Elves: an historical approach
Hi guys,
Interesting thread. I think trying to systematically think about this is a good start. FYI if you want a good consistent Elven society similar to the one in Tolkien, I reccomend Burning Wheel, thats the one which rang the truest to me. Usually in most systems Elves seem fake, just generic uber people.
Anyway, here is my take on all this. I didn't read the whole thread (which I hope will be forgiven) but i wanted to address a couple of the points mentioend in the O.P. and some of the first couple pages of followups.
Here's my little essay.
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The standard logical thing within the framework of RPG, especially D&D, is to look for Magic-as-Technology to trump the apparent paradoxes presented by extrapolating from some of the principles in the game. But if you think outside the box a bit I believe you can find much more elegant solutions to this which don’t require endless ‘Magic creep’ or ‘power creep’. Some people like campaigns like Eberron etc., perhaps others might prefer not to be forced into ultra- High Magic to make a given society make sense.
Most of the mythology that RPG elves are based on comes from Germanic, Finnish, Celtic and (especially in the case of Tolkien) Norse mythology. All you have to do if you want to understand how Elves might actually live is look at the history of some of these people, and through that dispel some of the modern myths which have actually replaced our understanding. To kind of explore this I’m going to take a look at two prominent Barbarian groupings, the La Tene era Celts and the Norse from during the peak of the Viking Age (8th – 10th Century AD) … for convenience I’m just going to use the term “Celts” and “Vikings” here.
So let’s consider the Celts. In many ways theirs was a timeless culture much like that of most RPG elves. Their material culture (i.e. artifacts recovered by archeologists) evolved and grew in subtlety and complexity over the years, but did not change radically in short periods like that of the Romans. Most of their traditions and cultural norms seemed to stay the same. In many aspects they seemed lost in time, or timeless. The statue of the ‘Dying Gaul’
http://content.answers.com/main/content/wp/en/d/d4/Dying_gaul.jpg from Pergamon in Anatolia (where Turkey is today) in 220 BC is virtually identical in appearance, (in hair, moustache, weapons, equipment, and adornment like torcs), to the descriptions Julius Caser gave of Celts in Gallic Wars 150 years later, and to Agricola’s descriptions of Britons 100 years after that. So in some aspects it was a stable if not static culture, and yet it was also very advanced. Which brings me to…
MYTH #1: BARBARIANS WERE BACKWARD AND DIRTY
The Celts were very inventive and creative, and sophisticated in the hard sciences; they were far ahead of the Romans in metallurgy and many key military technologies. The Celts introduced mail ( ‘chainmail’ in the RPG world) to the Romans, and the Romans also copied their helmets (Coolus type) swords (Gladius Hispaniensis, Spatha and Falcata) from the Celts, as well as the critical weapon-related technology of pattern welding. The Romans claimed that their equipment was superior to that of the Celts but modern tests have shown that it was by far the other way around. The Celts also introduced soap, barrels, pants, wheeled carts, various horse tack, and made some of the most sophisticated and beautiful gold and silver jewelry the world has ever seen. Former Monty Python writer and amateur Historian Terry Jones recently pointed out that they apparently also made a very sophisticated wheat harvesting machine like a combine, which they themselves were apparently not particularly impressed by and the Romans obviously didn’t talk about much. They also left Calendars which were several orders of magnitude more accurate than contemporary Roman equivalents. I could go on and on.
As for being Dirty, the Celts bathed regularly, brushed their teeth, combed their hair, apparently cleaned wax out of their ears with little spoons, and lets not forget, THEY INTRODUCED SOAP TO THE ROMANS (the Romans quickly saw the value for washing laundry but didn’t take to the idea for bathing with it for a long time, preferring to scrape sweat and dirt off their body with a little curved stick). Similarly, the Vikings also bathed regularly, if not as often as we might today, both in steam saunas and in cold water as they still do. There is for example a document from a Bishop in England in the 10th century complaining that the Danes were tempting the local women to sin by their habit of bathing every week. Even in Christian Europe bathing was practiced regularly until the early Renaissance. Public bath-houses for both sexes existed in nearly every major city in Europe until the 13th -14th centuries. They remained very popular despite being condemned by Church officials. A shortage of firewood to heat the water also apparently contributed to their decline. Pagans lacking all terror of the human body apparently liked to be naked and enjoyed bathing, the Celts seemed to be obsessed by it. From some of the new research coming out, they even had cities, running water all that stuff only the Romans were supposed to have, one good example of all of the above being the famous Celtic town of Numantia, in Spain.
