text:
Economy of Afghanistan

The economy of Afghanistan is listed as the 124th largest in the world in terms of nominal gross domestic product (GDP), and 102nd largest in the world in terms of purchasing power parity (PPP). With a population of around 41 million people, Afghanistan's GDP (nominal) stands at $14.58 billion as of 2021, amounting to a GDP per capita of $363.7 (according to a World Bank report). Its annual exports exceed $2 billion, with agricultural, mineral and textile products accounting for 94% of total exports. The nation's total external debt is $1.4 billion as of 2022.

The Afghan economy continues to improve due to the influx of expats, establishment of more trade routes with neighboring and regional countries, and expansion of the nation's agriculture, energy and mining sectors. The billions of dollars in assistance that came from expats and the international community saw this increase when there was more political reliability after NATO became involved in Afghanistan.

Despite holding over one trillion dollars in proven untapped mineral deposits, Afghanistan remains one of the least developed countries in the world. Its unemployment rate is over 23% and about half of its population lives below the poverty line. The main factor behind this has been the continuous war in the country, which deterred business investors and left much of the population fighting among each other instead of catching up with the rest of the world. Afghanistan has long sought foreign investment in order to improve its economy. The population of Afghanistan increased by more than 50% between 2001 and 2014, while its GDP grew eightfold. After the U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan and the Taliban's return to power in 2021, the Biden administration decided to confiscate or withhold $9.5 billion worth of assets from the Afghanistan Central Bank to stop the Taliban from accessing it.

The official currency of Afghanistan is the afghani (AFN), which has an exchange rate of around 70 afghanis to 1 United States dollar. The country has a central bank called Da Afghanistan Bank (DAB). A number of local banks also operate in the country, including the Afghanistan International Bank, Azizi Bank, New Kabul Bank and Pashtany Bank.

Economic history
When Afghanistan was ruled by Emir Abdur Rahman Khan (1880–1901) and his son Habibullah Khan (1901–1919), a great deal of commerce was controlled by the government. These monarchs were eager to develop the stature of government and the country's military capability, and so attempted to raise money by the imposition of state monopolies on the sale of commodities and high taxes. This slowed the long-term development of Afghanistan during that period. Western technologies and manufacturing methods were introduced at the command of the Afghan ruler, but in general only according to the logistical requirements of the growing army. An emphasis was placed on the manufacture of weapons and other military material. This process was in the hands of a small number of foreign experts invited to Kabul by the Afghan kings. Otherwise, it was not possible for non-Afghans, particularly westerners, to set up large-scale enterprises in Afghanistan during that period.

In the post-independence period, DAB strongly financed the cultivation of cotton; at one point, the Spinzar Cotton Company in Kunduz Province was one of the largest providers of cotton in the world, most of which were exported to the Soviet Union. Fruits were mainly exported to British-controlled India.

The first prominent plan to develop Afghanistan's economy in modern times was the Helmand Valley Authority project of 1952, modeled on the Tennessee Valley Authority in the United States, which was expected to be of primary economic importance. Glenn Foster, an American contractor working in Afghanistan in the 1950s, stated this about the Afghan people:"Even though there are masses of people, the country seems able to feed them all. Although their diet may not be abundant, you don't see the hunger that you do in some countries...."

Afghanistan began facing severe economic hardships during the 1979 Soviet invasion and ensuing civil war destroyed much of the country's limited infrastructure, and disrupted normal patterns of economic activity. Eventually, Afghanistan went from a traditional economy to a centrally planned economy up until 2002 when it was replaced by a free market economy. Gross domestic product has fallen substantially since the 1980s due to disruption of trade and transport as well as loss of labor and capital. Continuing internal strife severely hampered domestic efforts to rebuild the nation or provide ways for the international community to help.

According to the International Monetary Fund, the Afghan economy grew 20% in the fiscal year ending in March 2004, after expanding 30% in the previous 12 months. The growth was mainly attributed to United Nations assistance. Billions of dollars in international aid had entered Afghanistan from 2002 to 2021. A GDP of $4 billion in fiscal year 2003 was recalculated by the IMF to $6.1 billion, after adding proceeds from opium production. Mean graduate pay was $0.56 per man-hour in 2010. The country expects to be self sufficient in wheat, rice, poultry and dairy production by 2026.

The recent reestablishment of the Taliban government led to temporary suspension of international development aid to Afghanistan. The World Bank and International Monetary Fund also halted payments during that period. In this regard, Taliban's spiritual leader Hibatullah Akhundzada stated, "The economy of a country is built when its people work together and do not rely on foreign aid[.]" The Biden administration froze about $9 billion in assets belonging to the DAB, which was intended to block the Taliban from accessing the money. The recent droughts, earthquakes and floods in the country have created further adverse economic situation for many residents. The Ministry of Finance has collected over $2 billion in 2022.

The GDP of Afghanistan is estimated to have dropped by 20% following the Taliban return to power. Following this, after months of free-fall, the Afghan economy began stabilizing, as a result of the Taliban's restrictions on smuggled imports, limits on banking transactions, and UN aid. In 2023, the Afghan economy began seeing signs of revival. This has also been followed by stable exchange rates, low inflation, stable revenue collection, and the rise of trade in exports. In the third quarter of 2023, the Afghani rose to be the best performing currency in the world, climbing over 9% against the US dollar.

Agriculture and livestock
Agriculture remains Afghanistan’s most important source of employment: 60-80 percent of Afghanistan’s population works in this sector, although it accounts for less than a third of GDP due to insufficient irrigation, drought, lack of market access, and other structural impediments. Most Afghan farmers are primarily subsistence farmers.

Afghanistan produced in 2018:

 * 3.6 million tons of wheat;
 * 984 thousand tons of grape (18th largest world producer);
 * 615 thousand tons of potato;
 * 591 thousand tons of vegetable;
 * 381 thousand tons of watermelon;
 * 352 thousand tons of rice;
 * 329 thousand tons of melon;
 * 217 thousand tons of apple;
 * 150 thousand tons of onion;
 * 106 thousand tons of maize;
 * 56 thousand tons of barley;
 * 47 thousand tons of peach;

In addition to smaller productions of other agricultural products.

Afghanistan produces around 1.5 million tons of fresh fruits annually, which could be increased significantly. It is known for producing some of the finest fruits, especially pomegranates and grapes as well as sweet melons and mulberries. Other fruits grown in the country include apples, apricots, cherries, figs, kiwi, oranges, peaches, pears, persimmons, plums, and strawberries. As of 2022, farming is entirely organic and steadily increasing. There are over 5,000 greenhouses in the country.

The northern and western Afghan provinces are long known for pistachio cultivation. In recent years, farmers in the southern provinces began growing American pistachio trees. Provinces in the east of the country, particularly Khost and Paktia, are famous for pine nuts. The northern and central provinces are also famous for almonds and walnuts, as well as for kangina, a method of storing grapes in mud. The Bamyan Province in central Afghanistan is known for growing superior quality potatoes, which produced 370,000 tons in 2020. Nangarhar, Kunar and Laghman are the only provinces in the country where large farms of grapefruits, lemons, limes, and oranges can be found. Nangarhar also has farms of dates, peanuts, olives, and sugarcane. Cultivation of these products have spread to other provinces of the country. Other agricultural products such as avocados, bananas and pineapples have recently been planted in the provinces of Balkh, Helmand, Nangarhar, and Paktia.

Afghanistan is listed as the 54th largest vegetables producing country. Most of its vegetables are for domestic consumption and include beans, broccoli, cabbages, carrots, cauliflowers, chickpeas, coriander, corns, cucumbers, eggplants, leeks, lettuces, okras, onions, peppers, potatoes, pumpkins, radishes, rhubarb, spinach, tomatoes, turnips, and zucchinis. Wheat and cereal production is Afghanistan's traditional agricultural mainstay. The nation is nearing self-sufficiency in grain production. It requires an additional 1 to 3 million tons of wheat to become self-sufficient, which is predicted to be accomplished in the near future. Livestock in Afghanistan mainly include cattle, sheep, and goats. Poultry farming is widespread in the warmer parts of the country. The Habib Hassam Poultry Complex is located in Jalalabad.

Arable land in Afghanistan was reported to be over 7.5 million hectares. Wheat production had stood at about 5 million tonnes in 2015, nurseries held 119,000 hectares of land, and grape production is at 615,000 tonnes. It was reported that cotton production has jumped to 500,000 tons. Around 3200 ha of farm land in Afghanistan is used to cultivate saffron, mostly in the west, north and south of the country. Sugarcane is currently grown on 1750 ha of land, and asafoetida on nearly 980 ha of land.

Forestry
According to a 2010 report, only about 2.1% (or 1350000 ha) of Afghanistan is forested. This can be significantly increased by planting trees, including in the non-rocky hills and mountains which trap underground water. Some steps have been taken in recent years in planting trees in the urban areas all across Afghanistan. Even the Taliban spiritual leader has recently called for planting more trees. Felling has been made illegal nationally.

Fishing
Afghanistan is landlocked with its citizens having no direct access to an ocean. The country has many lakes, ponds, reservoirs, rivers, springs, streams, etc., which make it a suitable climate for fish farming. Historically, fish constituted a smaller part of the Afghan diet because of the unavailability of modern fish farms. Fishing only took place in the lakes and rivers, particularly in the Amu, Helmand and Kabul rivers. Consumption of fish has increased sharply due to the establishment of many fish farms. There are over 2,600 of them in the country. The largest ones are at the national reservoirs, which supply fish eggs to smaller fish farms.

Trade and industry
Afghanistan's geographical location makes it economically secured. The Lapis Lazuli corridor connects Afghanistan with Turkmenistan and ultimately ends somewhere in Europe. Other such trade routes connect Afghanistan with neighboring Iran, Pakistan, Tajikistan and Uzbekistan. The country also has direct trade with China and India via air corridor. It has four international airports, which include: Kabul International Airport in the capital city; Mazar-e Sharif International Airport in the north of the country; Herat International Airport in the west; and the Ahmad Shah Baba International Airport in Kandahar. It also has about 24 domestic airports. The major airlines of the country include Ariana Afghan Airlines and Kam Air. Its national rail network is slowly expanding to connect Central Asia with Pakistan and Iran. In addition to Central Asia, imported goods also enter by rail from neighboring Iran and China.

