A few weeks ago during Fantasy’s Blog For A Beer on racism in the genre, we talked about using fantastic or SFnal elements as allegories to explore prejudice and -isms. My initial reaction to this is noted in the thread–mainly that I don’t think allegory is sufficient for exploring these issues anymore. But my secondary reaction is kind of tangential: why are we using elves as an allegory for skin color issues? Why the heck don’t elves have varied colors themselves?
Let’s think about this from a worldbuilding standpoint. Every story I’ve seen which featured elves has made them either a magically-created species (e.g., Tolkien) or a naturally-evolving one (e.g., Moorcock’s elfy Melniboneans). The MC elves usually seem to predate humans, but haven’t changed much in all that time. Generally NE elves are assumed to have developed in parallel with humans, which I imagine would affect their evolution since they’d probably compete within the same niche. But let’s forego that complication because that could land us with skin-camouflaging herbivore elves or something. Let’s also forego the hybrid MC/NEs — magically-created elves that then progress along natural lines, or vice versa. Wendy Pini’s Elfquest elves are a great example of this (and one of the rare cases of brown elves — some of them settled in a desert or on plains, and developed darker skin), but they’d throw a monkey wrench into the whole thing since some of them turned into magic eugenicists.
Anyway, let’s just say we’re dealing with a separate species which evolved on an Earthlike world independently of/isolated from humankind. There’s no logical reason why such elves should come solely in the colors we see in 99% of fantasy, which are either really pale white or really dark black (e.g., the drow/trow). Neither extreme makes sense, except in a fairly small environmental niche — and the niches used often are nonsensical too, like Forgotten Realms’ take on the drow; they’re an underground species. Nearly every underground species on our planet lacks melanin because there’s no need for UV protection; so why are these drow black?
Elves are usually written as intelligent, adaptable beings. There’s no reason for them to be confined to a single geographic location once they develop seafaring skills or whatever. So theoretically they could spread as far and wide as humans have, and theoretically they’d have to cope with the same environmental changes. They wouldn’t necessarily cope in the same way (e.g., humans develop deeper chests at higher altitudes; maybe high-altitude elves would develop “air-enriching” magic) but I would expect to see some regional variation among them, unless they had magical teleportation devices and could bop around the globe to keep the gene pool uniform.
It doesn’t even make sense from a mythological/literary standpoint. European myth is full of variation in its elflike creatures: brownies (who may not be brown, but that’s how I’ve always seen them in my head), wood-elves or dryads (which I’ve heard described as green or bark-colored), nymphs (usually blue or transparent), whatever. Yet from D&D to Laurell K. Hamilton, we mostly get tall, skinny, straight-haired, pointy-eared pale people. Scratch that — Hamilton’s got one black elf and a couple of vaguely brown ones. And a green guy. But much is made of the fact that these aren’t fully elves; they’re hybrids of elves and entirely different species, including animals, some of which can only interbreed through magical bestiality. I’m not sure if these “dehumanized” (de-elvenized?) examples should count.
This applies to any fantasy species, IMO. Unless they’re magical, I would expect to see a wide range of variation in the appearance, language, and customs of dragons, unicorns, mermaids, whatever. This may be one reason why I so love Naomi Novik’s Temeraire series — she doesn’t do one-note dragons. It may also be a reason to like a more recent novel: Marie Brennan’s so-far-excellent Midnight Never Come. I haven’t finished it yet, but it sounds like every human nation (and some non-human locales, like the ocean) in her world has its own population of elves, with its own distinct culture. This would bode well for elven diversity.
We need more fantasy like this, I’m thinking. Fantasy worlds should be complex — as complex as our own. Complexity does not mean strictly racial complexity, though that’s part of it. Complexity does not need to mean incomprehensibility, either, which it won’t be if it adheres to certain rules of logic. Frankly, I believe fantasy writers should be just as bound by logic as science fiction writers. Yeah, I know we’re talking about magic here. But magic reads better when it functions logically; any good writer understands this. It’s no fun to see omnipotent godlike people zipping around willy-nilly and smiting away at each other without cause-and-effect chains that we can intuitively follow. That gets boring, unless there are rules. And what better rules are there to follow than those of nature?
