SOOO my story involves immortal Elves, solely in the sense that they can't die of old age. From LOTR to Inheritance, even The Witcher, I've "studied" different types of elves, and so far Tolkien's are my faves. Now for my dilemma... How can I construct my Elves in such a way that they don't seem like a full copy of Tolkien's elves?
You say you have studied multiple types of Elves. I would suggest creating a list of their attributes by author to make comparison easier, and referencing it to mix and match the traits you want.
Maybe they can be telepathic? Or have blue/purple/otherwise skin? Or perhaps they have small horns on their heads? Maybe they can be aquatic? Tails? Fur? Short haired?
What role are these elves going to play in the story? What do you need them to be able to do, or not able to do? Its easier to help design a part of the story if we know what this part is supposed to do.
Go read The Silmarillion, then come back and tell us about Tolkien elves. There are so many types, sub-types, ones that evolved their lifestyles with the changes of Middle Earth that it really becomes incredible that one man produced all that original thought. I think the hard part is you don't want to be a Tolkien clone of immoral elves. Fine, don't make yours immortal. You are the weaver of your tale, tell it any way you choose. In my current WIP I have elves, but to them elf is a derogatory term applied to them by humans. "Elf" in human folklore is a nasty tricky creature and the name was given to the people who call themselves the Miskinii. They live in the woods, are immortal, and any Tolkien fan or DnD player would recognize them. But I also chose to model their lifestyle after Native American culture from Michigan where I was raised. They are a blend of Potawatomi, Odawa, Ottawa, and Ojibwa tribes. Early first-contact original source material research was awesome for a history nerd like me. But for me this bridged a gap between a reader's expectation of a traditional post-Tolkien elf and artistic license to make them look and behave how I want them and not re-making Elrond of Rivendell in my own work.
1. Can't die of old age, but can be killed 2. The way they speak is kinda soft/smooth 3. Tall, plus length/style of hair Also @Joe_Hall, for now I'm going on the movies, but I am currently reading LOTR books. But thanks, one day I'll get to Silmarillion.
Well, consider these elves, you might recognise them: They suppress their emotions, because they once had destructive emotions. They're ruthlessly logical. They have green blood. They're compelled to mate once ever 7 years. They're not telepathic but they have mysterious mind powers, including joining their mind to another person's mind. I'd say they're quite different from Tolkien elves.
Hehe, I bet these are mostly short-haired elves? And they probably come from some planet that starts with the letter V.
Well, here is a list of Elf tropes that you can pick and choose from: https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/ElfTropes
Anything given those species traits will generally fall into the readers' minds as ____ elves. Space elves, blue elves, subterranean elves, Hellraiser Warhammer 40K elves, Hellraiser TES elves, interdimensional apocalypse-bringing elves, Protoss, Ogier. Typically their wider field of view with respect to time and beauty (or a perverted beauty in the sense of the Hellraiser elf trope) makes them aloof jerks that loath humans. It's especially satisfying when, despite being physically superior to humans on paper, they're fated to be indignant scraps left behind after defeat in the face of brutal human conquest. If you worked backwards trying to find a good character foil for the human condition, you'd come up with elves all on your own anyway. I don't think anyone's going to care if you elves follow one archetype or another. What matters is if you do interesting things with them in the story. That said, my suggestion is that if you choose focus on giving them a physical trait to make them unique to other elves, make it functionally significant. My favourite is wood elves being strictly carnivorous and also known for cannibalism. Other neat things might be: sex always kills the male, their tongue has another bitey mouth on it, acid blood, lay eggs, morph into hawks (willingly or not) in the moonlight, they're immortal to aging but still develop more and more tumours as time goes on leaving the wisest among them a hulking bunch of flesh that isn't even ambulatory, etc...
Giving wood Elves an allergy to bark could be fun. But physical traits aren't the only thing that make them what they are. How does their culture come into play. I gave Elves in one novel a very rigid culture very loosely modeled of some of the more rigid Asian cultures I have read about.
