Fantasy Races: Staples or New Creations?

[elemtilas]

Cool blog post. I love long lived or immortal races for exactly the reasons you mentioned.

I think the time perspective is one of the keys here. For example, in The World, there is an Elf-analogue (they call themselves Teor), but I can't think of any stories I've written where they appear yet.

They are certainly the most different of the races I know about. For one, they do live long lifespans. Very long. Daine are, when compared with Men, "functionally immortal", quite capable of living a thousand or more years, and some perhaps ten times that. I mean, if you had a chum you hang out with in the pool hall who can regale you with stories of not only that little fracas at Hastings but also the time that Rascally Roman came snooping around, cos he was there both times, that's pretty much immortal for all intents and purposes.

Daine are like that; Teor even more so, as there are some still in the East who can regale one with tales of a world so ancient you might think she was just making it all up...

Time, ya; that's a key. They are, in a lesser way, kind of like God. God sees all of material history, from the big bang all the way
up to the big crunch and every event in it as one event, all the grand stretches, all the lives of Men and Dolphins, all the empires, all the moments of enlightenment and fall from grace are all one. Humans don't generally see this way. The Past is increasingly murky and mythical; the Future is an unknown; the Present is where we are and let's just be content with that. Teor, far from being anything like all knowing, experience and understand their own existence that way. A Teor who has travelled far and lived through many ages of Time, that one sees all those events as one event, whereas a Man of his acquaintance can only hope to understand 95% of that visceral, emotional, experience as disconnected history.

I think a good rough analog to Elvish thinking is the (US) car commercial where the dad picks up a crayon from the back seat of the car and sees his daughter when she's about six, come running across the yard; and then a hospital ID bracelet, and he sees her at thirteen or so after a sports injury; and at the end, he gives her the key and she's probably eighteen or so and off to uni. A parent, I think, sees his own kid as both little umpkins and grown up girl all at once. This is something like how an Elf understands all the long years of his own experience.

Another key, at least for me and long-lived races, is sorrow. The long life of a Daine or a Teor are sure to be full of many happy moments. Falling in love (even if it ìs for the twentieth time), the birth of a child, the conclusion of long and unhappy war. But tempering that is the long sorrow of places lost, things perished and people gone; of a world that has changed in its externals and can never return to its vision as first experienced.

For example, when a Teor speaks of the sea as raurumwollio, his word at once leads one to think he is speaking of the continuous rolling of the waves crashing upon the warth. For, indeed, raurum means a roaring, crashing sound, as of thunder or waves or even a rockslide in the hill country; and wowollio gives the sense of repetition, of doing a thing over again. Yet however lovely and appropriate one might think such a word, for another Teor, its meanings run much deeper. For them this single word contains not only the sound of the roaring waves but also the long memory of the Distant Sea as it was in the time of their youth far away and deep sorrow and longing for lands long ago washed away and drowned deep under those rolling, roaring waves and indeed the knowledge of the loss of kith and kin who have taken to ships and sailed away upon those waves to Donwareccwalhya, the Land Beyond the Sea which none may now attain; or who have wandered some other road to some other destiny. It is a sense of sundering as well as continuing; a mournful feeling within and set against contentment.

It's kind of like nostalgia, that sense of longing for times past, but is sadder and broader in connotation. Even though a Daine or Teor himself has changed and grown through the course of his life, there is always that part of the heart that rests unchanging and apart from the fits and starts, the lability of existence outside and the change of the world. Men certainly feel this way too, like when they go back to their old neighbourhood and find it's all Portoricans now, and all the Italians have gone away...but the time scales involved are much longer and burden of such memory the more dolorous.

In fact, as a Daine gets older and this burden becomes ever more onerous, he risks dying from the weight of it! His body may be hale, but his heart and his spirit become weighed down and sick. Eventually, he'll just sleep and won't wake up again in this world.

Is "I think humans with wings are cool, and developing their differing biology, culture, gender roles and society is my idea of fun" a good enough reason? lol.

Absolutely!

 

[Annoyingkid]

Some elves in my story are pacifist stoners who live in mud huts and mud holes.
Others are legendary war heroes who live in finely crafted cities who never stop training.
Others are bandits who are agents of chaos.
Others live in trees, although there are unexpected consequences for that.
Others live in shipyard towns and work there.
Most are farmers.
Others are inventors, pioneering solar power technology.
The strongest of them can bring a god to their knees.
The weakest coast through life.
Some are very pretty and some are ugly. The males typically aren't effeminate. Most are just normal looking. They don't have any kind of inherent grace to them.
They grow 100x slower than a human would. It takes a century for an elf baby to reach the maturity of a 1 year old.
There are twice as many elf males as there are females. There's a reason for that.
They're psychologically resistant to mental problems due to immortality.
Their durability and magical affinity can run the gamut.
They are not inherently connected to nature any more than a human would be.

I believe in variety. Even when I finally introduce humans, which would be in book 5, I see no reason to foil humans or have them foil elves. Humans were made to be a large, visible, sacrificial target for the dragon so the elves wouldn't have to deal with him again.

 

[TheCrystallineEntity]

From TV Tropes:

While Tolkien is largely the inspiration for the modern conception of elves, many uses of them would count as subversions today. That's especially true of the Noldor of Nargothrond, a group of elves living in a large secluded cave city obsessed with craftsmanship and smithing. The "one with nature" stereotype, in particular, is only seen in a small group that is mostly insignificant within his greater mythos.

Though most people consider the Orcs to be the Trope Codifier – if not the Trope Maker – for the Always Chaotic Evil trope, it should be noted that Tolkien went on record saying that he didn't consider the Orc race to be uniformly evil; because of his strong Catholic upbringing, he expressly rejected the idea of an entire race being beyond salvation, and said that he would have taken the time to include sympathetic Orcs if he'd been able to fit them into the narrative. In The Silmarillion he writes the Orcs began when Melkor imprisoned and corrupted elves, and that far from enjoying evil "the Orcs loathed the Master whom they served in fear". They're also rather different from later portrayals of orcs in that they're neither near-mindless animalistic savages nor Noble Demon Proud Warrior Race Guys; Tolkien orcs have roughly human-level intelligence and are more skilled with torture and machines (particularly weapons) than they are in direct combat.

Despite the stereotype of an Evil Overlord being evil for the sake of it, in Morgoth's Ring Tolkien goes into a lot of detail on the actual motives of the two Dark Lords, Morgoth and Sauron. Morgoth is shown as essentially nihilistic and his apparent eventual plan was to destroy everything basically out of spite that he hadn't created it. Sauron, meanwhile, became evil out of a desire to bring order to the world, which used to be a very noble feature of his, and after Morgoth's defeat his motives seemed to be restoring Middle-Earth after the war, however he was too proud to humble himself, which led to his corruption. It is even mentioned that in the beginning nothing was evil, showing there is free will..