival is no exception.
top of the altar stone
courtesy Father Murphy

“This is the most beautiful anti-Crusading book ever written,” Murphy explained, “because it’s written in the most popular story of its day: the Grail [story]. And secondly … this is more Christian than Christianity. It’s arguing against Crusading because…of the nature of love.”

*
Murphy’s highly original analysis of Wolfram’s Grail, which Gemstone of Paradise elucidates in detail, has been well received by critics and academics in the field, earning the book awards from the New Jersey Council of Humanities, the Mythopoeic Society, and the American Library Association.

In an interview with the Voice, Riley-Smith described Murphy’s association of the Grail with the altar in Bamberg (which Murphy has named the “Paradise Altar” because of its artistic allusions to the rivers of Paradise) as “very convincing,” though he admitted he is not an expert on Parzival and points out that Crusades historians tend to not be very interested in the Grail.
According to Riley-Smith, the Grail is “the greatest and most enduring literary invention of all time.” Accordingly, it has largely been left to the expertise of literary scholars to unveil the relic’s deepest secrets. Still, as Murphy would eventually discover, in its own way the Grail offers a significant contribution to the study of Crusades history.
Indeed, Murphy’s interpretation of Parzival fits within, and even bolsters, Riley-Smith’s revolutionary historical framework of the Crusades. Prior to Riley-Smith, historians interpreted the Crusades as “nothing but a modern economic venture, just an attempt by poor third and fourth sons to acquire land somewhere because their family wasn’t going to give them any,” Murphy said.
After spending months in dark European monasteries hunched over deeds entrusted to the monasteries by crusaders, Riley-Smith found that most of the deeds were to entire castles. This led him to conclude that, in general, it was the father of the household who went on crusade for the salvation of his soul and to do pious work for Jesus—hardly the self-serving motive originally posited.

“The Crusades were done out of real, genuine piety, not a cynical desire to grab money,” Murphy said. Furthermore, he argued, Wolfram’s opposition to the Crusades, because it is framed in religious terms, proves how much the crusaders were motivated by religious beliefs.

“If you had guys who were killing Muslims because it’s worth a lot of money,” Murphy said, “do you think arguing, ‘Hey, this isn’t very Trinitarian’ will stop them? But if they are pious and religious and holy, and they are hacking away out of love of Jesus Christ, you can talk to them.”

Murphy admits he initially feared Riley-Smith would see his argument—especially its emphasis on Wolfram’s anti-crusade message—as a contradiction of his historical model, prompting Murphy to send an email to Riley-Smith explaining how the two arguments are, in fact, complementary.
However, Riley-Smith “saw that right away,” Murphy explained.
Many other prominent scholars have also taken Murphy’s side, including Rachel Fulton, a University of Chicago history professor who claims expertise in Parzival, which she teaches as part of her courses on the history of European civilization.

“Fr. Murphy has given us an exceptionally insightful reading of a complex story that works on literary, theological, and historical grounds,” she wrote in an email.

Albrecht Classen, an expert in medieval and early modern German and European literature and culture at the University of Arizona, likewise praised Murphy’s work in a recent email to the Voice.

“He succeeds in connecting Wolfram’s Parzival with fundamental Christian teachings about love, family, and friends that extends far beyond the narrow limits of one religion against another,” he wrote.

But Gemstone of Paradise is more than just a work of literary analysis: its first and final chapters chart Murphy’s search for and, he claims, successful discovery of the very Grail which inspired Wolfram’s epic. It’s a bold claim, but one which Murphy defends rather ardently.

Based on the research of Josef Braun, S.J., who in the 1920s catalogued nearly every type of altar in existence in Europe, Murphy concluded that there were only two medieval portable altars still in existence with the artistic motifs described in Parzival—one in Brussels and one in Bamberg.

“Because Bamberg is in Franconia, Wolfram’s heartland, and because there is a possibility that Bamberg is mentioned at one point in the narrative … and because its portable altar was in the reliquary-box form, I believe that the altar at Bamberg is the one that inspired Wolfram,” Murphy writes in the book’s final chapter.