The Afghanistan–Pakistan Transit Trade Agreement (APTTA) allows Afghan and Pakistani cargo trucks to transit goods within both nations. This revised US-sponsored APTTA agreement also allows Afghan trucks to transport exports to India via Pakistan up to the Wagah crossing point. There are over a dozen official border crossing points all around Afghanistan. They include Abu Nasir Port in Farah Province, Ai-Khanoum in Takhar Province, Angur Ada in Paktika Province, Aqina in Faryab Province, Dand-aw-Patan in Paktia Province, Ghulam Khan in Khost Province, Hairatan in Balkh Province, Ishkashim in Badakhshan Province, Islam Qala in Herat Province, Sher Khan Bandar in Kunduz Province, Torghundi in Herat Province, Torkham in Nangarhar Province, Spin Boldak in Kandahar Province, and Zaranj in Nimruz Province. The country also has legal access to two major seaports in Pakistan, the Gwadar Port in Balochistan and the Port Qasim in Sindh. Afghanistan also has legal access to major seaports in Iran, which include the one in Bandar Abbas in the Persian Gulf and the Chabahar Port in the Gulf of Oman.

Afghanistan is endowed with a wealth of natural resources, which include extensive deposits of barites, chromite, coal, copper, gold, gemstone, iron ore, lead, lithium, marble, natural gas, petroleum, salt, sulfur, talc, uranium, and zinc. Rare-earth elements can be found all over the country. In 2006, a U.S. Geological Survey estimated that Afghanistan has as much as 36 e9cuft of natural gas, 3.6 Goilbbl of oil and condensate reserves. According to a 2007 assessment, Afghanistan has significant amounts of undiscovered non-fuel mineral resources. Geologists also found indications of abundant deposits of colored stones and gemstones, including emerald, garnet, kunzite, lapis lazuli, peridot, ruby, sapphire, spinel, and tourmaline.

It is claimed that Afghanistan has at least $1 trillion in untapped mineral deposits. A memo from the Pentagon stated that Afghanistan could become the "Saudi Arabia of lithium". Some believe that the untapped minerals are worth up to $3 trillion. The Khanashin carbonatites in the Helmand Province of the country have an estimated 1 million metric tonnes of rare earth elements.

Afghanistan currently has a copper mining deal with China Metallurgical Group Corporation, which involves the investment of $2.8 billion by China and an annual income of about $400 million to the Afghan government. The country's Ainak copper mine, located in Logar Province, is one of the biggest in the world. It is estimated to hold at least 11 million tonnes or US$33 billion worth of copper.

The previous government has signed a 30-year contract with investment group Centar and its operating company, Afghan Gold and Minerals Co., to explore and develop a copper mining operation in Balkhab District in Sar-e Pol Province, including a gold mining operation in Badakhshan Province. The copper contract involved a $56 million investment and the gold contract a $22 million investment.

The country's other recently announced treasure is the Hajigak iron mine, located 130 mi west of Kabul and is believed to hold an estimated 1.8 billion to 2 billion metric tons of the mineral used to make steel. The country also has a number of coal mines.

Afghanistan's important resource in the past has been natural gas, which was first tapped in 1967. During the 1980s, gas sales accounted for $300 million a year in export revenues (56% of the total). About 90% of these exports went to the Soviet Union to pay for imports and debts. However, during the withdrawal of Soviet troops in 1989, the natural gas fields were capped to prevent sabotage by criminals. Gas production has dropped from a high of 8.2 e6m3 per day in the 1980s to a low of about 600000 m3 in 2001. Production of natural gas was restored during the Karzai administration in 2010.

It is predicted that by pumping-out its own oil reserves,  Afghanistan will no longer be importing oil products after 2026. Originally, the Karzai administration and China National Petroleum Corporation (CNPC) signed a contract for the development of three oil fields in the northern provinces of Sar-e Pol, Jowzjan and Faryab. It was later reported that CNPC began extracting 1.5 e6oilbbl of oil annually. In early 2023, the Xinjiang Central Asia Petroleum and Gas Company signed a similar contract with the Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan. Russia had also found interest in oil and gas supply to Afghanistan.

Economic development and recovery
Afghanistan embarked on a modest economic development program in the 1930s. The government founded banks; introduced paper money; established a university; expanded primary, secondary, and technical schools; and sent students abroad for education. In 1952 it created the Helmand Valley Authority to manage the economic development of the Helmand and Arghandab valleys through irrigation and land development, a scheme which remains one of the country's most important capital resources.

In 1956, the government promulgated the first in a long series of ambitious development plans. By the late 1970s, these had achieved only mixed results due to flaws in the planning process as well as inadequate funding and a shortage of the skilled managers and technicians needed for implementation. Da Afghanistan Bank serves as the central bank of the nation. The "afghani" (AFN) is the national currency, which has an exchange rate of around 70 afghanis to 1 US dollar. There are over a dozen different banks operating in the country, including Afghanistan International Bank, Kabul Bank, Azizi Bank, Pashtany Bank, Standard Chartered Bank, and First Micro Finance Bank. Cash is still widely used for most transactions. A new law on private investment provides three to seven-year tax holidays to eligible companies and a four-year exemption from exports tariffs and duties. Improvements to the business-enabling environment have resulted in more than $1.5 billion in telecom investment and created more than 100,000 jobs since 2003.

Afghanistan is a member of ECO, OIC, SAARC, and WTO. It has an observer status in the SCO. It seeks to complete the so-called New Silk Road trade project, which is aimed to connecting South Asia with Central Asia and the Middle East. This way Afghanistan will be able to collect large fees from trade passing through the country, including from the Trans-Afghanistan Pipeline.

Some of the ongoing national mega projects include the Qosh Tepa Canal project in the north of the country and the New Kabul City. Other smaller development projects include the Qatar Township in Kabul, Aino Mena in Kandahar and the Ghazi Amanullah Khan Town east of Jalalabad. Similar projects are also found in Herat in the west, Mazar-e-Sharif in the north, Khost in the east, and in other cities.

There are as much as 5,000 factories in Afghanistan. Most are locally owned,    while others involve foreign investors. They produce construction materials, furniture, household items, apparel, food, beverages, pharmaceutical products, etc. The country imports roughly $500 million of textile goods from other countries. It exported about $168 million worth of cotton in 2022. Afghan handwoven rugs are one of the most popular products for exportation. Other products include hand crafted antique replicas as well as leather and furs. Afghanistan is the third largest exporter of cashmere.

After the Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan returned to power, the country suffered from a major liquidity crisis and lack of banknotes. Because outside donors have severely cut funding to support Afghanistan's health, education, and other essential sectors, many Afghans lost their incomes. Under the assessment system of the World Food Programme (WFP), almost 20 million people suffered either level-3 “crisis” or level-4 “emergency” levels of food insecurity. The crisis’ impact on women and girls was especially severe. Officials under the new Islamic Emirate continue to provide communication services to areas that lacked them. The government collected 61 billion afghanis in tariffs in 2022, which increased to 76 billion in 2023. It continues to attract foreign investors.

Tourism
Tourism in Afghanistan was at its peak in 1977. Many tourists from around the world visited Afghanistan, including from as far away as Europe and North America. All of that ended with the start of the April 1978 Saur Revolution. However, it is again gradually increasing despite having reputation as one of the most dangerous countries in the world. Between 4,000 and 20,000 foreign tourists visit Afghanistan every year. As many as 371,000 Afghans have visited different parts of the country in 2022. Tourists are advised to avoid areas where armed criminals may operate.

Ariana, Flydubai and Kam Air all provide flight services between Dubai International Airport and Kabul International Airport. The city of Kabul has many guest houses and hotels, which include the Kabul Serena Hotel, the Hotel Inter-Continental Kabul, the Safi Landmark Hotel, and the Kabul Star Hotel. Small number of guest houses and hotels are also available in other cities such Kandahar, Herat, Mazar-i-Sharif, Jalalabad, Bamyan, Fayezabad, etc. For those wanting to travel by road, there are bus terminals with mosques, Afghan style restaurants and small shops in the major cities. The following are some of the notable places in Afghanistan that tourists visit:
 * Badakhshan Province
 * Fayzabad
 * Ishkashim (border crossing between Afghanistan and Tajikistan)
 * Wakhan National Park in Wakhan District
 * Balkh Province
 * Great Blue Mosque in Mazar-i-Sharif
 * Balkh (ancient town)
 * Hairatan (border crossing between Afghanistan and Uzbekistan)
 * Bamyan Province
 * Band-e Amir National Park
 * Site of Buddhas of Bamyan
 * Zuhak
 * Ghazni Province
 * Burial site of Al-Biruni
 * Burial site of Mahmud of Ghazni
 * Citadel of Ghazni
 * Jaghori District (various cultural and scenic sites)
 * Sarda Dam in Andar District
 * Herat Province
 * Great Mosque of Herat
 * Herat Citadel
 * Islam Qala (border crossing between Afghanistan and Iran)
 * Torghundi (border crossing between Afghanistan and Turkmenistan)
 * Salma Dam (Afghanistan-India Friendship Dam)
 * Kabul Province
 * Chihil Sutun
 * Darulaman (Darul Aman Palace, Tajbeg Palace, Afghan Parliament, National Museum of Afghanistan, etc.)
 * Gardens of Babur
 * Paghman
 * Qargha Reservoir
 * Shahr-e Naw (Kabul City Center, Serena Hotel, Abdul Rahman Mosque, Shahr-e Naw Park, foreign embassies, etc.)
 * Wazir Akbar Khan (Arg, Kabul International Airport, foreign embassies, etc.)
 * Kandahar Province
 * Aino Mina (modern community with hotels, guest houses, restaurants, shops, parks, etc.)
 * Dahla Dam in Shah Wali Kot District
 * Chilzina Park
 * Mausoleum of Mirwais Hotak
 * Reg District (Sand District)
 * Shrine of the Cloak
 * Shrine of Baba Wali in Arghandab
 * Nangarhar Province
 * Jalalabad
 * Ghazi Amanullah International Cricket Stadium (next to Ghazi Amanullah Khan Town)
 * Darunta Dam
 * Nimruz Province
 * Zaranj (border crossing between Afghanistan and Iran)
 * Kamal Khan Dam
 * Nuristan Province
 * Parun
 * Panjshir Province
 * Bazarak
 * Panjshir Valley

National data
The following table shows the main economic indicators in 2002–2020 (with IMF staff estimates in 2021–2026). Inflation below 5% is in green. The annual unemployment rate is extracted from the World Bank, although the International Monetary Fund find them unreliable.

