Elgfróði
Half man, half elk figure from Germanic heroic legend
Elgfróði (literally "Elk-Fróði"; sometimes anglicised as "Elgfrothi"), is the half-man, half-elk elder brother of the hero Bödvar Bjarki and Thorir Houndsfoot in Germanic heroic legend. His name is also used as an alternative term for centaurs, although it is not clear if he was originally thought of as having two or four legs.
Name
Elgfróði translates as "Elk-Fróði", in which "Fróði" is a personal name. In addition to this translation or the name being presented in its Old Norse spelling, it is also sometimes presented in an anglicised form, such as "Elgfrothi".
Attestations
Hrólfr Kraki's saga
In Hrólfs saga kraka, the sole surviving medieval source referencing Elgfróði, he is the son of Bjorn ("bear"), the son of King Hring of Oppland, and Bera ("female bear"), a churl's daughter and Bjorn's childhood friend. It tells that Bjorn refused the advances of his stepmother, the queen, while the king was away and struck her, telling her to leave him. In retaliation, the queen cursed Bjorn to take the form of a bear by day whereupon he fled to a cave and proceeded to hunt the king's cattle. Taking advantage of this, the queen encourages King Hring to send men to kill the bear. One evening Bera sees the bear who walks up to her and through looking into its eyes realises it is Bjorn. She follows Bjorn back to his cave where he returns to his human form and makes her pregnant.
Begin with the source’s own compact description: “Elgfróði” is half man, half elk figure from Germanic heroic legend. The dossier treats that line as a proposition to test through Elgfróði, Half and half, not as a finished interpretation.
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This entry incorporates text from “Elgfróði” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.