So, like the tomb-raiding, fictionalized professor we often associate with Harrison Ford, Murphy set off in search of the object of his fancy.

After making a five-hour drive to the Royal Museums of Art and History in Brussels with no results to show for it, Murphy decided to call the director of the diocesan museum in Bamberg.

“[He] told me that they had the object that I had described but that I was wrong about any depiction of the rivers of Paradise on it,” Murphy writes. “‘Only the twelve apostles,’ he said.”

It was at this point when, Murphy whispered as he related his remembrances, he received a message from what he believes may be his guardian angel.

“Go anyway, you fool!” the voice commanded from inside Murphy’s head. And so he went.

As Murphy and the museum’s director ascended the winding stairway which led to the exhibition hall, the director turned to Murphy, smiled and said, “I was mistaken about the rivers of Paradise … On top are not only the rivers of Paradise depicted around the stone but also the four trees of the Garden of Paradise,” Murphy writes in Gemstone.
Murphy’s heart leapt at the news, which confirmed that the altar’s features matched the description contained in Parzival—with only one question let unanswered: is the stone green?

The stone, Murphy was overjoyed to discover, was indeed green. According to the priest, Wolfram’s relic was more than the figment of one writer’s wild imagination—it was a real, tangible object of Christian piety.

“The exciting aspect of Prof. Murphy’s findings is…that he is able to trace the descriptions of the Holy Grail in Parzival to a very real object, thereby linking the work of imagination and artistic creativity to something real, grounded in the religious practices of the time,” Peter Pfeiffer, a professor in Georgetown’s German Department, wrote in an email.

However, scholars disagree over whether the altar stone of Bamberg, Germany, is actually the Grail which inspired Wolfram’s narrative.

In her review of the book for Reader’s Report, Fulton declares Gemstone of Paradise to be “a sophisticated, challenging and rigorous theological reading of Wolfram’s masterpiece wrapped up in a successful quest for the Holy Grail—or, at least, Wolfram’s Grail…”

Others are more skeptical of the discovery, though, including Classen, who calls the connection between the physical object—the green gemstone—and the literary discussion “tenuous at best.”

Murphy “seems to have found an object which Wolfram might have had in mind, and which would have deeply influenced his thinking, but it is not, and never will be, a perfect match,” Classen wrote in an email.

Still, Classen admitted that Murphy “is on fairly solid ground to suggest that the vicinity of Bamberg, with its altar/Grail object, and Wolfram’s birthplace south of it matters greatly.”

Most of the scholars consulted for this article do agree, however, that the importance of Wolfram’s epic—and Murphy’s book—lies not in the physical existence of the Grail, but rather in the deeper theological meaning the altar stone conveys.

Though she believes Murphy has found Wolfram’s Grail—or at least that the discovery is “very, very likely,” as she qualified in an interview with the Voice—in her review, Fulton identifies Murphy’s main contribution as “the reading of Wolfram’s work as itself a theologically sophisticated rebuff to his own contemporaries who would look for the Grail not at home or, sacramentally, already in their midst, but rather in the possession of the Muslims in the city of Jerusalem, lost to the Crusaders with the conquests of Saladin.”

Likewise, Classen recognized that “the ultimate purpose of [Murphy’s] investigation” was not merely to discover the Grail, but rather to show that “Wolfram rewrote the story of the Holy Grail in such a way as to tell the Christian world what the passion for fighting and dominance … signified about the state of Christendom in his day.”

So does the “True” Holy Grail really exist? Though many have found Murphy’s claim to be plausible, none of the scholars consulted believes there existed, or currently exists, a one true Grail—at least not in the form of a relic.

Like Murphy, Prof. Fulton believes Wolfram was right: “the true ‘Grail’ is the altar on which we celebrate Mass,” she said. Murphy’s Gemstone, Fulton argues in her review, is “a powerful wake-up call to pay careful attention to the theological arguments embedded in what many of us would prefer to read as … secular texts.”

