Welcome to the final post in the series of posts on Elves (which begins here). What are they? Why are they the way they are? Why do we have legends of them? In the last post we looked at the notion of “archetype” and how it applies to elves: what are the essential qualities of elves that distinguish them from other beings? By looking at different kinds of elves all over the world, we settled on the eternal child as the core of elfishness. In this post, we’re going to look at neoteny and how it might cast light on this eternal child archetype.
Neoteny
Neoteny is a term from biology and refers to the retention of juvenile features in an adult animal. (It comes from a compound of Greek néos, young, and teínein, to stretch or extend: extension of youth.) Now of course almost all creatures preserve childhood features as they age: both adult and baby humans have five fingers on each hand, for example. Neoteny is a concept used to compare species. If you find two closely related species A and B, and species A looks rather like the children of species B, species A is taking evolutionary advantage of neoteny. They’ve found that remaining more childlike as adults has helped them create an ecological niche.
Let’s take some specific examples.
Of Mice and Mole Rats
Behold the mouse and its relative, the naked mole rat.
Now compare that to a newborn mouse.
No one would confuse a naked mole rat with a baby mouse, but there are some important similarities. The naked mole rat has a large, round head, with large eyes and small snouts. They are hairless, and their skin is smooth.
But the differences are more than skin deep. They live a crazy long time — often 30 years, as compared with 1-3 years for mice and rats — and they’re resistant to age-related diseases. They are highly intelligent and adaptable. They are large, and they are also extremely fast; but they are less hardy and strong. And they have long childhoods, taking up to a year to reach sexual maturity, while mice are adults after six weeks.
Of Dogs and Wolves
These are common features of neoteny in mammals, although of course it’s not an all-or-nothing situation. Dogs, for example, show some features of neoteny compared to wolves, but not all of them. On the one hand, dogs have rounder heads and larger eyes, can live twice as long as a wolf, and are more adaptable and intelligent (well, some breeds are). Some of them are larger than wolves as well. However, they are not generally hairless or smooth skinned, and they are mostly smaller than wolves, so they’re not the best example of neoteny.
Of Monkeys and Men
A better example — in fact a paradigmatic example in mammals — is humanity itself, compared with our closest relatives, chimpanzees. Humans are strangely childlike primates. We have rounder heads, larger eyes, and are of course relatively hairless and smooth-skinned. We live twice as long as chimpanzees, and our childhoods last twice as long too. We are much more clever and adaptable, and are generally about a foot taller, but are only half as strong.
Why are we this way? No one knows. In fact neoteny itself is still poorly understood. But it’s been observed that neoteny tends to be an evolutionary strategy when a species lives in a rapidly changing environment that favors brain plasticity, but with few natural predators, making physical prowess less important. By remaining childlike, the animal remains flexible and adaptable (physically and mentally).
So what does all this have to do with elves?
Elfolution
Elves, of course, live an extremely long time — generally eternally, often with long childhoods. They usually have superhuman intelligence (or at least great wisdom from experience), and they are even more hairless and smooth than we are — you rarely see one with a beard, even among Santa’s elves. And while they’re tall, they’re not always known for their strength.
It’s remarkable how well elves fit into the characteristics of the neotenic evolutionary strategy. But neoteny is a recent biological concept (proposed by Julius Kollman in 1885); there is no sense in which the elves of faerie were intentionally designed to be neotenic. Could it just be coincidence?
I think it more likely that the archetype Elf serves as a subconscious symbol of this critical factor in human evolution. By telling stories of elves, we examine our place in ecology. We compare ourselves to beings that we might have been, or might yet be, and gain a broader view of our lives and purpose in the world.
If so, this might be why elves are also associated with nature. They are not spirits that tell us about how to be human, or how to live in the human world. They tell us about the place of humanity in the larger ecology, in the more-than-human world, the fields and forests beyond the walls of our spacetime village.
The Elf as the Human-As-Other
In many ways, then, stories of elves allow us to take a half-step out of our skins, a short hop along the evolutionary path, to view ourselves in a broader ecological context. To see ourselves as nonhumans might see us. To see another, perhaps greater, version of ourselves. By embodying the eternal child archetype, elves reflect essentials of human nature and our relationship with the world.
Who would we be if we were wiser, taller, older, stronger, yet more childlike and open to the world?
Would we be better neighbors to the trees and animals? Would we fit well into the broader universe?
Would we still feel pain, loss, greed, and jealousy?
Would we be more powerful, and would that be a good thing?
Would we like ourselves?
There are no simple answers to these questions, which is why stories of elves continue to be told. We will always be fascinated by stories of glimpsing elves, visiting elves, dancing with elves, marrying elves, warring with elves. There will always be elf-maidens dancing barefoot in the twilight glades; there will always be elf-cobblers laboring in the wee hours; there will always be elf-kings casting spells of beguilement. They open our hearts and minds to the child, the wonder, the wisdom, and the eternal.
The elves are ourselves, when we are enchanted.
