MYTH & Legend
NOVEMBER 2017
THE ELF LORD
(A triptych based on the poem “Erlkönig” by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe)
JANE HARRINGTON
THE ELF LORD
(A triptych based on the poem “Erlkönig” by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe)
JANE HARRINGTON
The Father--
It had taken twice as long as he’d expected to reach the fishing hole, so he can’t say he’s surprised by the slow pace getting home. He had thought that the pools and puddles—still there, surprisingly, from the storm—would dry up over the course of the day. The sun had been shining on the pond, after all, but penetrating the canopy of the wildwood was another thing altogether, even though the turn had arrived this week, errant gusts sending leaves whirling. A sassafras leaf skids across the horn of the saddle, in front of the father and son. The boy, laughing, grabs it and sets it over his hand like a red mitt, then fills his strong little lungs with air and blows it off like the wind.
He is so happy, the boy, having caught his first fish today. “The salmon of wisdom!” he’d proclaimed it to be. Of course it was no salmon, not from a pond in the middle of the wildwood. But his mother often told him the legend of the hero Finn McCool, how as a child he’d brushed a thumb over the scales of a silver salmon and then, after putting the thumb in his mouth, had gained all the wisdom of the world. The boy had sucked his thumb as a baby, still did when he was sick or frightened, so he liked this episode the best, always asked his mother to tell it, always asked her when he would have a salmon. Her answer was always along the lines of Maybe one day, for salmon was rare, brought in from the riverlands and too precious for their family. A black bass is what the boy has really caught, though his father has told him only that it is a beauty, because it is, and because it reminds him of his own first fish caught with his own father, at the same pond. There would be time later to tell his son the truth of his catch, the father had thought, the slap-slap of the fish in its oil-cloth bag marking the uneven rhythm of their ride as he steers the horse around piles of deadfall and over berms left by the floods.
It had been epic, the storm. Something he’d never seen in all his life, an afternoon tempest with gold-foil lightning and doom-fire on the horizon after it sailed east. When, now, a week ago? Two? And still the water fills the ruts in the path, still it flows in channels where never a creek has been. This is why the trek has been so slow, why he worries in earnest that he will run out of daylight. He had feared this while at the pond, but the boy wanted so to make the catch, to feel the pride of being the one to bring home dinner for his parents, for his new puppy who loved nothing more than a fishtail. They have still to cross the storm-born weir, not far ahead, the father is sure, though he can’t hear the plashing yet. A remarkable sight, he had thought when he saw it, even if so difficult to ford. He had said to himself that he’d take his wife tomorrow—she loves waterfalls. They could walk, so close to the cottage it is, take a picnic, nap under a tree to the soothing sounds. But it isn’t romance on his mind at this moment. It is the darkening path, his fear of not getting their son home safely.
“Papa,” the boy says, “I’ve just seen the Elf Lord.”
“Are you sure it’s not the Oak-shee?” the father says, playing along as he pulls up the reins and guides the horse through underbrush to avoid a brokeneck willow across the path. The storm had snapped trees clear in half—not just starvelings, but healthy trees—the winds strangely low and straight, as if blown from a great bellows at forest’s edge. “The Oak-shee would be angry that all these trees are hurt,” the father says, getting back to the center of the path and tapping the horse with his boot heels.
“No, it’s the Elf Lord,” the boy says, pointing to a glow beyond a copse.
“Just foxfire,” the father says. But he puts an arm around the boy’s chest and pushes his heels more deeply into the animal’s sides.
The Son--
“See him now, Papa?” The boy leans his head back, against his father’s shoulder, a weariness coming over him. He has a sudden longing for home, imagines the smell of his fish on the fire, can almost feel the soft fur of his little hound. A buddy for you, his father had said of the dog, for the boy is an only child and would always be so, something he had heard his parents whisper about in the night when they thought him asleep on his tick.
“It could be the Grogoch,” the father says.
“But he is not hairy,” the boy giggles softly, his own downy hair brushing his father’s neck. “And the Elf Lord doesn’t wear rags. He has a velvet jacket with emerald buttons.”
“If he favors the color green, he could be the Lurgadhan,” the father offers.
“He doesn’t have a pipe, and he doesn’t speak in riddles. He talks about his sunflowers, how they grow in a maze. He says I should come play in his garden. Don’t you hear him, Papa?”
“No,” the father says, but the boy knows this tone. It is the same one his father uses when he asks him if it’s possible for a father and mother to die and leave their child alone in the world.
“Then why do you hurry?” he asks, gripping his father’s arm as the horse leaps over a blackthorn fallen, the branches brushing the boy’s skin between his woolen sock and the hem of his pant leg. He shudders, because the blackthorn, in all his mother’s stories, is a tree to stay clear of, to never touch.
“To beat the darkness,” the father says.
“He is bright, the Elf Lord,” the boy tells him, yawning. “He will light the way.”
“But I thought he never came down from the manse on the mound,” the father says, “that he never left his royal family, that he let the winged Elves and the lesser Fairies do his bidding. Are you sure it is not the Water-shee, followed us from the pond?”
“He has no webbing between his fingers,” the boy says, eyelids twitching, falling shut. “He is saying that his daughters are kind and musical, that they will rock me and sing me to sleep.”
“It is a fever dream, nothing more,” the father says. He leans heavily over his son, who is slumped now in the saddle. The father pushes his heels harder, harder, into the animal’s sides.