As Murphy explains in Gemstone of Paradise, Wolfram ties the Grail “neither to the objects of the Last Supper nor to the relics of the Crucifixion, but rather to those of Holy Saturday—and to the present,” rendering its pious message—much like the legend of the Grail itself—timeless.

Students experience paranormal activity
By Jordon Shinn
Staff Writer
Published: March 24, 2009

The moon is full but small, enveloped in jagged blue clouds lurking across the night sky.

A chill wind blows from the east as midnight tolls from the library’s bell tower, resounding solemnly down shadowed streets.

Campus looks dead, but some say it’s more alive than it seems.

Security staffers said they hear women whispering on the upper floors of the Edmon Low Library but see no one. Guards said they have followed a man in a baseball cap and a woman with bushy black hair more than once without success.

“I’ve seen a lady on the fourth floor who just got out of sight,” said Anthony Parson, library security supervisor.

He said the woman had black “really crazy, curly messed-up hair,” was about 5-foot-7-inches, 180 pounds and “probably in her 50s.”

“I tried to locate her,” he said. “She never did exit the building.”

Parson said he and two police officers searched the building after closing last semester.

“I suspected we had people spending the night in here,” Parson said.

He said one of the officers spotted the mysterious lady again — this time on the fifth floor near the west elevator, but she disappeared.

“What he’d described was the exact same lady I’d seen,” Parson said.

The library is not the only possibly haunted building on campus. Old Central, Cordell Hall, the Bartlett Center and others are all said to have otherworldly residents. But with so many rumors, it’s hard to discern fact from illusion.

One Internet rumor describes the ghost of a woman who hanged herself in the Bartlett Center back when it was a women’s dormitory in the early 1900s.

Training Lt. Leon Jones, a bicycle police officer on campus, said he was patrolling campus winter break in the late ’90s.

Jones said his partner noticed a single track of footsteps in the snow leading to a front door of the Bartlett Center, slightly ajar around 3 a.m. The Bartlett Center, like the other buildings on campus, should have been locked up for the holidays.

Jones said he and his partner checked every room.

“We did a thorough search of the place,” he said. “We were probably in there for a good two hours.”
When they got to the third floor, Jones said they heard a “loud scream and a giggle coming from the fourth floor.”

Jones said they hurried up the stairs, but the floor was empty.

He said he believes it was a ghost.

“I didn’t see anything, but that’s what I believe it was,” he said.

Students also are experiencing unexplainable activity off campus.

Brittany Foster, an athletic training senior, suspected a ghost was in her house when her dog came to live with her.

“She would act like she is staring at something that’s not there,” Foster said.

She said she started getting feelings when she noticed her dog acting weird.

“Not uncomfortable feelings, but feelings like someone else was there,” she said.

Foster heard about a ghost hunter and decided to have him investigate.

Charlie Konemann, a senior agriculturist in the entomology department, is the co-founder of the Oklahoma Society for Paranormal Investigations.

Konemann said he hasn’t investigated campus before, but has performed eight investigations in the last two years with his team, including Foster’s house in Stillwater. They have recorded disembodied footsteps, voices and abnormally high electromagnetic frequencies.

“We’re not out to prove there’s ghosts,” he said. “People call us to come take a look and tell them what’s going on in their house. Paranormal — it simply means it’s above normal. Something’s going on that you can’t explain.”

Foster said she is skeptical about the results.

“It makes sense that he didn’t find anything with that one experience with the videos and the cameras set up,” Foster said.

Although Foster said she hoped OSPI would bring closure to the mystery, she said she is fine not knowing.

She said if there is a ghost, then she doesn’t mind.

“It’s not a bad ghost. It’s not a ghost I’m scared of. Most movies are about scary ghosts. This is not a scary ghost.”

