"It's...complicated. The myth of elves evolved from a combination of a lot of different folklore and fable about fairies and forest people that was passed down through generations and then codified by a very famous fantasy novel that more or less solidified into one single image of small pointy-eared people that kind of filtered through world culture and well..."

That doesn't seem adequate. "There's this theory that if you gave a million monkeys a million typewriters, or pens and paper if your world isn't at that tech level yet -which doesn't mean I think you're primitive!- I just mean that if you give them an infinite amount of time, they'll eventually reproduce the entire works of a given author, and I think it's something like that. There are apparently infinite universes with an infinite possibilities so I think something similar happened, where our myth happens to resemble a people evolving in a completely different universe, and I mean, probably superficially. I don't know that your people are immortal magic forest-dwellers but-"

She doesn't seem to realize she's rambling.