Regarding Elves

Hello Mr. White and Mr. Morris,

Apologies for the delay in the construction of this effort. Second, Mr. White, I received your generous gift quite some time ago of course, and I apologize for not writing in the least a thank you note. It was my intention to include the note in this document, which has taken too much time to write. I have yet to think of a sufficient gift that is in kind. In any case, the shirt is hellatite. But fits quite well.

Back to the subject:
Regarding our last meeting, during which many things were discussed and again, left open for further debate and research: Let us commence without delay. We begin with the problem of elves. It appears we are looking for something that both does and does not exist. From Wikipedia: "An elf is a creature of Germanic mythology. The elves were originally thought of as a race of minor nature and fertility gods, often pictured as youthful-seeming men and women of great beauty living in forests and underground places and caves, or in wells and springs. They have been portrayed to be long-lived or immortal and as beings of magical powers."

Our question is "Do Chinese Elves exist? If so, what do they look like?" Before we go further, the first question to be answered is indeed "Do elves exist?" If we answer in the negative then we proceed with a preliminary allowance of the following sort:

If the Chinese were to imagine elves, they would undoubtedly look like Chinese elves.

The tautology is avoided by saying that all elves look like young humans. Chinese elves therefore look like young Chinese humans. Thus we can imagine what the mysterious being in this story looks like.

But the answer remains problematic. The problem with a Chinese Elf is the problem of translating a word, magnified ten-fold. For we are asking for a referent which exists only in the collective imagination of a people. We might ask in return whether there is an American Qilin? Is the answer 'Yes, it is an Unicorn' or shall we say something different?

The question at this point comes down to the essence of elf: If I am imagining an elf, am I imagining a thing? If so, what sort of thing is it? If I am imagining an elf that looks like a young Chinese human am I imagining a thing? or is it again like imagining something that
glows like electrified neon but behaves like marble when wet but is perfectly moldable when dry? No such substance exists here that we know of, but it can be imagined. Shall we, as a result of such idle imagining, admit ourselves to be Humeans? What then is the condition for the possibility of knowledge?

There is a Chinese word for elf. It is: 小精灵. The Pinyin for those less knowledgeable regarding such matters is xiǎo jīng líng.
小 xiǎo: Small, tiny; few; young
精 jīng: energy; perfect; excellent; refined; very; proficient,
灵 líng: alert; departed soul; efficacious; quick; effective; intelligence

As a guess, I would say that the word is a later, indeed derivative concept, being a portmanteau of xiǎo, jīng, and líng. Certainly if the notion were ancient, there would be a single character for elf, just as there is a single character for dragon. [龍, lóng]

Using the chinese characters in a Google-China image search we get some interesting results.
It appears that there are few Chinese elves. The search has shown that when an Chinese man imagines an elf, he imagines the the creature from Germanic mythology.

If we ask the question in another form, affirming that elves do exist, then the question becomes: "Have the Chinese ever encountered an elf?"

The Chinese could only encounter an elf if 1) there actually are elves in China, and 2) the elves have allowed themselves to be known to the Chinese. There is a word for elf, so clearly they have encountered them in some way. But is this encounter direct or indirect?

With indirect contact, one race tells another about their encounters, for instance with elves or unicorns, or atoms, or germs for that matter and the latter race investigates the matter further and on their own.

JB

Roxbury