“You’re hurting me, Papa,” the boy whimpers, though he seems to know—it is in his tone—that it is not his father who hurts him, but the Elf Lord. “He tells me he loves me,” the boy spittles around the thumb he has put in his mouth, “that he needs but a touch.”
“No! No! No!” are the father’s cries, a gallop of cries, over the pounding hooves beneath them. “We are almost home! Look ahead! Listen! It is the water!”
But the boy’s world has gone white.
The Elf Lord--
I will call it The Waiting Tree, he thinks, settling onto a low branch of a sprawling peach tree in the yard. He likes to create proper names, govern words and phrases and those who must add his invented monikers to their vocabularies. What, he wonders now, shall I call the boy? And he plucks at the leaves within reach, green turning rust, curled darts skittering in the breeze. I will call these leaves Twitch-dancers, he says to himself, knowing full well he has gotten off course in his thinking process, but also knowing that his train of thought would not dare leave him in the lurch for long. He is the Elf Lord, after all—short on attention but long on self-aggrandizement. He will not forget about the boy.
Ah, the boy, he thinks now (See?), what a lovely boy. Better than any he’d observed in the past week. Or was it two? Sure, there were some who were more cultured—the ones born of mixing with the Elfin, of course—and some who had that trans-terrestrial attractiveness that comes with even an iota of Fairy blood. But his wife had gotten it in her head that only a pure child of the wildwood would do to replace the newborn that had been taken from them that night of the cruel labor, of the stabbing lightning. The child hadn’t even tasted one breath, not one. And please, she had said to her husband as she sobbed (and he’d sobbed, too, let’s not leave that out), you must find the boy yourself. A loving one, she had told him, as the true wildwoodeans always are. He was sure she would be pleased with his choice. He had seen how this boy had looked at his father, and how the father had looked at the boy. He feels a shiver move through him, not one rooted in a chill, no, but something else entirely, something he will not, No-No-No, give audience to. I shall name it Feeling Non Grata, he thinks, and he sets his eyes on the path, tips an ear (not pointed, by the way, that’s a stereotype), but he hears no hooves, only that trickling of the storm-born weir, constant and mournful.
Just look how the boy is treated here, he thinks, tapping his gilded heel against the bole of the peach tree. Really? A one-room hut in the middle of the woods? At the manse he will be tutored in the classics and in bow skills, he will have his own steed, he will dress in spectacular colors, not these dull earth tones the dwellers of the wildwood wear. His gaze has wandered to the door of the hut, a half-door, the top swung open enough for him to see the mother in her rough linen, setting another log on the fire. A yipping comes from inside. A dog? The Elf Lord clucks his tongue against his teeth (the Elfin aren’t keen on dogs). Oh, all right already, we’ll get him a dog.
She has come to the porch, the mother, for it is the sound of hooves that has made the dog bark. There is a look of relief on her face, but only for a split second, her husband’s very pace an alarm, then the terror in his eyes like flames out of the gloaming. Her own eyes meet the Elf Lord’s. He is stretched out on the branch, his arm dangling, for all he needs is to touch the boy as the horse passes, and then the two of them will be on the mound, father and son, in the arms of his wife. That’s all he need do, he must look away from that mother, he must look away as she races down the path to meet her husband, his tears raining onto the boy, limp in his arms. He must look away.
And so the Elf Lord does, only turning his head for a moment from the path in front of him—that path of pools and puddles that wends deep into the wildwood—when he hears the rustling, the patting of an oil-cloth bag, a boy filling his lungs with air: “Mama, I caught the silver salmon!”

JANE HARRINGTON has written best-selling books for young adults (Scholastic, Lerner), and her literary fiction, creative nonfiction and lyric prose have been published widely, including in Chautauqua, Eastern Iowa Review, Circa, Claudius Speaks, Irish America, Feminine Collective, and Where the Sweet Waters Flow: Contemporary Appalachian Nature Writing (upcoming, West Virginia UP). Jane is a Visiting Assistant Professor of English at Washington & Lee University and a fellow at the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts (VCCA). Her website: www.janeharrington.com
Chila: What can you tell us about "The Elf Lord"?
Jane: I have been drawn lately to the fairy canon, to reshaping, repurposing, favorite tales. “The Elf Lord” is one such work. In it I was able to give breath to a lost grandson, spend time with a precious revenant. If but for the length of a story.
Chila: Share with us something you've learned about writing over the years.
Jane: I have learned that I have to trust myself over the critic.
Chila: What do you one day want to write more than anything?
Jane: I’m afraid the fairies will jinx me if I express any grand goals. For now, I’d like to find a publisher for a collection of fabulist novellas and short stories that includes "The Elf Lord" and some retellings of Oscar Wilde’s fairy tales.
Chila: What can you tell us about "The Elf Lord"?
Jane: I have been drawn lately to the fairy canon, to reshaping, repurposing, favorite tales. “The Elf Lord” is one such work. In it I was able to give breath to a lost grandson, spend time with a precious revenant. If but for the length of a story.
Chila: Share with us something you've learned about writing over the years.
Jane: I have learned that I have to trust myself over the critic.
Chila: What do you one day want to write more than anything?
Jane: I’m afraid the fairies will jinx me if I express any grand goals. For now, I’d like to find a publisher for a collection of fabulist novellas and short stories that includes "The Elf Lord" and some retellings of Oscar Wilde’s fairy tales.