Gross national saving: 22.7% of GDP (2017)

GDP - composition by sector: note: data excludes opium production
 * agriculture: 23% (2016)
 * industry: 21.1% (2016)
 * services: 55.9% (2016)

GDP - composition by end use:
 * household consumption: 81.6% (2016)
 * government consumption: 12% (2016)
 * investment in fixed capital: 17.2% (2016)
 * investment in inventories: 30% (2016)
 * exports of goods and services: 6.7% (2016)
 * imports of goods and services: -47.6% (2016)

Household income or consumption by percentage share:
 * lowest 10%: 3.8%
 * highest 10%: 24% (2008)

Agriculture - products: wheat, milk, grapes, vegetables, potatoes, watermelons, melons, rice, onions, apples

Industries: small-scale production of bricks, textiles, soap, furniture, shoes, fertilizer, apparel, food-products, non-alcoholic beverages, mineral water, cement; handwoven carpets; natural gas, coal, copper

Industrial production growth rate: -1.9% (2016) country comparison to the world: 181

Labor force: 8.478 million (2017) country comparison to the world: 58

Labor force - by occupation: agriculture 44.3%, industry 18.1%, services 37.6% (2017)

Population below poverty line: 54.5% (2017)

Budget:
 * revenues: 2.276 billion (2017)
 * expenditures: 5.328 billion

Taxes and other revenues: 11.2% (of GDP) (2017) country comparison to the world: 210

Exports: $2 billion (2022) country comparison to the world: 164

Exports - commodities: gold, grapes, opium, fruits and nuts, insect resins, cotton, handwoven carpets, soapstone, scrap metal (2019)

Exports - partners: United Arab Emirates 45%, Pakistan 24%, India 22%, China 1% (2019)

Imports: $7 billion (2022) country comparison to the world: 125

Imports - commodities: wheat flours, broadcasting equipment, refined petroleum, rolled tobacco, aircraft parts, synthetic fabrics (2019)

Imports - partners: United Arab Emirates 23%, Pakistan 17%, India 13%, China 9%, United States 9%, Uzbekistan 7%, Kazakhstan 6% (2019)

Reserves of foreign exchange and gold: $7.187 billion (2017) country comparison to the world: 85

Current account balance: $1.014 billion (2017) country comparison to the world: 49

Currency: Afghani (AFN)

Exchange rates: 67 afghanis to 1 US dollar (2023)

Fiscal year: 21 December - 20 December

Energy in Afghanistan
Energy in Afghanistan is provided by hydropower followed by fossil fuel and solar power. The nation currently generates over 600 megawatts (MW) of electricity from its several hydroelectric plants as well as using fossil fuel and solar panels. Over 670 MW more is imported from neighboring Iran, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan and Uzbekistan. Da Afghanistan Breshna Sherkat (DABS) is the national electricity provider.

Price of electricity is 2.5 afghanis per kw in Kabul Province, 4 afghanis in Herat Province, and around 6 afghanis in Balkh Province. The government wants to use the nation's coal reserves to produce extra electricity. The CASA-1000 project will also add 300 MW of electricity to the national grid.

Due to large influx of expats from neighboring Pakistan and Iran, the nation may require as much as 7,000 MW of electricity in the coming years. The Afghan National Development Strategy has identified renewable energy alternatives, such as wind and solar energy, as a high value power source to develop. A number of major solar and wind farms already exist in the country,  with more under development.

license: Creative Commons - Attribution Share-Alike - https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/

title: Economy of Afghanistan


text:
Elf

An elf (: elves) is a type of humanoid supernatural being in Germanic folklore. Elves appear especially in North Germanic mythology, being mentioned in the Icelandic Poetic Edda and Snorri Sturluson's Prose Edda.

In medieval Germanic-speaking cultures, elves generally seem to have been thought of as beings with magical powers and supernatural beauty, ambivalent towards everyday people and capable of either helping or hindering them. However, the details of these beliefs have varied considerably over time and space and have flourished in both pre-Christian and Christian cultures.

Sometimes elves are, like dwarves, associated with craftsmanship. Wayland the Smith embodies this feature. He is known under many names, depending on the language in which the stories were distributed. The names include Völund in Old Norse, Wēland in Anglo-Saxon and Wieland in German. The story of Wayland is also to be found in the Prose Edda.

The word elf is found throughout the Germanic languages and seems originally to have meant 'white being'. However, reconstructing the early concept of an elf depends largely on texts written by Christians, in Old and Middle English, medieval German, and Old Norse. These associate elves variously with the gods of Norse mythology, with causing illness, with magic, and with beauty and seduction.

After the medieval period, the word elf tended to become less common throughout the Germanic languages, losing out to alternative native terms like Zwerg ('dwarf') in German and huldra ('hidden being') in North Germanic languages, and to loan-words like fairy (borrowed from French into most of the Germanic languages). Still, belief in elves persisted in the early modern period, particularly in Scotland and Scandinavia, where elves were thought of as magically powerful people living, usually invisibly, alongside everyday human communities. They continued to be associated with causing illnesses and with sexual threats. For example, several early modern ballads in the British Isles and Scandinavia, originating in the medieval period, describe elves attempting to seduce or abduct human characters.

With urbanisation and industrialisation in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, belief in elves declined rapidly (though Iceland has some claim to continued popular belief in elves). However, elves started to be prominent in the literature and art of educated elites from the early modern period onwards. These literary elves were imagined as tiny, playful beings, with William Shakespeare's A Midsummer Night's Dream being a key development of this idea. In the eighteenth century, German Romantic writers were influenced by this notion of the elf and re-imported the English word elf into the German language.

From the Romantic idea of elves came the elves of popular culture that emerged in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The "Christmas elves" of contemporary popular culture are a relatively recent creation, popularized during the late 19th century in the United States. Elves entered the twentieth-century high fantasy genre in the wake of works published by authors such as J. R. R. Tolkien; these re-popularised the idea of elves as human-sized and humanlike beings. Elves remain a prominent feature of fantasy media today.

Reality and perception
Elves have in many times and places been believed to be real beings. Where enough people have believed in the reality of elves that those beliefs then had real effects in the world, they can be understood as part of people's worldview, and as a social reality: a thing which, like the exchange value of a dollar bill or the sense of pride stirred up by a national flag, is real because of people's beliefs rather than as an objective reality. Accordingly, beliefs about elves and their social functions have varied over time and space.

Even in the twenty-first century, fantasy stories about elves have been argued both to reflect and to shape their audiences' understanding of the real world, and traditions about Santa Claus and his elves relate to Christmas.

Over time, people have attempted to demythologise or rationalise beliefs in elves in various ways.

Integration into Christian cosmologies

Beliefs about elves have their origins before the conversion to Christianity and associated Christianization of northwest Europe. For this reason, belief in elves has, from the Middle Ages through into recent scholarship, often been labelled "pagan" and a "superstition." However, almost all surviving textual sources about elves were produced by Christians (whether Anglo-Saxon monks, medieval Icelandic poets, early modern ballad-singers, nineteenth-century folklore collectors, or even twentieth-century fantasy authors). Attested beliefs about elves, therefore, need to be understood as part of Germanic-speakers' Christian culture and not merely a relic of their pre-Christian religion. Accordingly, investigating the relationship between beliefs in elves and Christian cosmology has been a preoccupation of scholarship about elves both in early times and modern research.

Historically, people have taken three main approaches to integrate elves into Christian cosmology, all of which are found widely across time and space:

 * Identifying elves with the demons of Judaeo-Christian-Mediterranean tradition. For example:
 * In English-language material: in the Royal Prayer Book from c. 900, elf appears as a gloss for "Satan". In the late-fourteenth-century Wife of Bath's Tale, Geoffrey Chaucer equates male elves with incubi (demons which rape sleeping women). In the early modern Scottish witchcraft trials, witnesses' descriptions of encounters with elves were often interpreted by prosecutors as encounters with the Devil.
 * In medieval Iceland, Snorri Sturluson wrote in his Prose Edda of ljósálfar and dökkálfar ('light-elves and dark-elves'), the ljósálfar living in the heavens and the dökkálfar under the earth. The consensus of modern scholarship is that Snorri's elves are based on angels and demons of Christian cosmology.
 * Elves appear as demonic forces widely in medieval and early modern English, German, and Scandinavian prayers.
 * Viewing elves as being more or less like people and more or less outside Christian cosmology. The Icelanders who copied the Poetic Edda did not explicitly try to integrate elves into Christian thought. Likewise, the early modern Scottish people who confessed to encountering elves seem not to have thought of themselves as having dealings with the Devil. Nineteenth-century Icelandic folklore about elves mostly presents them as a human agricultural community parallel to the visible human community, which may or may not be Christian. It is possible that stories were sometimes told from this perspective as a political act, to subvert the dominance of the Church.
 * Integrating elves into Christian cosmology without identifying them as demons. The most striking examples are serious theological treatises: the Icelandic Tíðfordrif (1644) by Jón Guðmundsson lærði or, in Scotland, Robert Kirk's Secret Commonwealth of Elves, Fauns, and Fairies (1691). This approach also appears in the Old English poem Beowulf, which lists elves among the races springing from Cain's murder of Abel. The late thirteenth-century South English Legendary and some Icelandic folktales explain elves as angels that sided neither with Lucifer nor with God and were banished by God to earth rather than hell. One famous Icelandic folktale explains elves as the lost children of Eve.