Hardly. What you have there is the Shakespeare Elf -- think of Puck and Peaseblossom, etc., from A Midsummer Night's Dream. All cutesy and snuggling up in a peanut shell, etc. Blecch. Originally, Tolkien's elves (in The Hobbit, in Mirkwood Forest, led by Thranduil), because of their immortality, were terribly indifferent to the suffering of others, and wouldn't go out of their way to help others. They used used illusion to lure people. They were beautiful but dangerous. I think Tolkien mellowed them a little by the time he wrote LOTR. I prefer the Elves in Discworld, by Terry Pratchett, because they are based more on the nastier kind of fairy-folk in British and European folklore than elves as portrayed in most modern (post-Tolkien) fantasy fiction. His elves are predatory, cruel, and will use other living things, and hurt them, because it is fun. Mostly they get away with this, due to the illusion-creating glamour they cast. While elves are not musical, elf-song is perceived as beautiful by humans, and is highly hypnotic. Elves are generally seen as innately beautiful and stylish, but this is just another aspect of the glamour. Some of them are only vaguely humanoid. The only defense against them is iron. As Terry points out in Lords and Ladies: “Elves are wonderful. They provoke wonder. Elves are marvellous. They cause marvels. Elves are fantastic. They create fantasies. Elves are glamorous. They project glamour. Elves are enchanting. They weave enchantment. Elves are terrific. They beget terror. The thing about words is that meanings can twist just like a snake, and if you want to find snakes, look for them behind words that have changed their meaning. No one ever said elves are nice. Elves are bad.” In the folklore, people who are kidnapped by elves can be rescued, but this needs courage and a cool head, as there won't be a second chance. Sometimes, it is enough to go back to the place where teh person was taken -- a fairy ring, perhaps, where elves gather to dance, or some crossroads which they pass when they go hunting -- and their human captive will be among them. The rescue must drag the hostage out of the dance, or off the horse, and hold on tight, no matter what happens. Take the song known in Scotland as the ballad of Tam Lin, who was kidnapped by the elves. His lover Janet pulls him off the fairy horse and holds on as be turns into a snake, a deer, and a red-hot iron, before turning back into human form. She has the courage, and Tam is free and unharmed. Others were not so lucky. An Irish hero, Bran the son of Febal, heard an elf-woman singing and followed her to her magical island in the western seas. He remained there for a year -- so he thought -- but he and their companions grew homesick. She told them to sail close to the coast of Ireland and speak with anyone standing on dry land, but not step ashore themselves. And so they anchored in a harbour, and shouted to the men on the beach. Nobody recognised them, though someone remember old stories about a man called Bran who once, long ago, had sailed into the West. One of Bran's friends jumped into the water and swam ashore, but as soon as he touched land, he crumbled into dust. As for Bran, he put out to sea again, and has never been seen since. It's not just bards, seers and heroes - ordinary people get taken too. During a wedding dance on a Danish farm, the bride went out for a breath of air, and walked as far as a little mound in one of the fields, a mound where elf-folk lived. It had opened up, and elves were dancing there too, and one of them came out and offered her some wine. She drank (tip: never eat or drink anything the elves offer you; Tolkien knew this, and worked it into "The Hobbit"). After drinking, she joined in their dancing, just one dance, and then remembered her husband and went home. But nobody could recognise her, and she couldn't recognise anybody, and the village and the farm were different. There was just one old woman who listened to her and exclaimed, 'Why, you must be the girl who disappeared a hundred years ago, at my grandfather's brother's wedding!' At these words, the bride's true age came upon her in an instant, and she fell dead. It is tales such as this, told in the European countryside, that show you what people thought of elves. They were often lurking in quite normal, familiar places. There was nothing to fear. They were the Hidden People, the Good People, the Underground Folk, the Good Neighbours. There's no need to be frightened, is there? Yet long after the 'enlightened' and well-educated generations had lost their faith and fear, after the wild elves had been safely reduced to Peaseblossoms, an occasional artist recaptured the older image. Richard Dadd, the crazed painter, did so in his sinister picture The Fairy Feller's Master Stroke, which he worked on from 1855 to 1864, living in an asylum. So did the composer Rutland Boughton in the key aria of his opera The Immortal Hour (1914), based on a poem by Fiona Mcleod: How beautiful they are, The lordly ones Who dwell in the hills In the hollow hills. Their limbs are more white Than shafts of moonshine. They are more fleet Than the north wind. They laugh and are glad And are terrible. When their lances shake and glitter Every green reed quivers. How beautiful they are, The lordly ones Who dwell in the hills In the hollow hills. Beautiful, indeed -- and terrible.
