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Comment by asdfasgasdgasdg | Hacker News Reader

I love stories that subvert the elvish tropes. Maybe because so many have used the elves basically unmodified, it's great to see someone do it differently. In the Second Apocalypse, there is a race called the Nonmen who are clearly inspired by the elves. They are beautiful, immortal, strong, and talented in sorcery, like Tolkien's elves. But the trope is subverted in a variety of ways. They were not originally immortal, they were granted this "gift" by the main antagonists of the series. The same agent that gave them immortality also killed off all the females of their species. Moreover, while it made them ageless, it did not give them minds capable of coping with that agelessness, so many of them have gone insane. It's an interesting take on a darker version of elfdom.

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Warcraft's elves are pretty subverted. They're more pawns for the higher powers than anything. Their immortality was a tool used to enslave them to protecting the World Tree. The logic being that if you make a race immortal and then make that immortality contingent on the World Tree being alive, they will be highly motivated to protect said World Tree.

Beyond that, they're kinda responsible for a suspiciously large number of bad things that happened in Warcraft history. There are so many examples I will definitely overlook several obvious ones here. Off the top of my head:

* the sundering (thanks, Azshara) * yogg'saron entering the emerald dream (thanks, Fandral) * Illidan, nuff said * The Sunwell - I'm gonna go out on a limb here and call it a net bad thing. It contributed a lot to Arthas's descent into madness/ascent to power and unleashing Kel'Thuzad into the world again was pretty not good.

It would be interesting to have a story set in the stone age where Neanderthals are the "normal humans" and the Cro Magnons are the elves, the lithe, agile, gracile ones with childlike faces (compared to a Neanderthal) and a love of innovation and novelty.

This... isn't conclusively ruled out by modern archaeology, as far as I know, and it would allow you to talk about "half-elves" while maintaining the notion that they're still separate species.

I believe Carl Sagan played with the idea for a fictional story, but never got beyond what he explored as non-fiction (primarily, to my mind in the book The Dragons of Eden). Also, you can argue some of Stephen Baxter's books explore the ideas, though Stephen Baxter has tried to be both historically accurate enough that he generally doesn't use fantasy terms like dwarves/elves, and smart enough to not fall into stereotype traps that you could easily point to in his descriptions of other hominids. (It's a running theme in among other things his Manifold books, and probably most interesting in hints and tertiary themes in the Long Earth young adult fiction he cowrote with Terry Pratchett, where the term elves is actually used, though not entirely based on hominids known to this Earth.)

My very lay understanding is that in the cross-over period where early Sapiens lived with other hominids you could draw some parallels to Neanderthals as dwarves (or sometimes perhaps trolls) to Sapiens viewpoints at the time and in that case Denisovans might be elves.

If you want to throw in bad pop-genetics, there'd be more "half-dwarves" among European descendants and more "half-elves" among Asian descendants, from that viewpoint.

"Malazan Book of the Fallen" [1] has multiple non-standard races inspired from ancient hominid.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Malazan_Book_of_the_Fallen

The closest I can think of is William Golding's novel The Inheritors:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Inheritors_(Golding_novel)

Check out Steven Brust's Dragaera books. The "humans" in the books, Dragaerans, are essentially Tolkienesque elves; the "Easterners" are human, essentially Hungarians. Dragaerans aren't immortal, but have several thousand year lifespans so the difference is not very important to Easterners. (One character is older than the Dragaeran Empire, more than 200,000 years, IIRC.) And then there's the Serioli.

I always thought the elves in Styx: Master of Shadows were a cool subversion of elven tropes. They're very dark and otherworldly looking, almost vampiric.

http://38.media.tumblr.com/cc5a526de1722f7fa5afcde8c432d12a/...

otherwordly and vampiric is how the elves in Discworld[0] are portrayed, with the "obvious" explanation that people now remember them differently as words have changed meaning over time.

> Elves are wonderful. They provoke wonder. Elves are marvellous. They cause marvels. Elves are fantastic. They create fantasies. Elves are glamorous. They project glamour. Elves are enchanting. They weave enchantment. Elves are terrific. They beget terror. The thing about words is that meanings can twist just like a snake, and if you want to find snakes look for them behind words that have changed their meaning. No one ever said elves are nice. Elves are bad.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elves_(Discworld)

My understanding is that this is how elves used to be thought of and Tolkien's elves where their own thing.

We don't know the origin of the word "elf".

In the recent past, it was a generic term for any spirit. Under a Christian view of the world, elves were pagan spirits and therefore evil. You can check out the lyrics to the song "seven hundred elves", involving a farmer defending himself from forest spirits by hanging crosses around his house.

https://mainlynorfolk.info/steeleye.span/songs/sevenhundrede...

(Note that apparently this song uses "elves" to translate a Danish reference to "trolls".)

But this usage is known not to be the original view of elves. When the word originated, it didn't refer to something bad, as we can tell by the fact that so many Germanic names include an "elf" element: Alfric ("king of the elves"), Alvin ("friend of the elves"), Alfred ("advised by the elves"), etc.