Demythologising elves as indigenous peoples
Some nineteenth- and twentieth-century scholars attempted to rationalise beliefs in elves as folk memories of lost indigenous peoples. Since belief in supernatural beings is ubiquitous in human cultures, scholars no longer believe such explanations are valid. Research has shown, however, that stories about elves have often been used as a way for people to think metaphorically about real-life ethnic others.

Demythologising elves as people with illness or disability
Scholars have at times also tried to explain beliefs in elves as being inspired by people suffering certain kinds of illnesses (such as Williams syndrome). Elves were certainly often seen as a cause of illness, and indeed the English word oaf seems to have originated as a form of elf: the word elf came to mean 'changeling left by an elf' and then, because changelings were noted for their failure to thrive, to its modern sense 'a fool, a stupid person; a large, clumsy man or boy'. However, it again seems unlikely that the origin of beliefs in elves itself is to be explained by people's encounters with objectively real people affected by disease.

Etymology

The English word elf is from the Old English word most often attested as ælf (whose plural would have been *ælfe). Although this word took a variety of forms in different Old English dialects, these converged on the form elf during the Middle English period. During the Old English period, separate forms were used for female elves (such as ælfen, putatively from Proto-Germanic *ɑlβ(i)innjō), but during the Middle English period the word elf routinely came to include female beings.

The Old English forms are cognates – linguistic siblings stemming from a common origin – with medieval Germanic terms such as Old Norse alfr ('elf'; plural alfar), Old High German alp ('evil spirit'; pl. alpî, elpî; feminine elbe), Burgundian *alfs ('elf'), and Middle Low German alf ('evil spirit'). These words must come from Proto-Germanic, the ancestor-language of the attested Germanic languages; the Proto-Germanic forms are reconstructed as *ɑlβi-z and *ɑlβɑ-z.

Germanic *ɑlβi-z~*ɑlβɑ-z is generally agreed to be a cognate with Latin albus ('(matt) white'), Old Irish ailbhín ('flock'), Ancient Greek ἀλφός (alphós; 'whiteness, white leprosy';), and Albanian elb ('barley'); and the Germanic word for 'swan' reconstructed as *albit- (compare Modern Icelandic álpt) is often thought to be derived from it. These all come from a Proto-Indo-European root *h₂elbʰ-, and seem to be connected by the idea of whiteness. The Germanic word presumably originally meant 'white one', perhaps as a euphemism. Jakob Grimm thought whiteness implied positive moral connotations, and, noting Snorri Sturluson's ljósálfar, suggested that elves were divinities of light. This is not necessarily the case, however. For example, because the cognates suggest matt white rather than shining white, and because in medieval Scandinavian texts whiteness is associated with beauty, Alaric Hall has suggested that elves may have been called 'the white people' because whiteness was associated with (specifically feminine) beauty. Some scholars have argued that the names Albion and Alps may also be related (possibly through Celtic).

A completely different etymology, making elf a cognate with the Ṛbhus, semi-divine craftsmen in Indian mythology, was suggested by Adalbert Kuhn in 1855. In this case, *ɑlβi-z would connote the meaning 'skillful, inventive, clever', and could be a cognate with Latin labor, in the sense of 'creative work'. While often mentioned, this etymology is not widely accepted.

In proper names
Throughout the medieval Germanic languages, elf was one of the nouns used in personal names, almost invariably as a first element. These names may have been influenced by Celtic names beginning in Albio- such as Albiorix.

Personal names provide the only evidence for elf in Gothic, which must have had the word *albs (plural *albeis). The most famous name of this kind is Alboin. Old English names in elf- include the cognate of Alboin Ælfwine (literally "elf-friend", m.), Ælfric ("elf-powerful", m.), Ælfweard ("elf-guardian", m.), and Ælfwaru ("elf-care", f.). A widespread survivor of these in modern English is Alfred (Old English Ælfrēd, "elf-advice"). Also surviving are the English surname Elgar (Ælfgar, "elf-spear"), and the name of St Alphege (Ælfhēah, "elf-tall"). German examples are Alberich, Alphart and Alphere (father of Walter of Aquitaine) and Icelandic examples include Álfhildur. These names suggest that elves were positively regarded in early Germanic culture. Of the many words for supernatural beings in Germanic languages, the only ones regularly used in personal names are elf and words denoting pagan gods, suggesting that elves were considered similar to gods.

In later Old Icelandic, alfr ("elf") and the personal name which in Common Germanic had been *Aþa(l)wulfaz both coincidentally became álfr~Álfr.

Elves appear in some place names, though it is difficult to be sure how many of other words, including personal names, can appear similar to elf, because of confounding elements such as al- (from eald) meaning "old". The clearest appearances of elves in English examples are Elveden ("elves' hill", Suffolk) and Elvendon ("elves' valley", Oxfordshire); other examples may be Eldon Hill ("Elves' hill", Derbyshire); and Alden Valley ("elves' valley", Lancashire). These seem to associate elves fairly consistently with woods and valleys.

As causes of illnesses
The earliest surviving manuscripts mentioning elves in any Germanic language are from Anglo-Saxon England. Medieval English evidence has, therefore, attracted quite extensive research and debate. In Old English, elves are most often mentioned in medical texts which attest to the belief that elves might afflict humans and livestock with illnesses: apparently mostly sharp, internal pains and mental disorders. The most famous of the medical texts is the metrical charm Wið færstice ("against a stabbing pain"), from the tenth-century compilation Lacnunga, but most of the attestations are in the tenth-century Bald's Leechbook and Leechbook III. This tradition continues into later English-language traditions too: elves continue to appear in Middle English medical texts.

Belief in elves causing illnesses remained prominent in early modern Scotland, where elves were viewed as supernaturally powerful people who lived invisibly alongside everyday rural people. Thus, elves were often mentioned in the early modern Scottish witchcraft trials: many witnesses in the trials believed themselves to have been given healing powers or to know of people or animals made sick by elves. Throughout these sources, elves are sometimes associated with the succubus-like supernatural being called the mare.

While they may have been thought to cause diseases with magical weapons, elves are more clearly associated in Old English with a kind of magic denoted by Old English sīden and sīdsa, a cognate with the Old Norse seiðr, and also paralleled in the Old Irish Serglige Con Culainn. By the fourteenth century, they were also associated with the arcane practice of alchemy.

"Elf-shot"

In one or two Old English medical texts, elves might be envisaged as inflicting illnesses with projectiles. In the twentieth century, scholars often labelled the illnesses elves caused as "elf-shot", but work from the 1990s onwards showed that the medieval evidence for elves' being thought to cause illnesses in this way is slender; debate about its significance is ongoing.

The noun elf-shot is first attested in a Scots poem, "Rowlis Cursing," from around 1500, where "elf schot" is listed among a range of curses to be inflicted on some chicken thieves. The term may not always have denoted an actual projectile: shot could mean "a sharp pain" as well as "projectile." But in early modern Scotland, elf-schot and other terms like elf-arrowhead are sometimes used of neolithic arrow-heads, apparently thought to have been made by elves. In a few witchcraft trials, people attest that these arrow-heads were used in healing rituals and occasionally alleged that witches (and perhaps elves) used them to injure people and cattle. Compare with the following excerpt from a 1749–50 ode by William Collins:

"There every herd, by sad experience, knows How, winged with fate, their elf-shot arrows fly, When the sick ewe her summer food forgoes, Or, stretched on earth, the heart-smit heifers lie."

Size, appearance, and sexuality
Because of elves' association with illness, in the twentieth century, most scholars imagined that elves in the Anglo-Saxon tradition were small, invisible, demonic beings, causing illnesses with arrows. This was encouraged by the idea that "elf-shot" is depicted in the Eadwine Psalter, in an image which became well known in this connection. However, this is now thought to be a misunderstanding: the image proves to be a conventional illustration of God's arrows and Christian demons. Rather, twenty-first century scholarship suggests that Anglo-Saxon elves, like elves in Scandinavia or the Irish Aos Sí, were regarded as people.

Like words for gods and men, the word elf is used in personal names where words for monsters and demons are not. Just as álfar is associated with Æsir in Old Norse, the Old English Wið færstice associates elves with ēse; whatever this word meant by the tenth century, etymologically it denoted pagan gods. In Old English, the plural ylfe (attested in Beowulf) is grammatically an ethnonym (a word for an ethnic group), suggesting that elves were seen as people. As well as appearing in medical texts, the Old English word ælf and its feminine derivative ælbinne were used in glosses to translate Latin words for nymphs. This fits well with the word ælfscȳne, which meant "elf-beautiful" and is attested describing the seductively beautiful Biblical heroines Sarah and Judith.

Likewise, in Middle English and early modern Scottish evidence, while still appearing as causes of harm and danger, elves appear clearly as humanlike beings. They became associated with medieval chivalric romance traditions of fairies and particularly with the idea of a Fairy Queen. A propensity to seduce or rape people becomes increasingly prominent in the source material. Around the fifteenth century, evidence starts to appear for the belief that elves might steal human babies and replace them with changelings.

Decline in the use of the word elf
By the end of the medieval period, elf was increasingly being supplanted by the French loan-word fairy. An example is Geoffrey Chaucer's satirical tale Sir Thopas, where the title character sets out in a quest for the "elf-queen", who dwells in the "countree of the Faerie".

Mythological texts

Evidence for elf beliefs in medieval Scandinavia outside Iceland is sparse, but the Icelandic evidence is uniquely rich. For a long time, views about elves in Old Norse mythology were defined by Snorri Sturluson's Prose Edda, which talks about svartálfar, dökkálfar and ljósálfar ("black elves", "dark elves", and "light elves"). For example, Snorri recounts how the svartálfar create new blond hair for Thor's wife Sif after Loki had shorn off Sif's long hair. However, these terms are attested only in the Prose Edda and texts based on it. It is now agreed that they reflect traditions of dwarves, demons, and angels, partly showing Snorri's "paganisation" of a Christian cosmology learned from the Elucidarius, a popular digest of Christian thought.

