The Elfemism Treadmill

"those of the after days shall scoff, saying who are the fairies - lies told to the children by women or foolish men - who are these fairies? And some few shall answer: Memories faded dim, a wraith of vanishing loveliness in the trees, a rustle in the grass, a glint of dew, some subtle intonation of the wind; and others yet fewer shall say... 'Very small and delicate are the fairies now, yet we have eyes to see and ears to hear, and Tavrobel and Kortirion are filled yet with [?this] sweet folk. Spring knows them and Summer too and in Winter still they are among us, but in Autumn most of all do they come out, for Autumn is their season, fallen as they are upon the Autumn of their days. What shall the dreamers of the earth be like when their winter come."

J.R.R. Tolkien - The Book of Lost Tales

 

 

When I first played Morrowind I remember being outraged at hearing Orcs were not their own race but had been narratively elevated to some degenerate form of elves. For about five minutes. Then I remembered my Silmarillion and Tolkien's own explanation: Melkor, unable to create life but only to pervert it, "twisted" some early elves into the first orcs - and the rest is imaginary history. In fact, for all we (justifiably) scoff at every fantasy setting having like, 17 types of superfluous elves now, the sundering of the elves seems one of the earliest stable core concepts of Tolkien's mythology, along with the exile of the gnomes a.k.a. Noldor, from the time Sauron was just an overgrown housecat with a shiny gold collar. Moreover, early versions take the "diminishing" of the firstborn literally, with statuesque, superhuman elves shrinking to toadstool fairy proportions and fading to intangibility as humanity rises to power. Given Tolkien's influence in modern fantasy, maybe we can't blame fantasy cosmologies like The Elder Scrolls for interposing more races of "mer" of varying stature among its other borrowed gimmicks.

For instance something named after the Falmari for no particular reason.

Well... maybe we can blame them just a little.

The snarling troglodyte peppering me with arrows is a "Falmer" or supposedly former race of snow elves, who now run bug farms deep underground in abandoned dwarvish (Dwem-Mer) ruins, with Moria architecture and Minas Morgul lighting. For bonus points, descriptions of the Falmer make sure to reiterate that they were "twisted" into their current form. But they're Totally Not Klingons -errr, Orcs. Orcs are a race of straight-backed, square-jawed noble warriors and blacksmiths who believe in trial by combat, which are completely different from the other straight-backed, square-jawed noble warrior Nords who believe in trial by combat. One kind has boar tusks. Get your noble warrior races straight.

I've already bemoaned here the denigration of Elvish superiority in modern games, but it bears mentioning you run into the same escalation in the other direction. Once you've demeaned elves to being indistinguishable from humans with pointy ears, you immediately need to supply your audience with ultra-elves like fairies and half-dragons. At the other end of the spectrum, once you've elevated orcs to being indistinguishable from humans with tusks, you suddenly require infra-orcs to fill all those empty caves. I'll leave aside the more practical game design question of balance for now in favor of another issue: given that Tolkien himself set the precedents for the sundering and diminishing of elves and their twisting into orcs, how do his modern copycats fail where he succeeded?

Mainly, would-be designers of fantasy worlds now tend to miss the point that many of Tolkien's comments were meant to integrate Christian and pagan mythology and to present Middle-Earth as our own world (place names in early drafts were initially meant to link to the geography of the British Isles) both concerns being utterly irrelevant to the vast majority of fantasy writers whose cosmology tends to be overtly and explicitly set in alternate worlds.

When we encounter them at the end of the Third Age, the elves remain decidedly super-human to act as communal hero's mentor to humanity's quest against Sauron. Their fading has been creeping up on them yet still looms mainly in the future, serving to explain why we future inhabitants of Midgard no longer notice them these days. Are you planning to turn the Tevinter Imperium into Sussex at some point in Dragon Age 17: Hackquisition? No? Then your elves need not fade. Slow birth rates and a lack of concern with realpolitik serve equally well to explain why a race of brilliant immortals hasn't taken over the world.

 

The sundering of the elves served to explain an otherwise odd distinction between "light" and "dark" elves in northern mythology. However, while Tolkien limited himself to Nordic myths (Atlantis aside) his imitators place no such restrictions on themselves. Words like "elf" and "dwarf" and "fairy" or "troll" and "ogre" and "goblin" have always been interchangeable across times and cultures anyway, and if you're already mixing mythologies then splitting one race just bogs you down in gratuitous thematic overlap. Is there a point to Dark Elves when you could just give devils their own culture? Sundering also allowed for some political conflict between elves instead of painting them as a single monolithic voting bloc, but we'll get to that in a moment.

Moreover, the various elvish peoples served to fill in the boundaries beyond Tolkien's narrative. The Teleri at Alqualonde filled a very specific narrative purpose, but shoehorning them and the Vanyar into the action of The Lord of the Rings would've only muddied the already tenuous distinction between Mirkwood and Lothlorien. Turning them all into playable races in an RPG runs the same risk of effacing relevant distinctions instead of outlining them. Or worse, of overlapping too heavily with human provincialism. Do you really need a race of elves defined by turnip-farming?

Painting orcs as malformed elves fed Tolkien's need to adhere to Christian doctrine of a singular creator. Couldn't very well have The Devil matching God's craftsmanship, now could we? But do you, oh modern fabulist, fear angering the almighty Ya-Wee-Wee should you let different gods create their own races? Does OrsiMering the Orcs fit any narrative purpose whatsoever that wouldn't be better served by more straightforward origin stories? Granted, adventure stories usually need boogeymen and the whole fallen angel schtick works wonders but then how do your elf-derived orcs differ from either other elves or from naturally barbaric monkey-men? What's the point?

Stop inventing a "new" race every time you want to tell a story. One could defeat both this specialness inflation and the other major fantasy world foible of medieval stasis by allowing cultures instead of breeds to change. After all, the wistful, somewhat fatigued, fatalistic Noldor who welcomed Bilbo and Frodo are a far cry from the fiery crusaders who crossed the Helcaraxe - and they didn't need to turn into either orcs or turnip-farming hu-mons to achieve that effect. Unfortunately, the common expectation of fantasy races is that each comes pre-built with its own fixed set of cultural beliefs and practices, unto eternity, and different cities populated by the same race are expected to look exactly the same. Occasionally, if we discover that players want to play orcs we might retcon and legitimize orcs... only to replace them with Falmer and discover that NewOrc tastes suspiciously similar to OrcClassic, or that the Fairies singing among the branches are just covering old Elvish Top40 hits.

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P.S.

Granted, it may seem unfair of me to focus on The Elder Scrolls for this topic, as they've inserted change in a more natural fashion than most game series (Red Mountain, peace treaty terms for political change, etc.) but the series' races and geography were set in stone during the half-assed pre-Y2K period when nobody really expected video game lore to make sense.

P.P.S.
I suppose the title warrants an explanation, as not everyone has necessarily heard the term "euphemism treadmill"