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

[Gorck]

I deliberately rotate between DROH and DRAU equally just to see if my players are awake.

Well you need to make sure they’re not feeling DROWsy.

 

[Starfox]

I've long taken the approach that most common folks in a setting know next to nothing about the "monsters" that live on their borders, and so the cultures are ripe with misinformation, exaggeration, and superstition. All it takes is some townsfolk to get their butts handed to them in a surprise encounter with a strange group of female elves while exploring a cave and all of a sudden it's "but they used magic! and they were evil! SO eeeeevil! their skin was black as pitch and they moved so silently nobody could have heard them coming! . . . and they totally dominated the menfolk! and they totally worship spiders. Yeah, spiders!"

How true is any of that? Who knowns, and really - how often does it come up anyway?

My cosmology is essentially wish-fulfilling, or expectation-fulfilling, so I have to take the opposite view on this. If those cowpokes believe there are dark elves in the cave, then there will soon be.

Not saying you are wrong, just enjoying how different viewpoints can be.

 

[Starfox]

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?

Around Scandinavia and Great Britain there are tales of the people in the hills - in Sweden they are called Tomte, in Norway Nisse, in Britain Hob and Gnome among other things. This is how the gods and spirits of previous belief systems survived into Christian times. All of these could be said to be fey, or elves, or dwarfs - nordic dwarfs are more like D&D gnomes. All of them were said to live underground at various times.

Its not until Victorian times that any real effort went into structuring this. Before that the literate classes used Greek mythology. This means you can basically do whatever you like with al of this. There is very little canon.

 

[Doctor Futurity]

Well you need to make sure they’re not feeling DROWsy.

How DROHLL! ;-)

 

[Scribe]

Around Scandinavia and Great Britain there are tales of the people in the hills - in Sweden they are called Tomte, in Norway Nisse, in Britain Hob and Gnome among other things. This is how the gods and spirits of previous belief systems survived into Christian times. All of these could be said to be fey, or elves, or dwarfs - nordic dwarfs are more like D&D gnomes. All of them were said to live underground at various times.

Its not until Victorian times that any real effort went into structuring this. Before that the literate classes used Greek mythology. This means you can basically do whatever you like with al of this. There is very little canon.

I was just thinking about this last night/this morning in terms of 'what really is a Gnome, anyway' assuming it was just one of the various names for the Fey.

 

[NN]

My take

Drow was an Elvish Supremacist who sparked a civil war. Their side lost, thank The Gods.

Now, “Drow” - are a handfiul of secret ancient survivors of the losing side of the Elvish Civil War. They are now liches and other abominations.

“Neo-Drow” are modern elves who’ve learned a bit of the secret history and sympathise with Drow. Such groups range from edgelord ninnies to vile demon-worshipping cultists.

Do i win £5?

 

[Fifth Element]

"All of the monsters in question are unique to AD&D, and as I wrote virtually all of their stats and descriptions they are in fact my creative products, not the IP of WotC. That's a FWIW." Gary Gygax gave a lot to this hobby, but geez, he was pretty cavalier with acknowledging sources. Like, if he was a student he would definitely violate all of our academic integrity rules.

Plus he considered everything produced by other people for TSR to be TSR IP, while claiming he was exempt from that rule, even though he made a show of signing the same agreement as everyone else. He basically made it up as he went along.

Since WotC acquired TSR's IP, they acquired the D&D version of drow with it.

 

[Selvarin]

This reads more like someone injecting today's politics into yesterday's fantasy gaming.

 

[Dannyalcatraz]

Mod Note:

Let’s drift back a way from the more politically tinged posts, shall we? Thanks.

 

[Hriston]

The Dark Elves came from the common home shared by all Elves, a bay on the eastern coast of the Levantine Sea, possibly the Bay of Acre/Haifa Bay, where they first "awoke" roughly 80,000 years ago. After about 5,000 years, they were "discovered" by the huntsman of the Archfey who invited the Elves, about 2,000 years later, to come live in the Feywild where they would remain youthful and untired of life, and their bodies wouldn't fade. After another almost 600 years of deliberations, some of the Elves accepted the invitation and began the long journey into the Feywild, the first ones eventually reaching their destination about 4,000 years later (around 68,000 years ago) and becoming the first "Light" Elves because they witnessed the light of the Feywild when the rest of the world was in the grip of the Last Glacial Period.

Others among the Elves didn't heed the summons of the Archfey or went astray along their journey, never reaching the Feywild or seeing its light, so they became known as Dark Elves. From the Levant, they eventually expanded throughout Eurasia by about 45,000 years ago. Because they didn't go to the Feywild, they were subject to the "fading", destined to roam unhoused into the Ethereal, and some wandered even as far as the Shadowfell, becoming dark not in name alone...