Scholars of Old Norse mythology now focus on references to elves in Old Norse poetry, particularly the Elder Edda. The only character explicitly identified as an elf in classical Eddaic poetry, if any, is Völundr, the protagonist of Völundarkviða. However, elves are frequently mentioned in the alliterating phrase Æsir ok Álfar ('Æsir and elves') and its variants. This was a well-established poetic formula, indicating a strong tradition of associating elves with the group of gods known as the Æsir, or even suggesting that the elves and Æsir were one and the same. The pairing is paralleled in the Old English poem Wið færstice and in the Germanic personal name system; moreover, in Skaldic verse the word elf is used in the same way as words for gods. Sigvatr Þórðarson's skaldic travelogue Austrfaravísur, composed around 1020, mentions an álfablót ('elves' sacrifice') in Edskogen in what is now southern Sweden. There does not seem to have been any clear-cut distinction between humans and gods; like the Æsir, then, elves were presumably thought of as being humanlike and existing in opposition to the giants. Many commentators have also (or instead) argued for conceptual overlap between elves and dwarves in Old Norse mythology, which may fit with trends in the medieval German evidence.

There are hints that the god Freyr was associated with elves. In particular, Álfheimr (literally "elf-world") is mentioned as being given to Freyr in Grímnismál. Snorri Sturluson identified Freyr as one of the Vanir. However, the term Vanir is rare in Eddaic verse, very rare in Skaldic verse, and is not generally thought to appear in other Germanic languages. Given the link between Freyr and the elves, it has therefore long been suspected that álfar and Vanir are, more or less, different words for the same group of beings. However, this is not uniformly accepted.

A kenning (poetic metaphor) for the sun, álfröðull (literally "elf disc"), is of uncertain meaning but is to some suggestive of a close link between elves and the sun.

Although the relevant words are of slightly uncertain meaning, it seems fairly clear that Völundr is described as one of the elves in Völundarkviða. As his most prominent deed in the poem is to rape Böðvildr, the poem associates elves with being a sexual threat to maidens. The same idea is present in two post-classical Eddaic poems, which are also influenced by chivalric romance or Breton lais, Kötludraumur and Gullkársljóð. The idea also occurs in later traditions in Scandinavia and beyond, so it may be an early attestation of a prominent tradition. Elves also appear in a couple of verse spells, including the Bergen rune-charm from among the Bryggen inscriptions.

Other sources

The appearance of elves in sagas is closely defined by genre. The Sagas of Icelanders, Bishops' sagas, and contemporary sagas, whose portrayal of the supernatural is generally restrained, rarely mention álfar, and then only in passing. But although limited, these texts provide some of the best evidence for the presence of elves in everyday beliefs in medieval Scandinavia. They include a fleeting mention of elves seen out riding in 1168 (in Sturlunga saga); mention of an álfablót ("elves' sacrifice") in Kormáks saga; and the existence of the euphemism ganga álfrek ('go to drive away the elves') for "going to the toilet" in Eyrbyggja saga.

The Kings' sagas include a rather elliptical but widely studied account of an early Swedish king being worshipped after his death and being called Ólafr Geirstaðaálfr ('Ólafr the elf of Geirstaðir'), and a demonic elf at the beginning of Norna-Gests þáttr.

The legendary sagas tend to focus on elves as legendary ancestors or on heroes' sexual relations with elf-women. Mention of the land of Álfheimr is found in Heimskringla while Þorsteins saga Víkingssonar recounts a line of local kings who ruled over Álfheim, who since they had elven blood were said to be more beautiful than most men. According to Hrólfs saga kraka, Hrolfr Kraki's half-sister Skuld was the half-elven child of King Helgi and an elf-woman (álfkona). Skuld was skilled in witchcraft (seiðr). Accounts of Skuld in earlier sources, however, do not include this material. The Þiðreks saga version of the Nibelungen (Niflungar) describes Högni as the son of a human queen and an elf, but no such lineage is reported in the Eddas, Völsunga saga, or the Nibelungenlied. The relatively few mentions of elves in the chivalric sagas tend even to be whimsical.

In his Rerum Danicarum fragmenta (1596) written mostly in Latin with some Old Danish and Old Icelandic passages, Arngrímur Jónsson explains the Scandinavian and Icelandic belief in elves (called Allffuafolch). Both Continental Scandinavia and Iceland have a scattering of mentions of elves in medical texts, sometimes in Latin and sometimes in the form of amulets, where elves are viewed as a possible cause of illness. Most of them have Low German connections.

Medieval and early modern German texts

The Old High German word alp is attested only in a small number of glosses. It is defined by the Althochdeutsches Wörterbuch as a "nature-god or nature-demon, equated with the Fauns of Classical mythology... regarded as eerie, ferocious beings... As the mare he messes around with women". Accordingly, the German word Alpdruck (literally "elf-oppression") means "nightmare". There is also evidence associating elves with illness, specifically epilepsy.

In a similar vein, elves are in Middle High German most often associated with deceiving or bewildering people in a phrase that occurs so often it would appear to be proverbial: die elben/der alp trieget mich ("the elves/elf are/is deceiving me"). The same pattern holds in Early Modern German. This deception sometimes shows the seductive side apparent in English and Scandinavian material: most famously, the early thirteenth-century Heinrich von Morungen's fifth Minnesang begins "Von den elben wirt entsehen vil manic man / Sô bin ich von grôzer liebe entsên" ("full many a man is bewitched by elves / thus I too am bewitched by great love"). Elbe was also used in this period to translate words for nymphs.

In later medieval prayers, Elves appear as a threatening, even demonic, force. For example, some prayers invoke God's help against nocturnal attacks by Alpe. Correspondingly, in the early modern period, elves are described in north Germany doing the evil bidding of witches; Martin Luther believed his mother to have been afflicted in this way.

As in Old Norse, however, there are few characters identified as elves. It seems likely that in the German-speaking world, elves were to a significant extent conflated with dwarves. Thus, some dwarves that appear in German heroic poetry have been seen as relating to elves. In particular, nineteenth-century scholars tended to think that the dwarf Alberich, whose name etymologically means "elf-powerful," was influenced by early traditions of elves.

Britain

From around the Late Middle Ages, the word elf began to be used in English as a term loosely synonymous with the French loan-word fairy; in elite art and literature, at least, it also became associated with diminutive supernatural beings like Puck, hobgoblins, Robin Goodfellow, the English and Scots brownie, and the Northumbrian English hob.

However, in Scotland and parts of northern England near the Scottish border, beliefs in elves remained prominent into the nineteenth century. James VI of Scotland and Robert Kirk discussed elves seriously; elf beliefs are prominently attested in the Scottish witchcraft trials, particularly the trial of Issobel Gowdie; and related stories also appear in folktales, There is a significant corpus of ballads narrating stories about elves, such as Thomas the Rhymer, where a man meets a female elf; Tam Lin, The Elfin Knight, and Lady Isabel and the Elf-Knight, in which an Elf-Knight rapes, seduces, or abducts a woman; and The Queen of Elfland's Nourice, a woman is abducted to be a wet-nurse to the elf queen's baby, but promised that she might return home once the child is weaned.

Terminology
In Scandinavian folklore, many humanlike supernatural beings are attested, which might be thought of as elves and partly originate in medieval Scandinavian beliefs. However, the characteristics and names of these beings have varied widely across time and space, and they cannot be neatly categorised. These beings are sometimes known by words descended directly from the Old Norse álfr. However, in modern languages, traditional terms related to álfr have tended to be replaced with other terms. Things are further complicated because when referring to the elves of Old Norse mythology, scholars have adopted new forms based directly on the Old Norse word álfr. The following table summarises the situation in the main modern standard languages of Scandinavia.

Appearance and behaviour

The elves of Norse mythology have survived into folklore mainly as females, living in hills and mounds of stones. The Swedish älvor were stunningly beautiful girls who lived in the forest with an elven king.

The elves could be seen dancing over meadows, particularly at night and on misty mornings. They left a circle where they had danced, 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. In the words of the local historian Anne Marie Hellström:

"... on lake shores, where the forest met the lake, you could find elf circles. They were round places where the grass had been flattened like a floor. Elves had danced there. By Lake Tisnaren, I have seen one of those. It could be dangerous, and one could become ill if one had trodden over such a place or if one destroyed anything there."

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. Humans being invited or lured to the elf dance is a common motif transferred from older Scandinavian ballads.

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 the 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.

In ballads
Elves have a prominent place in several closely related ballads, which must have originated in the Middle Ages but are first attested in the early modern period. Many of these ballads are first attested in Karen Brahes Folio, a Danish manuscript from the 1570s, but they circulated widely in Scandinavia and northern Britain. They sometimes mention elves because they were learned by heart, even though that term had become archaic in everyday usage. They have therefore played a major role in transmitting traditional ideas about elves in post-medieval cultures. Indeed, some of the early modern ballads are still quite widely known, whether through school syllabuses or contemporary folk music. They, therefore, give people an unusual degree of access to ideas of elves from older traditional culture.

The ballads are characterised by sexual encounters between everyday people and humanlike beings referred to in at least some variants as elves (the same characters also appear as mermen, dwarves, and other kinds of supernatural beings). The elves pose a threat to the everyday community by lure people into the elves' world. The most famous example is Elveskud and its many variants (paralleled in English as Clerk Colvill), where a woman from the elf world tries to tempt a young knight to join her in dancing, or to live among the elves; in some versions he refuses, and in some he accepts, but in either case he dies, tragically. As in Elveskud, sometimes the everyday person is a man and the elf a woman, as also in Elvehøj (much the same story as Elveskud, but with a happy ending), Herr Magnus og Bjærgtrolden, Herr Tønne af Alsø, Herr Bøsmer i elvehjem, or the Northern British Thomas the Rhymer. Sometimes the everyday person is a woman, and the elf is a man, as in the northern British Tam Lin, The Elfin Knight, and Lady Isabel and the Elf-Knight, in which the Elf-Knight bears away Isabel to murder her, or the Scandinavian Harpans kraft. In The Queen of Elfland's Nourice, a woman is abducted to be a wet nurse to the elf-queen's baby, but promised that she might return home once the child is weaned.