Salamander (legendary creature)

The salamander is an amphibian of the order Urodela. As with many real creatures, pre-modern authors often ascribed fantastic qualities to it (compare the allegorical descriptions of animals in Medieval bestiaries), and in recent times some have come to identify a legendary salamander as a distinct concept from the real organism. This idea is most highly developed in the occult. Where the two concepts can be distinguished, the legendary salamander is most often depicted much like a typical salamander in shape, with a lizard-like form, but it is usually ascribed an affinity with fire (sometimes specifically elemental fire).

Morgens, Morgans or Mari-Morgans are Welsh and Breton water sprites that drown men. They may lure men to their death by their own sylphic beauty, or with glimpses of underwater gardens with buildings of gold or crystal. They are also blamed for heavy flooding that destroys crops or villages. In the story of the drowning of Ys, a city in Brittany, the king's daughter, Dahut, is the cause, and she becomes a sea morgen.

The morgens are eternally young, and like sirens they sit in the water and comb their hair seductively. In many ways they are a female version of the Scandinavian nixie. In Arthurian legend the "Lady of the Lake" is named "Morgen" The origin of Morgan le Fay may lie in these Breton myths.

Tales of morgens are preserved in the English countryside, like the one from western Somerset, where a fisherman adopts an infant morgen, only to have her revert to the sea when she grows up.

Ondines or undines (Latin: unda — a wave) are elementals, enumerated as the water elementals in works of alchemy by Paracelsus.^[1] They also appear in European folklore as fairy-like creatures; the name may be used interchangeably with those of other water spirits.^[2] Undines were said to be able to gain a soul by marrying a human and bearing his child.

The term has also been used as proper name for such a water spirit, "Ondine".

Ondine was a water nymph in German mythology. She was very beautiful and, like all nymphs, immortal. However, should she fall in love with a mortal man and bear his child - she will lose her "gift" of everlasting life.

Ondine fell in love with a dashing knight - Sir Lawrence - and they were married. When they exchanged vows, Lawrence said, "My every waking breath shall be my pledge of love and faithfulness to you." A year after their marriage Ondine gave birth to Lawrence’s child. From that moment on she began to age. As Ondine’s physical attractiveness diminished, Lawrence lost interest in his wife.

One afternoon Ondine was walking near the stables when she heard the familiar snoring of her husband. When she entered the stable, however, she saw Lawrence lying in the arms of another woman. Ondine pointed her finger at him, which he felt as a kick, waking up with a start. Ondine uttered a curse: "You swore faithfulness to me with every waking breath, and I accepted your oath. So be it. As long as you are awake, you shall have your breath, but should you ever fall asleep, then that breath will be taken from you and you will die!"

An elf is a creature of Germanic mythology. The elves were originally thought of as a race of minor nature and fertility gods, who are often pictured as youthful-seeming men and women of great beauty living in forests and underground places and caves, or in wells and springs. They have been portrayed to be long-lived or immortal and as beings of magical powers.

The earliest preserved description of elves comes from Norse mythology. In Old Norse they are called álfar (singular, nominative case: álfr), and although no older or contemporary descriptions exist, the appearance of beings etymologically related to álfar in earlier and later folklore strongly suggests that the belief in elves was common among all the Germanic tribes, and not limited solely to the ancient Scandinavians.

Although the concept itself is never clearly defined in the exact sources, the elves appear to have been conceived as powerful and beautiful human-sized beings. The myths about elves have never been recorded. Full-sized famous men could be elevated to the rank of elves after death, such as the petty king Olaf Geirstad-Elf. The smith hero Völundr is identified as 'Ruler of Elves' (vísi álfa) and 'One among the Elven Folk' (álfa ljóði), in the poem Völundarkviða, whose later prose introduction also identifies him as the son of a king of 'Finnar', an Arctic people respected for their shamanic magic (most likely, the sami). In the Thidrek's Saga a human queen is surprised to learn that the lover who has made her pregnant is an elf and not a man. In the saga of Hrolf Kraki a king named Helgi rapes and impregnates an elf-woman clad in silk who is the most beautiful woman he has ever seen.

