elven jewelry
The Discworld novels by Terry Pratchett feature extradimensional creatures called elves, that go back to the old myths of cradle-robbing fairies. The book Lords and Ladies is about an encounter with "the fair folk".
The elves of Norse mythology have survived into folklore mainly as females. The lvor (Swedish, singular lva) were stunningly beautiful girls who lived in the forest with an elven king. They were long-lived and light-hearted in nature. They could be seen at night dancing over meadows. The circles they left were called lvdanser (elf dances) or lvringar (elf circles). If a human watched their dance, he would discover that even though only a few hours seemed to have passed, many years had passed in the real world. (This time phenomenon is retold in Tolkien's Lord of the Rings when the Fellowship of the Ring discovers that time seems to have run more slowly in elven Lothlrien. It also has a remote parallell in the Irish sdhe).German folklore held that elves had a particular fondness for children and would appear to those about to die, rather like the Irish banshee. This aspect of the legend was immortalised by Goethe in his poem Der Erlknig, later set to music by Schubert.Tolkien is responsible for reviving the older and less-used terms elves, elven, and elvish rather than Edmund Spenser's invented elfs, elfin, and elfish. He probably preferred the word elf over fairy because elf is of Anglo-Saxon origin while fairy entered English from French.
Little documentation exists on English rustic beliefs and terminology before the nineteenth century, but it seems that the term elf was used, at least on some occasions or in some places, for various kinds of uncanny wights, either human-sized or smaller. But other terms were also used.