D&D General Drow as in Cow or Drow as in Snow: Where did the Dark Elves Come From?

Yeah, it’s weird as an old guy who started right after 2E started and stopped around 2000 so had literally zero idea of who Gygax or Arneson were as they had the least amount of references in the front matter of stuff of the at era.

Then I missed the Gygax on the Forums of the 2000s. My introduction into the history was the Blackmore doc on Amazon a couple years back and then picking up a second hand copy of Game Wizards at an airport last year.

Being able to look at all of it solely with several years of decades of history is probably the best way to view it.

It’s odd that the first association I had with “dark elves” was Tolkien with his rather literal interpretation of the term. They were elves that literally lived before there was the light of the sun and never saw the light of the trees in Arvandor prior to being consumed by Shelob Herself rather Lloth-like and the only real connection between Tolkien’s elves and D&D drow I can recall.

The closest to a drow would probably be the Noldor along with their kinslaying of the sea elves and oath swearing of vengeance against Morgoth—albeit except for that specific incident of violence against their fellow elves—the Noldor seemed to be more closely the influence for the grey elves.

Oddly, in Tolkien’s case, he also used the term gnomes somewhat interchangeably with the Noldor as they were more likely to be craftsmen and shared their love of craft with dwarves actually.

Anyway, given how much Tolkien there is in D&D, it seems that many want to diminish his influence in lieu of pointing more towards the pulpy influence of Howard & Co. Personally—and this is based on my reading of the game works not necessarily what those involved wrote about what they wrote—is that Tolkien flavored the game more than anything else, but that the pulp writers flavored the story.

Drow are a weird bunch really. I get the idea that they were always just a bunch of purely evil creatures, but that really fails to look at what was actually written in the early years. It’s been mentioned about the not-so-evil drow even in the old GDQ adventures. Greenwood talks about how roughly 1 in 10 drow even in drow civilizations in the Underdark are not evil and even good. He likewise mentions that Menzo is not a typical drow city, nor are most of the drow cities so overwhelmingly ran by radical Lloth clergy.

Granted, this was rather overlooked because it was sort of in line with the edgy type of game WotC wanted to have especially with the tail end of 2E and 3-4E. By the mid 2000s you end up with the batshit Dragon article about how f-ed up drow are which gets into all kinds of stuff that is really beyond the pale of what needed to be said. I’m sure some folks know of the article I’m talking about, but I’m not really interested in digging it up to post, but it’s pretty out there.

Anyway, I’ve decided that my my drow and elves in general are actually more akin to Tolkien’s work. To do this, I’ve sorta smashed some bits of random lore together. Specifically, how the eladrin originally in 2E were a type of elf that lived in the outer planes. I’ve just reversed it, so that the prime elves are actually originated in the outer planes and have become habituated to the prime at some level. Sort of like the Noldor of Tolkien. The history of the fall and a that is just misremembered stories of ancient pasts, with the drow being abyssal eladrin opposed to arborean eladrin. They have simply existed for so long they mix up their planar origins with their prime ones. Either way, elves are dwindling in the prime.

It also makes for a good origin of lots of other classic D&D species as most of them had by the introduction of the Great Wheel in the 1E Manual of the Planes godly realms filled with denizens that were identical to the ones in the prime. No reason goblins, orcs, trolls, giants, dwarves, and the rest weren’t likewise original from their pantheon’s realms.

Anyway, I’m not sure if that reduces the inherent racial associations regarding drow or not.
Dragonlance also treated dark elves more like Tolkien than Drow, "cast from the light".
 

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Dragonlance also treated dark elves more like Tolkien than Drow, "cast from the light".
I never got into Dragonlance, and with the exception of Dalamar in various The Wizards Three columns in Dragon Magazine had little exposure to them. Granted, Dalamar was a dark elf and I could tell there was something different to him compared with the typical way a drow elf was portrayed at the time.
So, I may be missing part of it, but in Tolkien, being a "dark" elf was actually a bit of an way to distinguish a "sundered" group of elves that refused to follow the calling of the Valar for the elves to journey to west, where those who arrived ultimately witnessed the light of the trees of Valinor.

They weren't "cast from the light" but more or less refused its summons. After the trees were destroyed by Ungoliant (I was really mixing up my Tolkien lore in my previous post where I referred to her as Shelob) and the Noldorian elves swore vengeance and returned to Middle-Earth, the two elves, light (in the form of the Noldor) and dark mingled and lived together. Granted, that for the most part the Noldor were the named members of the elven community, but not always. Thrainduil the elvenking of The Hobbit is a member of the Dark Elves (most likely) as was his son Legolas.

The Noldor, while being "elves of the light" were referred to as Deep Elves (as well as the aforementioned gnomes.)

Many Tolkien scholars assume that Tolkien was drawing upon Norse stories of Dökkálfar ("Dark Elves") and Ljósálfar ("Light Elves").
 


I would love to include a linguist into the discussion, with famliarity with old English, Anglo Saxon and/or Norse.
Precisely ... Prose Edda is a source for both Tolkien and Gygax, though Tolkien cites his sources and Gygax doesn't.

Black elves / svartafs go back at least to the prose Edda, though as I understand they're more dwarfy than elfy in D&D terms ... but then what's an elf, and what's a dwarf?
 