So consider this a plea for logical, complex fantasy worldbuilding. Not sure what to call such fantasy; I’ve heard the term “hard fantasy” bandied about lately, and maybe that applies. But in my opinion, this is just how all fantasy should be. (Dare I call it… mundane fantasy? Ew, please, no.)
1 • Randy Henderson said:
August 27th, 2008 at 4:08 pm, permalink
Nora – excellent article!
YEA, DIVERSITY
Couldn’t agree more. There is absolutely no reason that fantasy races spread across diverse environments wouldn’t develop diverse physical traits that make sense for their environment.
And definitely, they would develop not only diverse physical traits, but diverse cultural traits. We should see elves (or whatever) within the same world with differing religions and philosophies, different languages and accents, different economic models, different clothing materials and styles, etcetera as well as differing skin colors and hair color and styles.
This also opens up complex relationship models with the humans. I’m thinking of the time preceding and around the American Revolutionary War where the British and the French each “allied” themselves with different Native American tribes and exploited the natural rivalries between those tribes to their own ends, for example. You could have that going either way (the elves being exploited, or being the exploiters).
It also allows for there to be examples of racism and bigotry between elves (or whatever) of different colors and cultural backgrounds.
THE EXCEPTIONS
Not that there can’t be exceptions, of course. If the elves in the story are the immortal Tuatha De’Danaan, a select group of old celtic gods who live in an Other-Realm, there is no reason they wouldn’t appear uniformly white. But given that we’ve had little BUT white elves for much of the genre’s history, if having your elves be white isn’t critical to the story (e.g. if you are not writing a Celtic historical fantasy novel), then for the sake of originality and diversity, definitely make your elves multi-cultural, or even uniformly brown-of-skin.
I could even come up with a reason for black drow if I really wanted to. No reason that elf skin color has to be a function of melanin in relation to sunlight. Perhaps elves react to earth-spirt energies/ ley lines or some such, feeding off of it like plants feed off the sun. Drow, being close to and living around such sources, get a much deeper “tan” than elves living high in treetops distant from the earth.
But again, if you are going to have your elves be white and your drow be black, give a realistic reason why, and only if it really is important to the specific story you are telling.
BUT REALLY, WHY ELVES and WESTERN MYTHOLOGIES AT ALL?
Ultimately, my vote would be not to have elves or dwarves at all. Just because Tolkien chose to use Germanic Elves and Scandinavian Dwarves as his mythological races does not mean every fantasy writer who loves Tolkien (or played D&D which also features elves and dwarves) and is inspired by what has come before needs to do so as well. It is articles like yours (as well as books that break this tradition) that will hopefully make new writers challenge their own initial impulse to emulate the past, and instead explore the fantasy genre as the truly open-ended and creative field it can be.
Instead, use non-European/ non-Germanic/ non-Scandinavian mythologies.
Heck, you can do so even if you DO want to include elves.
Xana are fairies from Spain.
Diwata are Filipino fairies.
Ciguapa are from Dominican folklore.
In fact, to Nora’s point, since your fantasy race should have as much diversity as a human race, you could include all of those, AND the traditional Germanic and Celtic elves as well.
As for the matter of analogy and allegory, I would say … nothing
. I won’t reopen THAT can of worms 
2 • Randy Henderson said:
August 27th, 2008 at 5:59 pm, permalink
PS – Just because I think it is important to be clear on this point (and because I’ve been nitpicked on my word choice in the past), let me clarify that when I said, “then for the sake of originality and diversity…” I am not implying or coming from a mindset that featuring non-white fantasy races is some kind of oh-so-generous allowance by the writer, or that the natural state is “of course” white elves and “including” multicultural elves is an optional bit of effort that writers may choose to graciously undertake, or that the writer needs any great reason or motivation to feature non-white persons and races other than that it SHOULD simply be the natural thing to do.
Fantasy races should, in most cases, be multicultural simply because that reflects reality (in addition to being more original, fair, and whatever other word you wish to apply).
HOWEVER, precisely because new writers tend to emulate what came before, to write what they know, etcetera, and because fantasy has been so UNbalanced and rather pale up to this point in terms of racial and cultural diversity, we dohave to make conscious efforts, whether we are writers, editors, publishers, bloggers, or fans, to address this imbalance and encourage fiction that features persons/ beings of color until such time as it IS as “natural” for a fantasy story to include racial diversity as it is to include magic. Right or wrong, it won’t happen on its own.