Crossbreeding was consequently possible between elves and humans in the Old Norse belief. The human queen who had an elvish lover bore the hero Högni, and the elf-woman who was raped by Helgi bore Skuld, who married Hjörvard, Hrólfr Kraki's killer. The saga of Hrolf Kraki adds that since Skuld was half-elven, she was very skilled in witchcraft (seiðr), and this to the point that she was almost invincible in battle. When her warriors fell, she made them rise again to continue fighting. The only way to defeat her was to capture her before she could summon her armies, which included elvish warriors

There are also in the Heimskringla and in The Saga of Thorstein, Viking's Son accounts of a line of local kings who ruled over Álfheim, corresponding to the modern Swedish province Bohuslän and Norwegian province Østfold, and since they had elven blood they were said to be more beautiful than most men.

In addition to these human aspects, they are commonly described as semi-divine beings associated with fertility and the cult of the ancestors and ancestor worship. The notion of elves thus appears similar to the animistic belief in spirits of nature and of the deceased, common to nearly all human religions; this is also true for the Old Norse belief in dísir, fylgjur and vörðar ("follower" and "warden" spirits, respectively). Like spirits, the elves were not bound by physical limitations and could pass through walls and doors in the manner of ghosts, which happens in Norna-Gests þáttr. It is said that elves are the Germanic equivalent to the nymphs of Greek and Roman mythology, and vili and rusalki of Slavic mythology.

In Scandinavian folklore, which is a later blend of Norse mythology and elements of Christian mythology, an elf is called elver in Danish, alv in Norwegian, and alv or älva in Swedish (the first is masculine, the second feminine). The Norwegian expressions seldom appear in genuine folklore, and when they do, they are always used synonymous to huldrefolk or vetter, a category of earth-dwelling beings generally held to be more related to Norse dwarves than elves which is comparable to the Icelandic huldufólk (hidden people).

In Denmark and Sweden, the elves appear as beings distinct from the vetter, even though the border between them is diffuse. The insect-winged fairies in British folklore are often called "älvor" in modern Swedish or "alfer" in Danish, although the correct translation is "feer".

The elves of Norse mythology have survived into folklore mainly as females, living in hills and mounds of stones. The Swedish älvor.(sing. älva) were stunningly beautiful girls who lived in the forest with an elven king. They were long-lived and light-hearted in nature. The elves are typically pictured as fair-haired, white-clad, and (like most creatures in the Scandinavian folklore) nasty when offended. In the stories, they often play the role of disease-spirits. The most common, though also most harmless case was various irritating skin rashes, which were called älvablåst (elven blow) and could be cured by a forceful counter-blow (a handy pair of bellows was most useful for this purpose). Skålgropar, a particular kind of petroglyph found in Scandinavia, were known in older times as älvkvarnar (elven mills), pointing to their believed usage. One could appease the elves by offering them a treat (preferably butter) placed into an elven mill – perhaps a custom with roots in the Old Norse álfablót.

In order to protect themselves against malevolent elves, Scandinavians could use a so-called Elf cross (Alfkors, Älvkors or Ellakors), which was carved into buildings or other objects. It existed in two shapes, one was a pentagram and it was still frequently used in early 20th century Sweden as painted or carved onto doors, walls and household utensils in order to protect against elves.As the name suggests, the elves were perceived as a potential danger against people and livestoc The second form was an ordinary cross carved onto a round or oblong silver plate. This second kind of elf cross one was worn as a pendant in a necklace and in order to have sufficient magic it had to be forged during three evenings with silver from nine different sources of inherited silver. In some locations it also had to be on the altar of a church during three consecutive Sundays

The elves could be seen dancing over meadows, particularly at night and on misty mornings. They left a kind of circle where they had danced, which were called älvdanser (elf dances) or älvringar (elf circles), and to urinate in one was thought to cause venereal diseases. Typically, elf circles were fairy rings consisting of a ring of small mushrooms, but there was also another kind of elf circle:

