The word elf appears twice in CWKB, once in the adjective elfin and once in the compound elf-earl.
In keeping with the way early medieval sources treat the word, these will receive no explanation.
- they/them
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in reply to @thaliarchus's post:
Maybe it's like the Irish Aos Si where our English translator has unhelpfully decided that this independent cultural concept is basically the same as elfs, probably
The English did similar things to Latin supernatural beings, too—there're surviving glosses which render dryads as uudu-ælfinne (wood-elves), naiads as sæ-ælfinne (sea-elves), and so on. It seems like ælf/elf was a catch all for beings/people who were different to or more than humans, and if a source in another language drifted into that territory that was the word that was going to come out.
Ah, so that tendency is the same in the 9th century as in the 19th...