In addition to being clean, the Vikings were similarly also technologically advanced. Like the Celts, they were very sophisticated in metallurgy. We know from records in period that Viking swords were sought out by their contemporaries from the much more ‘civilized’ centers of the Khazari and Byzantine Empires, and in Persia and Arabia. Their real technological marvel though was their ships. The extremely sophisticated clinker-built warships of the Norse were by far the fastest ocean going warships of their day, and also had a shallower draft than any contemporary vessel of comparable size; as a result they were able to travel far up rivers (such as when Norse and Danish Vikings got in a fight with each other and local Saxons and pulled down London Bridge, whence the famous nursery rhyme. Believe it. Or not.) They also built stout sailing vessels which, as we know so well, roamed farther than nearly any other ships at sea.
The key difference between these Barbarians and say, the Romans, was a matter of cultural priorities and social organization, not a high tech society wiping out a low tech society, which is another myth.
MYTH #2: BARBARIANS WERE SICKLY AND DISEASED DUE TO THEIR BACKWARD LIVES IN THE WILDERNESS
This is sort of a clashing modern myth, because when it comes to “barbarians”, on the one hand you have the gym jock Arnold Schwarzenegger-as-Conan look, rippling muscles and perfect teeth, and on the other you have the ‘caveman’ look which is used in every movie from Gladiator to Braveheart. We are supposed to believe that all ‘Barbarians’ were cave men who, unlike the ones in the Geiko commercial, understood neither hygene nor how to use a comb, and liked to wear ragged furs more than anything else. I refer you to the section on hygene above, and try to think of the ultimate origins of say, Irish lace, Scottish Tartans, Argyle sweaters…
The O.P. pointed out how tough it was to survive in the forest. Apparently, not really so much. I guess it depends which forest, in what part of the world, and which people. Much of Germany, and (especially) Scandinavia is forested even today, back in the Iron and Medieval Ages respectively, Ireland, Germania, Belgium, and Scandinavia were heavily forested, there was very little cleared land. And yet, far from starving and struggling to survive, the Barbarians who lived in these areas seemed to thrive, more than thrive. In fact scientists believe that the major Barbarian invasion cycles around 400 BC (when the Celts sacked Rome) 50 BC, 400 AD (Franks and Gauls), and then with the Vikings started swarming all over Europe and Russia in 800 AD, were due to huge population booms in the Barbarian lands. So apparently they were getting food somewhere. Another interesting little factoid, they did some forensic analysis of La Tene Celtic skeletons (I think from Switzerland) dating to around 50 AD, and Roman skeletons from Teutoburg forest (also about 50 AD) and from Pompeii (around 150 AD). They found that the “barbarian” Celts were much healthier, and apparently just much larger people than the “Civilized” Romans. Some of the female Celtic skeletons were over six feet tall, wheras very few of any of the Romans were over five feet. Since there was considerable generic overlap in the populations (many ‘Romans’ were Cisalpine Gauls for example) so the difference is attributed to nutrition. The Celts also had much better teeth, and fewer signs of parasitic infestation.
Similarly, everyone has no doubt heard the claims that the Vikings were huge people. I have read contradictory evidence as to whether they actually were bigger than other people in the same time period or not. But I never heard them described as malnourished pygmies by anybody.
The Fianna in Ireland were youths who lived in the forests almost exclusively from hunting, admittedly a tough lifestyle, but they seemed to pull it off. Old permanent campfire sites where they used to cook game can still be found in Ireland.
Tacitus described how German tribes, who were swarming in population, barely farmed at all, preferring to live by the sword and ‘earn their bread and mead through wounds’
How did the Celts and Vikings thrive? From contemporary accounts it seems like they had plenty of game (the boar, and to a lesser extent the deer or stag feature hugely prominent in the artifacts of both cultures), they did a lot of herding of sheep and (especially) cattle (tough archaic breeds well capable of living in forests and steep hills) and they did a lot of fishing. Both cultures seemed to revere the Salmon, which the Celts thought was a symbol of wisdom. Contemporary observers described huge yields of fish in Denmark, for example.