As causes of illness

In folk stories, Scandinavian elves often play the role of disease spirits. The most common, though the also most harmless case was various irritating skin rashes, which were called älvablåst (elven puff) 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 (pictogram on a rock) found in Scandinavia, were known in older times as älvkvarnar (elven mills), because it was believed elves had used them. One could appease the elves by offering a treat (preferably butter) placed into an elven mill.

In order to protect themselves and their livestock 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 to protect against elves. The second form was an ordinary cross carved onto a round or oblong silver plate. This second kind of elf cross was worn as a pendant in a necklace, and 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 for three consecutive Sundays.

Modern continuations
In Iceland, expressing belief in the huldufólk ("hidden people"), elves that dwell in rock formations, is still relatively common. Even when Icelanders do not explicitly express their belief, they are often reluctant to express disbelief. A 2006 and 2007 study by the University of Iceland's Faculty of Social Sciences revealed that many would not rule out the existence of elves and ghosts, a result similar to a 1974 survey by Erlendur Haraldsson. The lead researcher of the 2006–2007 study, Terry Gunnell, stated: "Icelanders seem much more open to phenomena like dreaming the future, forebodings, ghosts and elves than other nations". Whether significant numbers of Icelandic people do believe in elves or not, elves are certainly prominent in national discourses. They occur most often in oral narratives and news reporting in which they disrupt house- and road-building. In the analysis of Valdimar Tr. Hafstein, "narratives about the insurrections of elves demonstrate supernatural sanction against development and urbanization; that is to say, the supernaturals protect and enforce religious values and traditional rural culture. The elves fend off, with more or less success, the attacks, and advances of modern technology, palpable in the bulldozer." Elves are also prominent, in similar roles, in contemporary Icelandic literature.

Folk stories told in the nineteenth century about elves are still told in modern Denmark and Sweden. Still, they now feature ethnic minorities in place of elves in essentially racist discourse. In an ethnically fairly homogeneous medieval countryside, supernatural beings provided the Other through which everyday people created their identities; in cosmopolitan industrial contexts, ethnic minorities or immigrants are used in storytelling to similar effect.

Early modern elite culture

Early modern Europe saw the emergence for the first time of a distinctive elite culture: while the Reformation encouraged new skepticism and opposition to traditional beliefs, subsequent Romanticism encouraged the fetishisation of such beliefs by intellectual elites. The effects of this on writing about elves are most apparent in England and Germany, with developments in each country influencing the other. In Scandinavia, the Romantic movement was also prominent, and literary writing was the main context for continued use of the word elf, except in fossilised words for illnesses. However, oral traditions about beings like elves remained prominent in Scandinavia into the early twentieth century.

Elves entered early modern elite culture most clearly in the literature of Elizabethan England. Here Edmund Spenser's Faerie Queene (1590–) used fairy and elf interchangeably of human-sized beings, but they are complex, imaginary and allegorical figures. Spenser also presented his own explanation of the origins of the Elfe and Elfin kynd, claiming that they were created by Prometheus. Likewise, William Shakespeare, in a speech in Romeo and Juliet (1592) has an "elf-lock" (tangled hair) being caused by Queen Mab, who is referred to as "the fairies' midwife". Meanwhile, A Midsummer Night's Dream promoted the idea that elves were diminutive and ethereal. The influence of Shakespeare and Michael Drayton made the use of elf and fairy for very small beings the norm, and had a lasting effect seen in fairy tales about elves, collected in the modern period.

The Romantic movement
Early modern English notions of elves became influential in eighteenth-century Germany. The Modern German Elf (m) and Elfe (f) was introduced as a loan-word from English in the 1740s and was prominent in Christoph Martin Wieland's 1764 translation of A Midsummer Night's Dream.

As German Romanticism got underway and writers started to seek authentic folklore, Jacob Grimm rejected Elf as a recent Anglicism, and promoted the reuse of the old form Elb (plural Elbe or Elben). In the same vein, Johann Gottfried Herder translated the Danish ballad Elveskud in his 1778 collection of folk songs, Stimmen der Völker in Liedern, as "Erlkönigs Tochter" ("The Erl-king's Daughter"; it appears that Herder introduced the term Erlkönig into German through a mis-Germanisation of the Danish word for elf). This in turn inspired Goethe's poem Der Erlkönig. However, Goethe added another new meaning, as the German word "Erle" does not mean "elf", but "black alder" - the poem about the Erlenkönig is set in the area of an alder quarry in the Saale valley in Thuringia. Goethe's poem then took on a life of its own, inspiring the Romantic concept of the Erlking, which was influential on literary images of elves from the nineteenth century on.

In Scandinavia too, in the nineteenth century, traditions of elves were adapted to include small, insect-winged fairies. These are often called "elves" (älvor in modern Swedish, alfer in Danish, álfar in Icelandic), although the more formal translation in Danish is feer. Thus, the alf found in the fairy tale The Elf of the Rose by Danish author Hans Christian Andersen is so tiny he can have a rose blossom for home, and "wings that reached from his shoulders to his feet". Yet Andersen also wrote about elvere in The Elfin Hill. The elves in this story are more alike those of traditional Danish folklore, who were beautiful females, living in hills and boulders, capable of dancing a man to death. Like the huldra in Norway and Sweden, they are hollow when seen from the back.

English and German literary traditions both influenced the British Victorian image of elves, which appeared in illustrations as tiny men and women with pointed ears and stocking caps. An example is Andrew Lang's fairy tale Princess Nobody (1884), illustrated by Richard Doyle, where fairies are tiny people with butterfly wings. In contrast, elves are small people with red stocking caps. These conceptions remained prominent in twentieth-century children's literature, for example Enid Blyton's The Faraway Tree series, and were influenced by German Romantic literature. Accordingly, in the Brothers Grimm fairy tale Die Wichtelmänner (literally, "the little men"), the title protagonists are two tiny naked men who help a shoemaker in his work. Even though Wichtelmänner are akin to beings such as kobolds, dwarves and brownies, the tale was translated into English by Margaret Hunt in 1884 as The Elves and the Shoemaker. This shows how the meanings of elf had changed and was in itself influential: the usage is echoed, for example, in the house-elf of J. K. Rowling's Harry Potter stories. In his turn, J. R. R. Tolkien recommended using the older German form Elb in translations of his works, as recorded in his Guide to the Names in The Lord of the Rings (1967). Elb, Elben was consequently introduced in 1972 German translation of The Lord of the Rings, repopularising the form in German.

Christmas elf

With industrialisation and mass education, traditional folklore about elves waned; however, as the phenomenon of popular culture emerged, elves were re-imagined, in large part based on Romantic literary depictions and associated medievalism.

As American Christmas traditions crystallized in the nineteenth century, the 1823 poem "A Visit from St. Nicholas" (widely known as "'Twas the Night before Christmas") characterized St Nicholas himself as "a right jolly old elf." However, it was his little helpers, inspired partly by folktales like The Elves and the Shoemaker, who became known as "Santa's elves"; the processes through which this came about are not well-understood, but one key figure was a Christmas-related publication by the German-American cartoonist Thomas Nast. Thus in the US, Canada, UK, and Ireland, the modern children's folklore of Santa Claus typically includes small, nimble, green-clad elves with pointy ears, long noses, and pointy hats, as Santa's helpers. They make the toys in a workshop located in the North Pole. The role of elves as Santa's helpers has continued to be popular, as evidenced by the success of the popular Christmas movie Elf.

Fantasy fiction

The fantasy genre in the twentieth century grew out of nineteenth-century Romanticism, in which nineteenth-century scholars such as Andrew Lang and the Grimm brothers collected fairy stories from folklore and in some cases retold them freely.

A pioneering work of the fantasy genre was The King of Elfland's Daughter, a 1924 novel by Lord Dunsany. The Elves of Middle-earth played a central role in Tolkien's legendarium, notably The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings; this legendarium was enormously influential on subsequent fantasy writing. Tolkien's writing had such influence that in the 1960s and afterwards, elves speaking an elvish language similar to those in Tolkien's novels became staple non-human characters in high fantasy works and in fantasy role-playing games. Post-Tolkien fantasy elves (which feature not only in novels but also in role-playing games such as Dungeons & Dragons) are often portrayed as being wiser and more beautiful than humans, with sharper senses and perceptions as well. They are said to be gifted in magic, mentally sharp and lovers of nature, art, and song. They are often skilled archers. A hallmark of many fantasy elves is their pointed ears.

In works where elves are the main characters, such as The Silmarillion or Wendy and Richard Pini's comic book series Elfquest, elves exhibit a similar range of behaviour to a human cast, distinguished largely by their superhuman physical powers. However, where narratives are more human-centered, as in The Lord of the Rings, elves tend to sustain their role as powerful, sometimes threatening, outsiders. Despite the obvious fictionality of fantasy novels and games, scholars have found that elves in these works continue to have a subtle role in shaping the real-life identities of their audiences. For example, elves can function to encode real-world racial others in video games, or to influence gender norms through literature.

Equivalents in non-Germanic traditions

Beliefs in humanlike supernatural beings are widespread in human cultures, and many such beings may be referred to as elves in English.

Europe
Elfish beings appear to have been a common characteristic within Indo-European mythologies. In the Celtic-speaking regions of north-west Europe, the beings most similar to elves are generally referred to with the Gaelic term Aos Sí. The equivalent term in modern Welsh is Tylwyth Teg. In the Romance-speaking world, beings comparable to elves are widely known by words derived from Latin fata ('fate'), which came into English as fairy. This word became partly synonymous with elf by the early modern period. Other names also abound, however, such as the Sicilian Donas de fuera ('ladies from outside'), or French bonnes dames ('good ladies'). In the Finnic-speaking world, the term usually thought most closely equivalent to elf is haltija (in Finnish) or haldaja (Estonian). Meanwhile, an example of an equivalent in the Slavic-speaking world is the vila (plural vile) of Serbo-Croatian (and, partly, Slovene) folklore. Elves bear some resemblances to the satyrs of Greek mythology, who were also regarded as woodland-dwelling mischief-makers.