If a human watched the dance of the elves, he would discover that even though only a few hours seemed to have passed, many years had passed in the real world. (This time phenomenon is retold in Tolkien's Silmarillion when Thingol watches Melian dance. It also has a remote parallel in the Irish sídhe.) In a song from the late Middle Ages about Olaf Liljekrans, the elven queen invites him to dance. He refuses, he knows what will happen if he joins the dance and he is on his way home to his own wedding. The queen offers him gifts, but he declines. She threatens to kill him if he does not join, but he rides off and dies of the disease she sent upon him, and his young bride dies of a broken heart

However, the elves were not exclusively young and beautiful. In the Swedish folktale Little Rosa and Long Leda, an elvish woman (älvakvinna) arrives in the end and saves the heroine, Little Rose, on condition that the king's cattle no longer graze on her hill. She is described as a beautiful old woman and by her aspect people saw that she belonged to the subterraneans.

These myths and legends of elves that are so popular among Scandinavians, are quite prevalent in their everyday lives. It has been said that to this day, many Scandinavians do still believe in this existence of " hidden people", and will often go out of their way to see that they do not disturb these creatures. For example, just outside of Reykjavik, Iceland, a soccer game was called to a halt when a misled ball rolled off the beaten path, and stopped right next to a sign that marked the home of 3 elves believed to dwell near the stones where the ball was resting. Instead of reclaiming the ball, the soccer player opted to leave it there in order to avoid disturbing the elves

Natives of Iceland either believe in elves or are unwilling to rule out their existence

Several Icelanders believe in huldufólk or “hidden folk”, the elves that dwell in rock formations. If the natives don’t explicitly express their belief, they are certainly reluctant to express disbelief

A 2006 and 2007 study on superstition by the University of Iceland’s Faculty of Social Sciences supervised by Terry Gunnell (associate folklore professor), reveal that natives would not rule out the existence of elves and ghosts (similar results of a 1974 survey by Professor Erlendur Haraldsson, Fréttabladid reports). Gunnel stated: “Icelanders seem much more open to phenomena like dreaming the future, forebodings, ghosts and elves than other nations.” His results were consistent with a similar study conducted in 1974

A recent episode of the Sci-Fi Channel's Destination Truth took the host and crew to Iceland to investigate the myth. They did find that several of their electronic devices had malfunctioned, glitched, or even been pushed or turned over. Some strange noises were also heard both by them personally and using a parabolic mic. Some EVP (Electronic Voice Phenomenon) was also recorded. Overall, no images of the elves were recorded and no one had seen anything of the like. The evidence was inconclusive.

German

The original German elves (Old Saxon alf; Middle High German: alb, alp; plural elbe, elber; Old High German alb, by 13th century are thought to be light creatures who lived in heaven during the era of Germanic paganism, and may have included dark elves or dwarves underground (as understood to be similar to the álfr of Old Norse mythology). In post-Christian folklore they began to be described as mischievous pranksters that could cause disease to cattle and people, and bring bad dreams to sleepers. The German word for nightmare, Albtraum, means "elf dream". The archaic form Albdruck means "elf pressure"; it was believed that nightmares are a result of an elf sitting on the dreamer's chest. This aspect of German elf-belief largely corresponds to the Scandinavian belief in the mara. It is also similar to the legends regarding incubi and succub

As noted above, an elven king occasionally appears among the predominantly female elves in Denmark and Sweden. In the German middle-age epic the Nibelungenlied, a dwarf named Alberich play an important role.

The Erlkönig's nature has been the subject of some debate. The name translates literally from the German as "Alder King" rather than its common English translation, "Elf King" (which would be rendered as Elfenkönig in German). It has often been suggested that Erlkönig is a mistranslation from the original Danish ellerkonge or elverkonge, which does mean "elf king".

According to German and Danish folklore, the Erlkönig appears as an omen of death, much like the banshee in Irish mythology. Unlike the banshee, however, the Erlkönig will appear only to the person about to die. His form and expression also tell the person what sort of death they will have: a pained expression means a painful death, a peaceful expression means a peaceful death. This aspect of the legend was immortalised by Goethe in his poem Der Erlkönig, later set to music by Schubert.

