On 29 September 2011 23:06, Jörg Rhiemeier <[log in to unmask]> wrote:

> >       but Tolkien's pretty, sexless
> > elves and their Romantic Weltschmerz I find morally suspect.  And
> > Tolkien set the tone for the portrayal of elves.  We get parades of
> > wise, ancient and slightly depressed beings floating elegantly through
> > works, providing the opportunity for banal, unexamined sentiments the
> > author approves of to be wrapped up in grandiose drapery and presented
> > as Wisdom.
>
>
> Yes, this kind of Elves have been criticized often, and
> justifiably so.  Tolkien IMHO portrayed them well; most
> later ones are just blatant rip-offs, sometimes even
> dropped like BDOs into worlds where they simply don't fit.
>
>
Yes indeed. Elves in most modern fantasy books can be rather bland, but
Tolkien's Elves were anything but. If you read the Silmarillion, you'll see
that Tolkien's Elves are just as fallible as Humans are, and in many cases
the consequences of their actions are anything but positive. In the
Silmarillion there are plenty of instances of Elves being jealous, angry,
arrogant, treacherous, horny (yes!) and even downright evil. Thanks to their
long lives, they do gather more *knowledge* than Humans, but only a few
actually gain any *wisdom*. Those are the ones who tend to survive the
others, which is why by the time of the Lord of the Rings, the only elves
still living in Middle-Earth seem to be such Fountains of Wisdom. But they
gained it the hard way. I certainly thought of the characters of Elrond and
Galadriel differently once I learned how their lives had been before that
time.

And if anything, Tolkien's Elves formed different nations, spoke different
(if related) languages, and even regularly massacred each other. A far cry
from the monolithic "wisdom cultures" they are given in lesser works.


>
> Yes, I have noticed this bogosity about many "Elvish" languages
> I have seen.  Most of them are just hackwork coarsely imitative
> of Quenya and Sindarin (which are excellently elaborated
> conlangs, even if they aren't really more subtle and refined
> than most human languages),


And indeed, they are not treated as such in Tolkien's material. On the
contrary, his works feature enough Humans who speak Elven languages (usually
Sindarin), some even good enough to produce poetry that the Elves themselves
appreciate! If anything, the Elven languages are presented as being *easy to
learn* by Humans, because they are somehow more directly connected to the
world, i.e. (slightly) less arbitrary than Human languages (probably because
the Elves are strongly rooted in Ea, and never leave the world even when
slain, whereas Humans are just staying there for a short time, and their
souls are not bound to the world).


> > Elves and Dwarves DID exist, and maybe still do.
> >
> > Tolkien was an expert in the Germanic languages, especially the
> Scandinavian
> > branch, whence the ideas came.  I'm not an expert at all, but have read a
> > bit of Norse mythology, and my reading is that the elves (álfar) and
> dwarves
> > (dvergar) referred to the original inhabitants of Scandinavia, the ones
> the
> > Germanic peoples met as they migrated in.  They might have been Lapps,
> > Caledonians/Picts, Basques or a people now extinct/absorbed, but they
> were
> > definitely human.
>
>
> This is pretty much what I assume, too, except that I place
> the "real Elves" on the British Isles (the Irish say the Elves
> were on the Isles before the Irish themselves, the Germanic
> tradition has them in a land beyond the sea), where they had
> a sophisticated civilization (also surfacing in Greek myths
> as Hyperborea and Atlantis) and traded with the people on the
> shores of the Continent.  Of course, these "real Elves" were
> 100% human, and their language an ordinary human language
> (Old Albic is my attempt at re-creating this language).
>
>
I might decide to call the Maggel speakers "Elves" after all (at least in
the language). So far, I called them "Pictics" to give them a possible
relationship with the Picts, but that's only one of the possible origin of
those people. I kind of like the idea that they would be called Elves, since
Maggel is supposed to be nearly impossible to learn, and its speakers are
very arrogant about being able to speak that language. The fact that the
language itself has hints of them being cannibals makes it only more
appropriate :P .
-- 
Christophe Grandsire-Koevoets.

http://christophoronomicon.blogspot.com/
http://www.christophoronomicon.nl/