In the Italian region of Romagna, the mazapégul are mischievous nocturnal elves who disrupt sleep and torment beautiful young girls.

Asia and Oceania
Some scholarship draws parallels between the Arabian tradition of jinn with the elves of medieval Germanic-language cultures. Some of the comparisons are quite precise: for example, the root of the word jinn was used in medieval Arabic terms for madness and possession in similar ways to the Old English word ylfig, which was derived from elf and also denoted prophetic states of mind implicitly associated with elfish possession.

Khmer culture in Cambodia includes the Mrenh kongveal, elfish beings associated with guarding animals.

In the animistic precolonial beliefs of the Philippines, the world can be divided into the material world and the spirit world. All objects, animate or inanimate, have a spirit called anito. Non-human anito are known as diwata, usually euphemistically referred to as dili ingon nato ('those unlike us'). They inhabit natural features like mountains, forests, old trees, caves, reefs, etc., as well as personify abstract concepts and natural phenomena. They are similar to elves in that they can be helpful or hateful but are usually indifferent to mortals. They can be mischievous and cause unintentional harm to humans, but they can also deliberately cause illnesses and misfortunes when disrespected or angered. Spanish colonizers equated them with elves and fairy folklore.

Orang bunian are supernatural beings in Malaysian, Bruneian and Indonesian folklore, invisible to most humans except those with spiritual sight. While the term is often translated as "elves", it literally translates to "hidden people" or "whistling people". Their appearance is nearly identical to humans dressed in an ancient Southeast Asian style.

In Māori culture, Patupaiarehe are beings similar to European elves and fairies.

title: Elf


text:
Evil

Evil, by one definition, is being bad and acting out morally incorrect behavior; or it is the condition of causing unnecessary pain and suffering, thus containing a net negative on the world.

Evil is commonly seen as the opposite, or sometimes absence, of good. It can be an extremely broad concept, although in everyday usage it is often more narrowly used to talk about profound wickedness and against common good. It is generally seen as taking multiple possible forms, such as the form of personal moral evil commonly associated with the word, or impersonal natural evil (as in the case of natural disasters or illnesses), and in religious thought, the form of the demonic or supernatural/eternal. While some religions, world views, and philosophies focus on "good versus evil", others deny evil's existence and usefulness in describing people.

Evil can denote profound immorality, but typically not without some basis in the understanding of the human condition, where strife and suffering (cf. Hinduism) are the true roots of evil. In certain religious contexts, evil has been described as a supernatural force. Definitions of evil vary, as does the analysis of its motives. Elements that are commonly associated with personal forms of evil involve unbalanced behavior, including anger, revenge, hatred, psychological trauma, expediency, selfishness, ignorance, destruction and neglect.

In some forms of thought, evil is also sometimes perceived in absolute terms as the dualistic antagonistic binary opposite to good, in which good should prevail and evil should be defeated. In cultures with Buddhist spiritual influence, both good and evil are perceived as part of an antagonistic duality that itself must be overcome through achieving Nirvana. The ethical questions regarding good and evil are subsumed into three major areas of study: meta-ethics, concerning the nature of good and evil; normative ethics, concerning how we ought to behave; and applied ethics, concerning particular moral issues. While the term is applied to events and conditions without agency, the forms of evil addressed in this article presume one or more evildoers.

Etymology
The modern English word evil (Old English yfel) and its cognates such as the German Übel and Dutch euvel are widely considered to come from a Proto-Germanic reconstructed form of *ubilaz, comparable to the Hittite huwapp- ultimately from the Proto-Indo-European form and suffixed zero-grade form. Other later Germanic forms include Middle English evel, ifel, ufel, Old Frisian evel (adjective and noun), Old Saxon ubil, Old High German ubil, and Gothic ubils.

The root meaning of the word is of obscure origin though shown to be akin to modern German übel (noun: Übel, although the noun evil is normally translated as "das Böse") with the basic idea of social or religious transgression.

Chinese moral philosophy
As with Buddhism, in Confucianism or Taoism there is no direct analogue to the way good and evil are opposed although reference to demonic influence is common in Chinese folk religion. Confucianism's primary concern is with correct social relationships and the behavior appropriate to the learned or superior man. Thus evil would correspond to wrong behavior. Still less does it map into Taoism, in spite of the centrality of dualism in that system, but the opposite of the cardinal virtues of Taoism, compassion, moderation, and humility can be inferred to be the analogue of evil in it.

European philosophy
In response to the practices of Nazi Germany, Hannah Arendt concluded that "the problem of evil would be the fundamental problem of postwar intellectual life in Europe", although such a focus did not come to fruition.

Spinoza
Baruch Spinoza states "" Spinoza assumes a quasi-mathematical style and states these further propositions which he purports to prove or demonstrate from the above definitions in part IV of his Ethics:
 * Proposition 8 "Knowledge of good or evil is nothing but affect of joy or sorrow in so far as we are conscious of it."
 * Proposition 30 "Nothing can be evil through that which it possesses in common with our nature, but in so far as a thing is evil to us it is contrary to us."
 * Proposition 64 "The knowledge of evil is inadequate knowledge."
 * Corollary "Hence it follows that if the human mind had none but adequate ideas, it would form no notion of evil."
 * Proposition 65 "According to the guidance of reason, of two things which are good, we shall follow the greater good, and of two evils, follow the less."
 * Proposition 68 "If men were born free, they would form no conception of good and evil so long as they were free."

Carl Jung
Carl Jung, in his book Answer to Job and elsewhere, depicted evil as the dark side of God. People tend to believe evil is something external to them, because they project their shadow onto others. Jung interpreted the story of Jesus as an account of God facing his own shadow.

Philip Zimbardo
In 2007, Philip Zimbardo suggested that people may act in evil ways as a result of a collective identity. This hypothesis, based on his previous experience from the Stanford prison experiment, was published in the book The Lucifer Effect: Understanding How Good People Turn Evil.

Milgram experiment
In 1961, Stanley Milgram began an experiment to help explain how thousands of ordinary, non-deviant, people could have reconciled themselves to a role in the Holocaust. Participants were led to believe they were assisting in an unrelated experiment in which they had to inflict electric shocks on another person. The experiment unexpectedly found that most could be led to inflict the electric shocks, including shocks that would have been fatal if they had been real. The participants tended to be uncomfortable and reluctant in the role. Nearly all stopped at some point to question the experiment, but most continued after being reassured.

A 2014 re-assessment of Milgram's work argued that the results should be interpreted with the "engaged followership" model: that people are not simply obeying the orders of a leader, but instead are willing to continue the experiment because of their desire to support the scientific goals of the leader and because of a lack of identification with the learner. Thomas Blass argues that the experiment explains how people can be complicit in roles such as "the dispassionate bureaucrat who may have shipped Jews to Auschwitz with the same degree of routinization as potatoes to Bremerhaven". However, like James Waller, he argues that it cannot explain an event like the Holocaust. Unlike the perpetrators of the Holocaust, the participants in Milgram's experiment were reassured that their actions would cause little harm and had little time to contemplate their actions.

Baháʼí Faith
The Baháʼí Faith asserts that evil is non-existent and that it is a concept reflecting lack of good, just as cold is the state of no heat, darkness is the state of no light, forgetfulness the lacking of memory, ignorance the lacking of knowledge. All of these are states of lacking and have no real existence.

Thus, evil does not exist and is relative to man. ʻAbdu'l-Bahá, son of the founder of the religion, in Some Answered Questions states:

"Nevertheless a doubt occurs to the mind—that is, scorpions and serpents are poisonous. Are they good or evil, for they are existing beings? Yes, a scorpion is evil in relation to man; a serpent is evil in relation to man; but in relation to themselves they are not evil, for their poison is their weapon, and by their sting they defend themselves."

Thus, evil is more of an intellectual concept than a true reality. Since God is good, and upon creating creation he confirmed it by saying it is Good (Genesis 1:31) evil cannot have a true reality.

Christianity

Christian theology draws its concept of evil from the Old and New Testaments. The Christian Bible exercises "the dominant influence upon ideas about God and evil in the Western world." In the Old Testament, evil is understood to be an opposition to God as well as something unsuitable or inferior such as the leader of the fallen angels Satan. In the New Testament the Greek word poneros is used to indicate unsuitability, while kakos is used to refer to opposition to God in the human realm. Officially, the Catholic Church extracts its understanding of evil from its canonical antiquity and the Dominican theologian, Thomas Aquinas, who in Summa Theologica defines evil as the absence or privation of good. French-American theologian Henri Blocher describes evil, when viewed as a theological concept, as an "unjustifiable reality. In common parlance, evil is 'something' that occurs in the experience that ought not to be."

Islam
There is no concept of absolute evil in Islam, as a fundamental universal principle that is independent from and equal with good in a dualistic sense. Although the Quran mentions the biblical forbidden tree, it never refers to it as the 'tree of knowledge of good and evil'. Within Islam, it is considered essential to believe that all comes from God, whether it is perceived as good or bad by individuals; and things that are perceived as evil or bad are either natural events (natural disasters or illnesses) or caused by humanity's free will. Much more the behavior of beings with free will, then they disobey God's orders, harming others or putting themselves over God or others, is considered to be evil. Evil does not necessarily refer to evil as an ontological or moral category, but often to harm or as the intention and consequence of an action, but also to unlawful actions. Unproductive actions or those who do not produce benefits are also thought of as evil.

A typical understanding of evil is reflected by Al-Ash`ari founder of Asharism. Accordingly, qualifying something as evil depends on the circumstances of the observer. An event or an action itself is neutral, but it receives its qualification by God. Since God is omnipotent and nothing can exist outside of God's power, God's will determine, whether or not something is evil.