Old elf mythology appears to have thought of them as human-like spirits, who might be conventionally or sexually dangerous, but who weren't evil.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elf

Another interpretation is that fairies (and their Scandinavian equivalents, trolls) represented prechristian, or unchristianized, peoples. They were an "other" and that means something strange and foreign, and likely but not necessarily dangerous.

Concerning the steeleye span song, I'd like to point out that, the elves' perspective is that their home was under attack by the farmer

> It's an interesting take on a darker version of elfdom.

Tolkiens orcs were originally elves, though they were twisted with methods of torture by Morgoth (Saurons master) into becoming as they are.

The corresponding race in the Second Apocalypse are the Sranc, an artificial genetic aberration derived from the Nonmen by aliens that possess superior biotech.

I concur with OP's comments that the Second Apocalypse is much darker than LOTR. The Sranc embody this difference. Partly due to how much more graphic detail an author can get away with these days, Sranc are much more brutal, bestial and disgusting than Orcs.

Besides the mere graphic violence, Bakker has a way of making things psychologically disturbing. For example, it's weird and scary that the Sranc have beautiful faces. Obviously the transgressions in their behavior are disturbing (they don't just want to kill you -- in fact, they'd prefer if you lived, so they can do unspeakable things to your body after subduing you). The orcs are just an ugly army of big brutish bad guys. But they fight with the same tactics as any other medieval army, at least to my recollection of the LOTR books. The Sranc (and Wracu and Bashrag etc.) are something different.

Absolutely. It's extremely psychologically compelling: the porcelain features, the "black seed", the imagery of thousands of screaming humanoid beasts hurling themselves ravenously at a shield wall.

imo the series (at least the first half) is eventually going to be seen as a defining piece of modern fiction.

Achamian vs. the Spires in Sauglish will go down as one of the greatest magical fight scenes in the history of the written word for me.

You have the wrong library. That fight was in Iothiah (the Sareotic Library).

Oh right. All these libraries starting with the word S.

Did Tolkien predict epigenetics?

Before epigenetics we had Lamarckism[0] and in The Island of Dr. Moreau visisection is used to create humanoid beings from animals[1]

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lamarckism [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Island_of_Doctor_Moreau

> Moreover, while it made them ageless, it did not give them minds capable of coping with that agelessness, so many of them have gone insane

I believe Tolkien elves also "grow weary of the world", hinting at some mental health problems.

While that's true, the situation with the Nonmen is . . . well . . . extreme. It's far worse than mere weariness. The whole world of Earwa is much darker and more violent than Tolkien's. Sauron would be a far preferable master even to the secondary antagonists in Second Apocalypse.

Warhammer 40k's Eldar are like this as well. They end up forking into factions with some giving themselves over into complete violent, orgiastic depravity and the other becomes extremely austere, self-denying ascetics.

And, going full circle, Eldar is of course the name of elevenkind in the Silmarillion.

Yes, the Eldar are a closer parallel to what the Nonmen are in these books. Although I'd probably still rather encounter the average Eldar in a dark alley.

You’d might like the Elves in The Nightmare Stacks by Charles Stross [0]. Which includes (mild spoiler) an assault on the city of Leeds in the UK by a combined-arms Elven battlegroup (think Waffen-SS with pointy ears). They have battle-tested air-land integration doctrine where their dragons operate in a close air support role. Some of their innate magical powers include foretelling and mind control over enslaved humans.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Laundry_Files

That’s a bit more than a “mild” spoiler...

I’d have been really annoyed if someone had told me that information before I read it (fantastic series of books by the way)

Yes. Still worth reading after the spoiler though.

I've always been a fan of Michael Moorcock's melniboneans.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Melnibon%C3%A9

>Its people, the Melnibonéans, are not wholly human and are commonly depicted as elven. They are skilled with magic and beautiful, though psychologically similar to cats, with a callous nature. They lack a moral sense. Their actions are determined by tradition and by the search for pleasure and new sensations.

Moorcock famously despised Tolkien's work. I always wonder if he invented Melnibone to be "how elves would really turn out"

Moorcock also has denied that the Melniboneans are elves. To him "elves are the little things that you'll find in gardens or in rings in the countryside". There's a good, recent interview here where he talks about this and his opinion of Tolkien, which I wouldn't quite call despising it:

https://appendixnbookclub.com/2019/12/02/an-interview-with-m...

I always took them to be more of a parody almost a fuck you to tolkiens elves.

Tolkien elves are already a darker version of the typical fantasy elf [1]. Those that have only read LOTR are often surprised by the amount of infighting, betrayal, assassinations and straight up genocide in the Silmarillion.

[1] which ironically are based on the common perception of Tolkien elves.

The Gloranthan take is that the Elves - Aldryami - are more-or-less human-shaped plants, making them rather weirder in a lot of ways than their high-IQ-long-lived-humanoid equivalents.

They also live underground!

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