Granted, Dalamar was a dark elf and I could tell there was something different to him compared with the typical way a drow elf was portrayed at the time.
That would be because dark elves, in the DL setting, are outcasts from elven society and not D&D’s canonical matriarchal, black-skinned, underdark-dwelling, spider-worshiping drow.
 

Anyway, given how much Tolkien there is in D&D, it seems that many want to diminish his influence in lieu of pointing more towards the pulpy influence of Howard & Co. Personally—and this is based on my reading of the game works not necessarily what those involved wrote about what they wrote—is that Tolkien flavored the game more than anything else, but that the pulp writers flavored the story.
Classically the Tolkien-minimalization started with Gary, and because his most famous public statements (an editorial in Dragon issue 95, and I believe at least one earlier) minimizing the influence of Tolkien came out after the Saul Zaentz's Tolkien Enterprises (the licensee for Tolkien products) threatened TSR with a lawsuit over their completely unauthorized Battle of the Five Armies wargame and the references to Hobbits, Ents, Balrogs and Nazgul in the original/first few printings of OD&D, his degree of sincerity has always been a bit in doubt.

Although Victor Raymond (at a time when James Maliszewski was writing about it) dug up a writing from Gary from 1974, prior to the lawsuit, where he similarly minimizes the Tolkien influence on D&D and Chainmail, of course we've more recently learned that Gary lifted quite a bit of Chainmail's fantasy elements from a Middle Earth wargame!

But either way, a lot of folks took Gary at his word, and he was consistent both in the 70s and into the 2000s on the forums that he quite liked The Hobbit but wasn't a big fan of LotR, and that his own personal faves were topped by Howard, Vance, and Leiber.

I agree with you that the set of races and classes (all but the Cleric and Paladin) and quite a few of the monsters in D&D obviously draw heavily on Tolkien, as is the general concept of the adventuring party made up of various races and classes of adventurer.

 
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Precisely ... Prose Edda is a source for both Tolkien and Gygax, though Tolkien cites his sources and Gygax doesn't.

Black elves / svartafs go back at least to the prose Edda, though as I understand they're more dwarfy than elfy in D&D terms ... but then what's an elf, and what's a dwarf?
Gary was also borrowing secondhand from Pratt and De Camp, from whom he directly swiped the physical description of Drow, as well as from Poul Anderson, all of whom were borrowing directly from scandinavian history and language, and the latter of whom's elves in Three Hearts and Three Lions and The Broken Sword fill in a lot of the missing pieces of D&D elves where they don't match up directly to Tolkien.
 
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Dragonlance also treated dark elves more like Tolkien than Drow, "cast from the light".
Yup. Although there were a couple of appearances of classic drow in Krynn before Tracy & Margaret clarified that drow as-such don't exist in Krynn.

I had the AD&D choose your own adventure game book The Soulforge, in which you play Raistlin going through his Test of High Sorcery, and in that it's established that (spoiler below)...

The final "unbeatable" challenge Raistlin faced in his test, which forced him to accept Fistandantalus' help, was a magic-resistant drow.

Interestingly, this book was written by Terry Philips, the guy who originally played Raistlin when Dragonlance was being developed, and apparently established some of his character traits, like the rasping voice.

Tracy and Margaret ret-conned it later, though, in their own novel of the same name.
 
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I never got into Dragonlance, and with the exception of Dalamar in various The Wizards Three columns in Dragon Magazine had little exposure to them. Granted, Dalamar was a dark elf and I could tell there was something different to him compared with the typical way a drow elf was portrayed at the time.
So, I may be missing part of it, but in Tolkien, being a "dark" elf was actually a bit of an way to distinguish a "sundered" group of elves that refused to follow the calling of the Valar for the elves to journey to west, where those who arrived ultimately witnessed the light of the trees of Valinor.

They weren't "cast from the light" but more or less refused its summons. After the trees were destroyed by Ungoliant (I was really mixing up my Tolkien lore in my previous post where I referred to her as Shelob) and the Noldorian elves swore vengeance and returned to Middle-Earth, the two elves, light (in the form of the Noldor) and dark mingled and lived together. Granted, that for the most part the Noldor were the named members of the elven community, but not always. Thrainduil the elvenking of The Hobbit is a member of the Dark Elves (most likely) as was his son Legolas.

The Noldor, while being "elves of the light" were referred to as Deep Elves (as well as the aforementioned gnomes.)

Many Tolkien scholars assume that Tolkien was drawing upon Norse stories of Dökkálfar ("Dark Elves") and Ljósálfar ("Light Elves").
This is true. They're not the same, but neither is a separate subspecies with different physical characteristics.
 

This is true. They're not the same, but neither is a separate subspecies with different physical characteristics
That Dökkálfar and Ljósálfar of the Prose Edda aren’t distinct and different subspecies or that Tolkien’s elves are distinct and different species?

In the former, they are quite different. In Tolkien they are the same biologically, however Tolkien applies much significance to lineages and inherited traits and even a Christian inspired level of “original sin” to this familial inheritance.

Again, getting back to my personal opinion on the physical differences between various D&D elves, I of a mind that even the elves themselves have it wrong—to some extent. While there is some extraplanar and deific basis in the differences, it’s not something that happened in the Prime Material in the various “real” D&D worlds but far before that.
 

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