Hallo conlangers!

On 16.12.2015 03:50, Padraic Brown wrote:

> Mark J. Reed wrote:
>
>> An interesting article. I had to wipe some disgust off my trousers after reading it, though.  The author
>> seems to really have a hate-on for Dungeons and Dragons (and modern fantasy in general, but D&D in
>> particular)..
> I think it could be that he feels "fantasy after Tolkien" in many ways dropped the ball on all things Elvish.
> Elves became again a "faded" folk if you will -- wispy, simpy, stereotypically woodsy, bow-slinging, harp-
> strumming and all that neo-medieval jass. That Tolkien raised the Elf up to a much higher standard than
> the usual wild imps of folklore (and worse, Victorian children's stories), and even his own early vision of
> them (those sappy-dappy Elves we first meet when Bilbo is coming into Rivendell with a load of Dwarves
> in tow).

Yes, many post-Tolkien writers severely impaired the dignity of the 
Elves that Tolkien so beautifully restored. My own version strips them 
of some aspects, too, but I think I do them more justice than the 
authors of D&D.

> I certainly don't hate D&D, or even modern fantasy as a genre, but I do also sympathise with his overall
> sentiment on the matter.
>
> Jörg Rhiemeier wrote:
>
>>> I didn't wan't any kind of superficial fantasy type elves in The World and it's in part for that reason I know
>>> so little about the Teyor, the folk that perhaps most resemble Tolkien's ideas of what it is to be Elf.
>> Fine. Nobody needs *yet another* instance of D&D-style Elves. What is more interesting is an *original*
>> treatment of Elves that casts a wholly new light on them. I hope to achieve that through my Elvenpath
>> project (of which Old Albic, my main conlang, is a part). More on that below.
>>
>>> I do have one poem written in Teyoran
>> Sounds quite ... elvish to me ;)
> Well, I certainly like the sound of Tolkien's Elvish languages! But aesthetically, I find much in common between
> those languages on the one hand and Teyoran & Queranaran on the other. Though there are differences in that
> I find some sounds and sequences aesthetically pleasing that might not be so "elvish" according to Tolkien.

Fine. I also like the sounds of Tolkien's Elvish languages (Quenya and 
Sindarin *do* sound different, but both are beautiful in their own, 
distinct ways!), and they are sources of inspiration for the phonologies 
of my Albic languages (besides Classical Old Albic, there will be 
various dialects, and also a handful of modern Albic languages, but 
these are still very sketchy now).

>> As for my own Elves, they are an attempt at expressing my own views of the
>> human condition, which are ultimately hopeful, and I wish to demonstrate
>> with the Elves what human beings can do. That, of course, is only
>> meaningful if all non-human or super-human traits are stripped off them,
>> which I do: my Elves are just human beings like you and me, no more, no
>> less. (This is also virtually the only way to plausibly fit them into the
>> history of "the real world".) They are in no way "ideal" or "saintly", they
>> have the same failings we all have; yet, they have learned to cope with
>> those failings in ways humanity as a whole can do, too.
> I always thought this was an interesting take on the Elvish Question. Particularly the combination of the idea
> of social / spiritual / mental elevation contained in "what human beings can do" coupled with making the
> protagonists, well, actual humans! Rather than some kind of "other" race.

Thank you. As you may remember, they originated in an attempt at 
introducing Tolkienian Elves into "the real world", inspired by a fan 
fiction story I found on the Net. But soon I realized that I could 
remove the traits that set them apart as a race without breaking what I 
was about to do with them. Indeed, the removal of those traits made the 
whole thing stronger, as a story about what human beings can achieve is 
best told with *human* characters! If they were something else, one 
could say, "Oh well, they can do that because they are 
[immortal/magical/whatever] - we aren't, and therefore we can't".

Also, the language I first came up with for them - Nur-ellen - was doing 
injustice to its parent, Sindarin. After I had severed the link to 
Tolkien, I went forth to write my own conlangs for them, unrelated to 
but still inspired by Tolkien's languages.

> In some key respects, our visions are parallel. Particularly in shining a light on the human condition, and in
> shining light on what humans can do. But also, so do the Daine and Dharghs and even the Hotai (Orc equivalents,
> if you will -- but then again, not really) -- they all share the common experience of living, thinking beings created
> to dwell, if for a time, in the world of physical being.

I see.

> Of course, we differ in some basic respects as well. The World is essentially an otherworld -- not this primary world
> at all. It exists within its own reality and its reality abides by its own Laws of Nature.

Yep. It is a self-contained fantasy world, even if it borrows a lot of 
things from the real world, to a higher degree than many other fantasy 
worlds I have seen. While Tolkien imagined Arda to be the distant part 
of the real world.

