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Christmas elves are everywhere at the moment, but have you ever wondered *why* elves and fairies have pointy ears? Short answer: they are wild ass ears. Let me explain… (thread)
Elvish pointy ears are purely an iconographic tradition; there are no pre-modern documents or descriptions of fairies that identify them as having pointy ears. Early English and medieval elves/fairies seem to have been imagined as looking just like us
So when did the pointy ears arrive? The earliest portrayals of fairies with pointy ears in Britain date from the early modern period, like this woodcut of Robin Goodfellow looking like a Roman faun
This, in fact, is the origin of pointed ears for fairies: from late antiquity onwards, vernacular fairy-like beings were consistently referred to in Latin as nymphae or fauni, with the church borrowing a Classical concept to classify these otherwise unclassifiable beings
Whether the fauns and satyrs of the Classical world were in any sense like fairies, or were the ancestors of fairies, is another question; but the use of Latin words for fairies led to their portrayal as Classical beings
The satyrs, companions of the god Dionysos, began life as therianthropic beings (human-animal hybrids) with the tails, legs and ears of wild asses. Over time they became slightly more human looking and lost of the legs and tails
But the asinine ears remained, and migrated from their original position on the top of the satyr’s head to the standard location for human ears. As the satyrs became more human, all that sometimes remained was the pointiness of their ears
As an aside, medieval iconography also portrayed demons with pointy, animal-like ears. This may be related to the fauns and satyrs but it may also be an independent development, designed to underline the demons’ bestial character
Early portrayals of demons do not feature pointed ears, and there is no evidence to suggest early modern portrayals of pointy-eared fairies derived from portrayals of demons
So in the Classical world as much as in the early modern world, pointy ears were a way of indicating that an otherwise humanoid being was somehow eldritch and unlike us…
Fast forward to 1965, and it is no surprise that a TV production company with a limited make-up budget chose to portray an extraterrestrial by drawing on the deep cultural association between pointy ears and the not-quite-human…