Rabbinic Judaism
In Judaism and Jewish theology, the existence of evil is presented as part of the idea of free will: if humans were created to be perfect, always and only doing good, being good would not mean much. For Jewish theology, it is important for humans to have the ability to choose the path of goodness, even in the face of temptation and yetzer hara (the inclination to do evil).

Ancient Egyptian
Evil in the religion of ancient Egypt is known as Isfet, "disorder/violence". It is the opposite of Maat, "order", and embodied by the serpent god Apep, who routinely attempts to kill the sun god Ra and is stopped by nearly every other deity. Isfet is not a primordial force, but the consequence of free will and an individual's struggle against the non-existence embodied by Apep, as evidenced by the fact that it was born from Ra's umbilical cord instead of being recorded in the religion's creation myths.

Buddhism

The primal duality in Buddhism is between suffering and enlightenment, so the good vs. evil splitting has no direct analogue in it. One may infer from the general teachings of the Buddha that the catalogued causes of suffering are what correspond in this belief system to 'evil'.

Practically this can refer to 1) the three selfish emotions—desire, hate and delusion; and 2) to their expression in physical and verbal actions. Specifically, evil means whatever harms or obstructs the causes for happiness in this life, a better rebirth, liberation from samsara, and the true and complete enlightenment of a buddha (samyaksambodhi).

"What is evil? Killing is evil, lying is evil, slandering is evil, abuse is evil, gossip is evil: envy is evil, hatred is evil, to cling to false doctrine is evil; all these things are evil. And what is the root of evil? Desire is the root of evil, illusion is the root of evil." Gautama Siddhartha, the founder of Buddhism, 563–483 BC.

Hinduism
In Hinduism, the concept of Dharma or righteousness clearly divides the world into good and evil, and clearly explains that wars have to be waged sometimes to establish and protect Dharma, this war is called Dharmayuddha. This division of good and evil is of major importance in both the Hindu epics of Ramayana and Mahabharata. The main emphasis in Hinduism is on bad action, rather than bad people. The Hindu holy text, the Bhagavad Gita, speaks of the balance of good and evil. When this balance goes off, divine incarnations come to help to restore this balance.

Sikhism
In adherence to the core principle of spiritual evolution, the Sikh idea of evil changes depending on one's position on the path to liberation. At the beginning stages of spiritual growth, good and evil may seem neatly separated. Once one's spirit evolves to the point where it sees most clearly, the idea of evil vanishes and the truth is revealed. In his writings Guru Arjan explains that, because God is the source of all things, what we believe to be evil must too come from God. And because God is ultimately a source of absolute good, nothing truly evil can originate from God.

Sikhism, like many other religions, does incorporate a list of "vices" from which suffering, corruption, and abject negativity arise. These are known as the Five Thieves, called such due to their propensity to cloud the mind and lead one astray from the prosecution of righteous action. These are: One who gives in to the temptations of the Five Thieves is known as "Manmukh", or someone who lives selfishly and without virtue. Inversely, the "Gurmukh, who thrive in their reverence toward divine knowledge, rise above vice via the practice of the high virtues of Sikhism. These are:
 * Moh, or Attachment
 * Lobh, or Greed
 * Karodh, or Wrath
 * Kaam, or Lust
 * Ahankar, or Egotism
 * Sewa, or selfless service to others.
 * Nam Simran, or meditation upon the divine name.

Question of a universal definition
A fundamental question is whether there is a universal, transcendent definition of evil, or whether one's definition of evil is determined by one's social or cultural background. C. S. Lewis, in The Abolition of Man, maintained that there are certain acts that are universally considered evil, such as rape and murder. However, the rape of women, by men, is found in every society, and there are more societies that see at least some versions of it, such as marital rape or punitive rape, as normative than there are societies that see all rape as non-normative (a crime). In nearly all societies, killing except for defense or duty is seen as murder. Yet the definition of defense and duty varies from one society to another. Social deviance is not uniformly defined across different cultures, and is not, in all circumstances, necessarily an aspect of evil.

Defining evil is complicated by its multiple, often ambiguous, common usages: evil is used to describe the whole range of suffering, including that caused by nature, and it is also used to describe the full range of human immorality from the "evil of genocide to the evil of malicious gossip". It is sometimes thought of as the generic opposite of good. Marcus Singer asserts that these common connotations must be set aside as overgeneralized ideas that do not sufficiently describe the nature of evil.

In contemporary philosophy, there are two basic concepts of evil: a broad concept and a narrow concept. A broad concept defines evil simply as any and all pain and suffering: "any bad state of affairs, wrongful action, or character flaw". Yet, it is also asserted that evil cannot be correctly understood "(as some of the utilitarians once thought) [on] a simple hedonic scale on which pleasure appears as a plus, and pain as a minus". This is because pain is necessary for survival. Renowned orthopedist and missionary to lepers, Dr. Paul Brand explains that leprosy attacks the nerve cells that feel pain resulting in no more pain for the leper, which leads to ever increasing, often catastrophic, damage to the body of the leper. Congenital insensitivity to pain (CIP), also known as congenital analgesia, is a neurological disorder that prevents feeling pain. It "leads to ... bone fractures, multiple scars, osteomyelitis, joint deformities, and limb amputation ... Mental retardation is common. Death from hyperpyrexia occurs within the first 3 years of life in almost 20% of the patients." Few with the disorder are able to live into adulthood. Evil cannot be simply defined as all pain and its connected suffering because, as Marcus Singer says: "If something is really evil, it can't be necessary, and if it is really necessary, it can't be evil".

The narrow concept of evil involves moral condemnation, therefore it is ascribed only to moral agents and their actions. This eliminates natural disasters and animal suffering from consideration as evil: according to Claudia Card, "When not guided by moral agents, forces of nature are neither "goods" nor "evils". They just are. Their "agency" routinely produces consequences vital to some forms of life and lethal to others". The narrow definition of evil "picks out only the most morally despicable sorts of actions, characters, events, etc. Evil [in this sense] ... is the worst possible term of opprobrium imaginable”. Eve Garrard suggests that evil describes "particularly horrifying kinds of action which we feel are to be contrasted with more ordinary kinds of wrongdoing, as when for example we might say 'that action wasn't just wrong, it was positively evil'. The implication is that there is a qualitative, and not merely quantitative, difference between evil acts and other wrongful ones; evil acts are not just very bad or wrongful acts, but rather ones possessing some specially horrific quality". In this context, the concept of evil is one element in a full nexus of moral concepts.

Approaches
Views on the nature of evil belong to the branch of philosophy known as ethics—which in modern philosophy is subsumed into three major areas of study:
 * 1) Meta-ethics, that seeks to understand the nature of ethical properties, statements, attitudes, and judgments.
 * 2) Normative ethics, investigates the set of questions that arise when considering how one ought to act, morally speaking.
 * 3) Applied ethics, concerned with the analysis of particular moral issues in private and public life.

Usefulness as a term
There is debate on how useful the term "evil" is, since it is often associated with spirits and the devil. Some see the term as useless because they say it lacks any real ability to explain what it names. There is also real danger of the harm that being labeled "evil" can do when used in moral, political, and legal contexts. Those who support the usefulness of the term say there is a secular view of evil that offers plausible analyses without reference to the supernatural. Garrard and Russell argue that evil is as useful an explanation as any moral concept. Garrard adds that evil actions result from a particular kind of motivation, such as taking pleasure in the suffering of others, and this distinctive motivation provides a partial explanation even if it does not provide a complete explanation. Most theorists agree use of the term evil can be harmful but disagree over what response that requires. Some argue it is "more dangerous to ignore evil than to try to understand it".

Those who support the usefulness of the term, such as Eve Garrard and David McNaughton, argue that the term evil "captures a distinct part of our moral phenomenology, specifically, 'collect[ing] together those wrongful actions to which we have ... a response of moral horror'." Claudia Card asserts it is only by understanding the nature of evil that we can preserve humanitarian values and prevent evil in the future. If evils are the worst sorts of moral wrongs, social policy should focus limited energy and resources on reducing evil over other wrongs. Card asserts that by categorizing certain actions and practices as evil, we are better able to recognize and guard against responding to evil with more evil which will "interrupt cycles of hostility generated by past evils".

One school of thought holds that no person is evil and that only acts may be properly considered evil. Some theorists define an evil action simply as a kind of action an evil person performs, but just as many theorists believe that an evil character is one who is inclined toward evil acts. Luke Russell argues that both evil actions and evil feelings are necessary to identify a person as evil, while Daniel Haybron argues that evil feelings and evil motivations are necessary.

American psychiatrist M. Scott Peck describes evil as a kind of personal "militant ignorance". According to Peck, an evil person is consistently self-deceiving, deceives others, psychologically projects his or her evil onto very specific targets, hates, abuses power, and lies incessantly. Evil people are unable to think from the viewpoint of their victim. Peck considers those he calls evil to be attempting to escape and hide from their own conscience (through self-deception) and views this as being quite distinct from the apparent absence of conscience evident in sociopaths. He also considers that certain institutions may be evil, using the My Lai Massacre to illustrate. By this definition, acts of criminal and state terrorism would also be considered evil.

Necessity
Martin Luther argued that there are cases where a little evil is a positive good. He wrote, "Seek out the society of your boon companions, drink, play, talk bawdy, and amuse yourself. One must sometimes commit a sin out of hate and contempt for the Devil, so as not to give him the chance to make one scrupulous over mere nothings ... "

The international relations theories of realism and neorealism, sometimes called realpolitik advise politicians to explicitly ban absolute moral and ethical considerations from international politics, and to focus on self-interest, political survival, and power politics, which they hold to be more accurate in explaining a world they view as explicitly amoral and dangerous. Political realists usually justify their perspectives by stating that morals and politics should be separated as two unrelated things, as exerting authority often involves doing something not moral. Machiavelli wrote: "there will be traits considered good that, if followed, will lead to ruin, while other traits, considered vices which if practiced achieve security and well being for the prince."

title: Evil