Plagues didn’t seem to re-appear after some flareups in the Classical era until European Christians began to crowd together in rapidly growing cities (and on their increasingly long voyages aboard ships) which lacked adequate provisions for sanitation. That and the whole nakedness is Sin / lack of bathing business, and an increasingly poor diet probably all contributed to the virulence of the Black Death when it first hit in 1348.
Magic can also play a role here, but Magic of a subtler kind.
DILEMMA: BARBARIANS WERE LED BY RUTHLESS BARBARIAN TYRANTS, BUT ELVES ARE SUPPOSED TO BE CHAOTIC, EASY WITH THEIR WOMEN AND LOVE FREEDOM
Freedom. Celts, and Vikings were both apparently heavy into it. Both were more democratically inclined than either the Romans or the Greeks. We know for a fact that true Monarchies didn’t emerge in Scandinavia until the end of the Viking age (after many very bitter struggles) There was still a remnant of Celtic democracy left thousands of years later in the Tanistry system of the Irish, Welsh and Scottish monarchies. The Vikings (Norse settlers fleeing the rise of the first king of Norway) established the oldest continuous Republic on earth in Iceland, based on the All-Thing, a kind of combination Parliament and Supreme court which was central to all Scandinavian tribes during the pagan era.
Women had great freedom in both Iron Age Celtic society and Dark Ages Norse society. One of the more realistic and historically accurate of the Icelandic Sagas (Njál's saga) hinges around the divorce of a man by his wife, on the basis that he could not please her sexually. This exact same rule exists in Irish Brehon law, a Celtic remnant still extant in the Christian era. Under Brehon law, a woman could divorce her husband for failure to provide adequately, for getting fat, for snoring, for engaging in homosexual activity, or for being unable to sexually satisfy her. Divorce means she gets half, or in some cases all of the common property (much of which was usually from brides dowry). It wasn’t until the 7th Century in Ireland and Scotland that Christian bishops established the ‘Law of the Innocents’, outlawing women from fighting in battle, or being made to fight.
Both Celtic and (especially) Norse women’s graves have been found with weapons, as well as blacksmith’s tools, merchants scales, and numerous other artifacts normally associated with males. Not just decorative weapons either, notched up, repeatedly honed fighting swords made for the hand of the woman they were buried with, who in many cases bore signs of healed wounds on their skeletons. A bunch of recently excavated female Scythian graves in the Ukraine actually had arrow-heads lodged in their ribs and spine. (Scythians are believed by some to be related to the Celts)
DILEMMA: ELVES ARE SAID TO HAVE BETTER KIT THAN HUMANS, YET THEY LIVE IN THE WILD LIKE SAVAGES
The hard-edged blade with its woven patterns quivers and trembles; grasped with terrible sureness, it flashes into changing hues.
- excerpt from the Anglo-Saxon poem Elene.
Definitely go right to the Norse or the Celts (especially) for this one. Want a good basis for magic swords? How about pattern welded blades? The Romans described the pattern welded weapons as ‘writhing like a serpent’, the Vikings later called it ‘the wyrm in the steel’. At the end of the 5th century Cassiodorus described pattern welded sword made by the Teutonic Warni tribe: “The central part of their blades, cunningly hollowed out, appears to be grained with tiny snakes, and here such varied shadows play that you would believe the shining metal to be interwoven with many colours. “
http://www.powning.com/jake/images/patternwlded10.jpg
This is a reference to the wavy patterns of pattern welded steel, which would normally be visible only when the sword was etched with acid. The Vikings, prized these swords so much after they lost the technology around the end of the first millennium, that they used to rob them from the graves (barrows) of their ancestors (just like in the Hobbit) and believed that they had been made by Giants or Trolls. They could identify such a blade by plunging it into the snow, then breathing across it to warm it… for a moment, the serpentine pattern would appear.
