Elves Had the Most Successful Rebranding of All Time

That jerk on the shelf notwithstanding, elves are some of the most harmless supernatural creatures in the modern canon. Even when they’re doing murder so that Will Ferrell can win the Eurovision Song Contest, they’re doing it in the service of good. (Huh, that guy has a real elf thing.) Whether they’re elderly cookie bakers, hot Tolkien archers or just regular old North Pole laborers, they’re almost never depicted as evil, unlike the witches, werewolves and other magical beings often mentioned in the same breath.

It’s all the more impressive considering that, until about 200 years ago, they were considered real shitheads. The earliest writings about elves in Anglo-Saxon England describe them as a cause of illness in people and livestock. Specifically, any sharp pain could be blamed on an “elf-shot,” which really puts Leglolas’ whole deal in perspective. Later, it was believed that elves had a tendency to seduce or rape humans and kidnap human babies. Mostly, elves loved to trick people. As if the rape and kidnapping weren’t bad enough, the Rumplestiltskin-ass jerkwads had to rub it in.

So just how did those bastards become Santa’s little helpers? Their image rehabilitation was carried out largely by the Brothers Grimm, who published “The Elves and the Shoemaker” in 1812. It tells the story of three elves (technically “little men,” but the Grimms probably didn’t mean humans with dwarfism) who show up each night to pick up the slack for an overworked cobbler who wakes up flabbergasted to find his work already done. It’s not altogether out-of-character for the trickster gods. It’s just an altruistic prank instead of — we really do have to keep checking our notes here — rape and kidnapping.

From there, it was easy to slot these creatures now known for their diligent work ethic into another story that needed them: the developing Santa myth. That’s a whole thing in and of itself, but most of what we think about Santa came from “‘Twas the Night Before Christmas,” released only 11 years later, which incidentally describes Santa as a “jolly old elf” even though he’s almost definitely a separate species from his factory employees.

Still, Santa didn’t actually get the help he needed until 1857, when Harper’s Weekly published a poem called “The Wonders of Santa Claus,” which described elves “all working with all their might / To make a million of pretty things / Cakes, sugar-plums and toys / To fill the stockings, hung up you know / By the little girls and boys.” That was the point of no return, when elves became a permanent fixture at the North Pole. It was an easy answer to the question, “How does Santa get everything done?” even though that line of inquiry is always going to end at, “It’s magic, now eat your peas,” anyway.

But don’t think that just because they’ve rebranded means they’re repentant; a century of advertising has taught us better than that. Keep as close an eye on that shelf jockey as he’s keeping on you. He’s capable of unspeakable things.