> The Teyor themselves I know
> are at once quite distinct from Men, [long text snipped]

That sounds very much like Tolkien's Elves!

> I should note also that in-world I do use the name "Elf", but not for any of the greater Peoples that inhabit Gea. In
> The World, "Elves" are indeed a kind of 'wee folk'. Impish and mercurial, they can be helpful if treated respectfully;
> but they can be real pains in the arse if crossed. And it doesn't take much to cross an Elf. No butterfly wings or any
> of that sappiness, but they are one of the Little People you'll find in the woods and hinterlands, the high moors and
> other dark abandoned places. Of course, in town, they're a dab hand as rat hunters. Better than any cat, when you
> get down to it!
>
> So, in The World, Elves are more like a cross between the old Germanic Elf & Victorian Woodland Sprite whilst Teyor
> are more akin to the higher conception of Elves that Tolkien first showed us. Hope all that makes some sense! This
> really just about exhausted everything I know about Teyor (and Elves!) in The World.

In the _Book of Lost Tales_, Tolkien had fairy-like beings which he kept 
separate from the Elves, too. He later removed them. While there is no 
positive evidence of fairies in my conceit, people of course have tales 
of fairies, and such critters also occur in the folk tales of my Elves, 
though the matter is still unexplored.

On 16.12.2015 12:34, BPJ wrote:

> Den 2015-12-16 kl. 10:53, skrev Pete Bleackley:

It was actually Padraic who wrote that.

>> I think it could be that he feels "fantasy after Tolkien" in many 
>> ways dropped the ball on all things Elvish.
>> Elves became again a "faded" folk if you will -- wispy, simpy, 
>> stereotypically woodsy, bow-slinging, harp-
>> strumming and all that neo-medieval jass. That Tolkien raised the Elf 
>> up to a much higher standard than
>> the usual wild imps of folklore (and worse, Victorian children's 
>> stories), and even his own early vision of
>> them (those sappy-dappy Elves we first meet when Bilbo is coming into 
>> Rivendell with a load of Dwarves
>> in tow).
>>
>> I certainly don't hate D&D, or even modern fantasy as a genre, but I 
>> do also sympathise with his overall
>> sentiment on the matter.
>>
>
> Well said. I agree every bit.

I do so, too.

> Before I gave up on fiction-writing years ago I wrote a long story in 
> a Norse setting where I tried to blend just a little bit of the 
> Tolkienian Elves and the Norse Alfar. I used the word Alfar and the 
> names for three kinds mentioned in the Norse sources (Ljósalfar, 
> Dökkalfar and Svartalfar) untranslated and tried to make *all* of them 
> feel more dangerous than Tolkien made them (with the individual 
> exceptions of Feanor and Thingol),

Many people these day tend to overlook _The Silmarillion_, which shows 
that Tolkienian Elves *can* do evil. And when they do, they do so at a 
large scale!

> although making the Svartalfar a blend of Orks, Hollywood vampires and 
> Waffen-SS was not so successful! :-)

Now that's what I call over-the-top bogeymen!

> Lest anyone wonders they each had their own language too: Old Saxon 
> for Ljósalfar, Old English for Dökkalfar and Old High German for 
> Svartalfar,

So your Alfar were, linguistically spoken, West Germanic! And your Nazi 
vampire orcs speaking an early form of German - a cliché, but it somehow 
doesn't feel *that* wrong!

> while the Æsir spoke Gothic, the Vanir Old Swedish (sic! -- after all 
> Freyr was _vanagoð_ and _svíagoð_!), the Dwarves Common Germanic and 
> humans had Old Norse names in the hope that readers, knowing Swedish, 
> should sense the meaning of 'alien' speech a bit.  I had great fun 
> making up the language samples though, especially when the human 
> protagonist accidentally woke the Dwarf Dawinaz (or Dáinn) who had 
> been sleeping for so long that even the other Dwarves thought he was 
> dead :-) and who only spoke his native language!

Apparently, you were heavily into old Germanic languages when you wrote 
that. Of course, that fits considering that it all was based on Germanic 
mythology. Those are *Germanic* gods, elves and dwarves, so why 
shouldn't they speak Germanic languages?

>
> BTW there even is a fairy living in a poppy (IIRC) in the Qenya 
> lexicon from the early twenties...

Yes, in the _Book of Lost Tales_ era, Tolkien still had such fairies - 
which he kept separate from the Eldar. It wasn't a bad move to nix them, 
though they could have led to interesting confusions.

--
... brought to you by the Weeping Elf
http://www.joerg-rhiemeier.de/Conlang/index.html
"Bêsel asa Éam, a Éam atha cvanthal a cvanth atha Éamal." - SiM 1:1