http://www.templ.net/pics-making/welded_steel/cleaning_steel06v.jpg
Now whether you think pattern welded steel just makes a nice looking blade or that it actually had some superior metallurgical properties, it’s not much of a stretch to imagine Elves making weapons like this. When you add in the fact that the Celts made such exquisite armor and helmets, you have a good basis for your elite Elven artifacts. And they were rare compared to your Roman / Christian civilization centers because the Celts lacked mass production, they just didn’t believe in it really. The Romans did it through slave labor and later the Medieval Christians mass produced weapons through the use of water-wheel and win-mill powered automated bellows, trip-hammers, and grinding wheels (all of which would be good technology for Dwarves or Gnomes IMHO)
DILEMMA: ELVES ARE SUPPOSED TO BE SKILLED WARRIORS, YET LESS WARLIKE THAN HUMANS: Is it really such a dilemma? If you look at it one way, this is the Celts in a nutshell. Raiding, duels of honor, cattle rustling and the like are a way of life; yet populations still boomed because the kind of depopulating wars the Romans (and later, the Medieval Christians) engaged in were very rare. Many battles were decided in fights between champions. It was similar with the Vikings. Duels or judicial combat were pretty common, so was raiding. Whole populations being put the sword and enslaved was fairly rare, yet everyone obviously knew how to fight, or fight a highly organized war if they had to (and when it came to foreigners, they could be pretty cruel)
But if you take away the hard drinking and the population pressure, you eliminate 90% of the violence, bad chaos and mayhem from either Norse or Celtic society. It’s not much of a stretch to imagine Elves being like Celts or Vikings, except they drink like the French or the Spanish do rather than say, like the Irish or the Swedes. If you put in the very low birth rate and longevity of the Elves, instead of being a problem, it becomes a solution to making this society stable, by helping address overpopulation.
And if you start with the individual prowess and fanatical courage of the Celts, and add the organizational skills and resourcefulness of the Norse war machine, you have a pretty potent adversary for anyone to deal with. There is a reason why Scandinavia was not ever really invaded through the Viking age (with the exception of some incursions into Denmark by the Carolingian Holy Roman Emperor) and there is a reason why it took the Romans 300 years from their own city being sacked before the could conquer Gaul. The Vikings themselves remained an extreme menace until they were converted to Christianity and their tribal federations were turned into centralized Monarchies. Then they finally settled down to become peasants like everyone else.
DILEMMA: ELVES ARE SUPPOSED TO BE EXPERTS WITH SWORDS AND BOWS – BUT WHY SHOULD THEY BE ANY BETTER THAN HUMANS?
Celtic and Viking cultures were both sword cultures, the sword was probably the most prestigious possession a man (or a woman) could own in either culture. We know they were good warriors with sophisticated Martial Arts systems and specific fencing skills. The famous Tain Bó Cuailnge describes the hero attending a fighting school, (presided over by a woman) where one had to learn specific Feats useful in combat, such as jumping over a high rod or fighting four men at once. Yep, Feats, sound familiar? Not a coincidence. But how about that bow? Well, apparently history has something for us there too. Depending on who you believe, the longbow, a vastly superior weapon to the smaller bows of Europe, was brought to the British Isles by the Vikings, or it was simultaneously developed by both the Norse and the Welsh. Either way, it was either a Celtic or a Norse weapon or both. It took the British Monarchy to organize the Welsh (whom they had just conquered in a bitter struggle lasting centuries) from being the deadly effective guerilla fighters, into the massed archer formations which proved devastating in the battles of the later Medieval period. But given the tactical organizational skills of the Pagan Vikings, it’s not much of a stretch to imagine our neo-Celtic / neo-Viking elves organizing parts of their armies in a similar fashion. Conversely, if you take the spiritual depth and cultural stability of the Celts and combine that with the resourcefulness and flexibility of the Vikings you have a society which would be both formidable and technologically and culturally very advanced, like Elves are supposed to be IMHO.
Does any of this mean that people will start using the historical sources for Elves or anything else? Obviously not, many good historical supplements came out for D20 and they went over like the proverbial lead balloon. But maybe you can use one or two of these concepts for the Elves in your campaign instead of distributing some new Magic item or Spell-like ability to each Elf in your world. Hopefully, some tiny fraction of the no doubt, very bored and irritated people reading this post will actually fade in their hatred for historical sources by some small iota. If even one gamer shifts on degree on that, this will not have been a complete waste of time
Machetaso