Variations of the German elf in folklore include the moss people and the weisse frauen ("white women"). On the latter Jacob Grimm does not make a direct association to the elves, but other researchers see a possible connection to the shining light elves of Old Norse.

The word elf came into Modern English as the Old English word ælf (pl. ælfe, with regional and chronological variants such as ylfe and ælfen), and so came to Britain originally with the Anglo-Saxons.Words for the nymphs of the Greek and Roman mythos were translated by Anglo-Saxon scholars with ælf and variants on it.

In relation to the beauty of the Norse elves, some further evidence is given by old English words such as ælfsciene ("elf-beautiful"), used of seductively beautiful Biblical women in the Old English poems Judith and Genesis A. Although elves could be considered to be beautiful and potentially helpful beings in some sections of English-speaking society throughout its history, Anglo-Saxon evidence also attests to alignments of elves with demons, as for example in line 112 of Beowulf. On the other hand, oaf is simply a variant of the word elf, presumably originally referring to a changeling or to someone stupefied by elvish enchantment.

Elf-shot (or elf-bolt or elf-arrow) is a word found in Scotland and Northern England, first attested in a manuscript of about the last quarter of the 16th century. Although first attested in the sense 'sharp pain caused by elves', it is later attested denoting Neolithic flint arrow-heads, which by the 17th century seem to have been attributed in the region to elvish folk, and which were used in healing rituals, and alleged to be used by witches (and perhaps elves) to injure people and cattle So too a tangle in the hair was called an elf-lock, as being caused by the mischief of the elves, and sudden paralysis was sometimes attributed to elf-stroke.

Dark elves (Old Norse: Dökkálfar, usually called the Svartálfar "black elves") are known as a class of elves living underground in Old Norse mythology, the counterparts to the Ljósálfar ("Light-elves"). They are very similar to dwarfs as they mainly live in places where there is little light, though unlike both high elves and dwarves the dark elves are an evil race that like suffering and pain. Their physical appearance is of darkly colored hair and black/dark eyes, as opposed to light elves with blond hair and blue eyes. Their skin tone could be any shade of color just like humans The dark elves originated in the Eddic and Germanic myths. They are more recently described as a race of elves and sometimes counterparts to the high elves in fiction and modern popular culture.

Dark elves are also now a common character in modern fantasy fiction, although usually very highly embellished with outside influences and rarely displaying many elements of the ancient folktales that inspired their inclusion, throughout fantasy fiction of many types. Their appearance varies considerably from representation to representation, as does their given background.

In Norse mythology, the light elves (Old Norse: Ljósálfar) live in the Old Norse version of the heavens, in the place called Álfheim underneath the place of the Gods. The idea of the light elf is one of the most ancient records of elves (Old Norse: álfr singular, álfar plural) preserved in writing, as close to the prototypical idea of the elf as we might get from Nordic mythology (as preserved an ancient Germanic paganism). The "light elf" designation is in contrast to the dark elf who is an earth dweller and may be a dwarf.

A gnome is a mythical creature characterized by its extremely small size and subterranean lifestyle.The word gnome is derived from the New Latin gnomus. It is often claimed to descend from the Greek γνώσις gnosis, "knowledge", but more likely comes from genomos "earth-dweller", in which case the omission of e is, as the OED calls it, a blunder. Another possibility is that it comes from the Arabic نوم (Noum) which means sleep. It is also possible that Paracelsus simply made the word up. Notable Gnomes in English Folklore include Sprin, Rumo, Pinny, Fislet and Gulcifer.

Paracelsus includes gnomes in his list of elementals, as earth elementals. He describes them as two spans high, and very taciturn. Sometimes they are seen as a type of fairy, though at other times are seen as a distinct species in their own right.

Some confusion arises as the gnome is one of many similar but subtly different creatures in European folklore; mythical creatures such as goblins and dwarves are often represented as gnomes, and vice versa.