And which came first, A Midsummer Night's Dream, or The Hobbit？ Originally, "elf" in traditional folklore referred to any number of creatures, including brownies, sprites, pixies etc, so that picture is a fair representation of what elves used to look like in folklore. Those are the kinds of creatures Shakespeare based his elf on. They predate Christianity in Britain.
I beg to differ. That representation looks like a saccharine 19th century depiction of elves. Folklore before Shakespeare, and for many years after, depicted them as tall, terrible, and highly dangerous. It's only in the late 19th century, and possibly much longer in rural areas, that elves became cutesy little child-like beings. Before that, elves were the kind of creatures that mothers would warn their children about. Don't go in the woods, the elves will get you. Don't go near the pond, or Jenny Greenteeth will get you. (To be fair, those kind of warnings were exactly what children needed. They mightn't understand about thorny bushes or wild hogs in the forest, but dangerous elves were easy to understand. As for the pond, Jenny Greenteeth is easier to picture than the danger of falling in and drowning). Adults also feared elves for centuries, and used horseshoes to keep them away. When you were coming home from the pub, a little worse for drink, it was easier to blame the elves than the alcohol for making you fall down. In an age before we understood child deformities, elves were blamed for swapping babies for their own changelings. Sudden paralysis in both humans and beasts, which today we call a 'stroke', used to be called ‘elf-stroke’ -- because an elf was doing the striking. Symptoms in ‘elf-shot’ animals varied from locality to locality, country to country, but were archaeological finds of Neolithic flint arrowheads were seen as proof of elves striking the person down and preventing him from moving. (Much more can be found on this blog about elf folklore in Northern England and Scotland). I wouldn't know about that. Christianity came to Britain in 611 AD, and belief in elves persisted (in parts) until the 17th and 18th centuries, and possibly even later. Prior to Christianity, are we talking about the Anglo-Saxon period? The Roman period? Or before even that? The Anglo-Saxon belief system is very hard to pin down. But the coming of Christianity did not eliminate the belief in spirits, especially so-called 'spirits of the wood' -- witness the widespread belief in the stories of Robin Hood, for instance. Or the superstitions that ships, being made of wood, had a 'soul' of their own and had to be 'placated'. Why, for instance, is it considered customary to 'bless' a ship by breaking a bottle of wine or champagne on the prow, in an attempt to bring it good fortune on its voyages? We still do this, but no-one can explain. What makes it 'lucky', exactly? Is it an echo of sailors' superstitions from centuries ago, when ships were given names and personalities? Does anyone know? Even more recently, during World War 2, pilots used to believe that there were 'gremlins' living in their aircraft. Anything that went wrong, it must have been a gremlin. If we can accept that, then the belief in dangerous and deadly elves isn't too difficult to understand.
Well, that's your opinion, and I disagree. The diversity of what was considered an "elf" can be clearly seen in the Nordic svartalfar, or "dark elf". The depiction of an elf - or more correctly, a fairy/faerie varies over a wide area and timespan. In the 8th century Echtra Fergus mac Leti, the eponymous hero encounters luchorpain, or "little bodies" - i.e. leprechauns. The word itself illustrates that they're not considered tall. Of course that picture is a 19th century illustration. Prior to the printing press, people weren't going to waste precious parchment drawing pictures of pagan beliefs. Come to that, if you're going to take issue with the image, find me a contemporaneous picture of a Brythonic, Celtic or Germanic elf. No, actually, don't bother. The whole point of this forum, and this thread, is to be helpful to other writers, not to show off how much one knows or doesn't know about history, and getting into an argument about this is neither useful nor helpful to the OP, so I'm not going to continue this discussion with you. The OP can decide which ones, if any, they wish to use in their writing.
Well, #1 could be interesting to work with. I'm already working on my own twist of #5. I know I've always been a logical person, so #2 could take that to quite an extreme, though maybe I could make it work for a few (minor?) characters, or maybe my MC as a character flaw. Thanks for the tips!
Very well, and I apologise if I have offended you. It was not my intention, nor was it my intention to start an argument or show off -- only to offer a balancing counter-view to the prevailing image of an "elf" as either a creature of good-will (as seen in the LOTR films), or a cute harmless being (as portrayed in A Midsummer Night's Dream). If I have spoken out of turn, or in ignorance, I only hope you will not think my words were intended as malicious or disrespectful. That is all, and thank you.
