ABSTRACT
Only a few opportunities to interpret the production and use of rock art through informed methods can be found in northern Europe. Most rock art traditions seem to have ended millennia before any historical sources that could inform us about people’s life-worlds. Exceptions to this are post-Reformation sources that connect cup marks or cupules with Elves: light fairy creatures that were easy to disturb and that could cause sickness and ill fortune if they got annoyed. This article highlights this phenomenon through historical and oral sources and through archaeological evidence. It is argued that Elf-phenomena may very well be built on older traditions, but that they found new expression through the Reformation and the Danish and Swedish state religion: Protestantism.