Gnomes feature in the legends of many of central, northern and eastern European lands by other names: a kaukis is a Prussian gnome, and barbegazi are gnome-like creatures with big feet in the traditions of France and Switzerland. Further east, tengu are sometimes referred to as winged gnomes.

According to certain medieval beliefs, Gnomes were deformed, usually with a hunchback, and were led by their king, Gob, who ruled with a magic sword

Today, Gnomes are traditionally thought of as being small, bearded and wearing pointed, colourful, conical hats. They live in natural areas close to the Earth and care for wildlife. They are more benevolent than other folkloric creatures such as goblins. This traditional view is supported in such fictional works as The Secret Book of Gnomes.

Claims of Gnome sightings

Despite the fact that Gnomes are usually seen as a mythical creature with no real existence, there have been certain cases where people have claimed to have encountered real, living gnomes, that are not fictional.

Cottingley, England, 1917

One of the Cottingley fairies photographs taken in 1917 by two young girls depicts a gnome. When the duo confessed to faking the photographs in the 1980s, they continued to insist that the one that they had taken of the gnome was genuine.

Argentina, 2007-08

The Gnome sightings in Argentina is a reported wave of sightings of Gnomes in General Güemes, Salta, Argentina that came to its climax in 2007. The craze was similar to that of the chupacabra, which had also happened in the Americas. Some reports claim that a survey showed that 90% of locals believed in the creature with over a hundred claiming to have actually seen one of the creatures, however contrasting reports claim that very few locals actually believe in it.

Locals had reported seeing gnomes (or duendes) for several decades, however reports increased in 2007 after railway workers reported seeing one run around the tracks. They reported seeing a knee height humanoid creature wearing a pointy hood who ran sideways.

The story was reported by El Tribuno in Argentina, and then The Sun in the UK. It was then picked up by Fox News in the USA, before becoming something of an urban legend. Since then, many skeptics have declared the story to be false, claiming that the video used as the main evidence is faked and that reports of the beliefs were exaggerated.

Various video recordings claiming to depict the creatures were uploaded onto websites such as YouTube. The majority follow the same formula of a group of teenagers getting scared by a gnome, and running away screaming

May 2007 Video

In this video, lasting only 16 seconds, a group of teenage males are playing football outside when they are terrified by a gnome that appears to be only a few inches tall.^]

October 2007 Video

Two males are playing football indoors, when they are terrified at a creature that runs along the floor.

March 2008 Video

In March 2008, a 'creepy gnome' who wears a pointy hat, that locals claim stalks the streets of General Guemes, Salta, Argentina,was caught on video by local teenagers on their mobile phone, led by Jose Alvarez, who commented on how he and some friends had encountered it one night.

"We were chatting about our last fishing trip. It was one in the morning. I began to film a bit with my mobile phone while the others were chatting and joking. Suddenly we heard something — a weird noise as if someone was throwing stones... We looked to one side and saw that the grass was moving. To begin with we thought it was a dog but when we saw this gnome-like figure begin to emerge we were really afraid... This is no joke. We are still afraid to go out — just like everyone else in the neighbourhood now... One of my friends was so scared after seeing that thing that we had to take him to the hospital.

The video quality is fairly blurred and dark. It goes from showing the teenagers chatting, to zooming in on something rustling about in some long grass several metres away. The creature then dashes across a field, running sideways, and this is filmed for a brief few seconds.

A second video, virtually identical to the first, but with certain distinct differences, was later released on the internet, confirming that two very similar, yet different, versions of the account were filmed, providing strong evidence that the video was faked.

On October, 2008, South America’s ‘creepy gnome’ or ‘midget monster’ had again caused panic among locals. Experts examined the recorded footage, (by Juan Carlos Roldan, his brother Javier and 5 friends, by the water fountain in Clodomira, Santiago del Estero, Argentina, and running down Avenue San Martin). Photographic expert Aldegonda Alvarz, of Universidad Nacional de Santiago del Estero, stated: "This video footage seems credible. We could be looking at another ‘petiso orejudo’ - small being."