This is also not to ignore the very real fact that the lack of racial and cultural diversity is hurtful to persons of color regardless of the reason the writer consciously or unthinkingly excluded non-white races. Exclusion, no matter how innocent or unintentional the reason behind it, never feels good. Rather, awareness that readers are being left feeling excluded and insulted is a primary motivator to push for the diversity in fiction that should really be there anyway, and a reason to push for it to happen quickly.
So having an entirely brown race of elves is equally as valid as having an entirely white race of elves, and both are less valid (with a few exceptions) as having BOTH white and brown elves. There should be no external justification or motivation needed beyond that.
It just so happens that it is also the “right” thing to do. By having your fantasy races and humans reflect real-world diversity, you are less likely to leave real-world readers (brown, white, yellow, or other) feeling excluded or insulted. And that isn’t a bad thing.
3 • Cheryl Holland said:
August 28th, 2008 at 7:27 am, permalink
There are a few elves of other colours out there, but they are rare.
James Barclay’s Raven series contains (for want of a better term) “rainforest elves”, who are darker of skin than humans. This is largely environmental rather than genetic though, as one character who returns home after “going native” among humans for a time is given a lot of grief about how he’s now paler than his kin.
Also (and I hate to mention it) there’s the brown-skinned elf in the first D&D movie. (I have watched it, but I didn’t inhale.) Reactions to her were interesting though, as a lot of people I know said that they didn’t see why she she needed to be black. They felt that rather than promoting diversity it was more of a stunt done to grab attention, because elves don’t usually come in that colour.
4 • Nora said:
August 28th, 2008 at 2:40 pm, permalink
Hi Cheryl,
I’m confused — darker of skin than rainforest-dwelling humans? Or do you mean white (ostensibly non-rainforest-dwelling, though in a fantasy world anything goes) humans? And he goes native among humans in the rainforest, or in some other environment?
Why would dwelling in a rainforest make anybody turn browner as a short-term environmental adaptation? The rainforest canopy is pretty thick; anyone dwelling there gets less sun than people who live in unshaded places. So provided they were there long enough, I would think they’d be paler.
Hmm. See, this is the kind of biological headscratchyness that I’m talking about. This just doesn’t make sense. Or maybe I’m just misunderstanding?
…There was a D&D movie? More than one? How did I miss that? ::clueless::
5 • JS Bangs said:
August 28th, 2008 at 4:19 pm, permalink
Just so everyone knows, there isn’t any strong correlation between equatorial regions and dark skin among human populations. Both the original article and some of the comments seem to perpetuate this misunderstanding. Yes, pale Europeans originated in the high temperate zones, but they now comfortably live all over the world. Pacific Islanders are relatively light-skinned and live almost entirely in the tropics, while the darkest skinned people in the world are Australian Aborigines that live in the temperate zones. IIRC Jared Diamond talks about this misapprehension in Guns, Germs, and Steel.
So your fantasy world could realistically have light-skinned (but well tanned) people living in the tropics, with dark-skinned races in the temperate forests. Or any other combination you can think of.
6 • JS Bangs said:
August 28th, 2008 at 5:36 pm, permalink
A comment on the article itself: Yes, please! I would love to see more brown elves (and green elves and purple elves). My interest in this is more literary than political, though: there are so many interesting things in the world outside of the mythological creatures of northern European myth, and it’s high time that fantasy started using some of them. I am bored of regular elves. Bring me something interesting.
7 • Clint Harris said:
August 28th, 2008 at 6:22 pm, permalink
Some excellent points. I think Randy has the history on this down solid too. Sure, Tolkien has his blonde/blue-eyed elves and darker-haired varieties, but like Randy said, this is based on Northern European folklore. Pretty homogenous, really.
Today, the world has gotten a little more diverse than those days. We are dealing with world cultures as opposed to regional folklore. Elves of color? Bring ‘em on. I would like to see that. When I was in high school, scribbling down stories, I always wondered why their weren’t more diverse races. Halflings, elves, etc.
TSR told us that the darker your skin was, the more trecherous the race. Dark elves, the duergar, halflings living of the moons of Faerun. Black=mean apparently.
I didn’t like that. I didn’t like it any more than limiting alignment with color in dragons. Reds are evil? Blacks are evil? Whites, evil? But if they are a metallic color, they are good? WTF?
The thing is that a lot of stories that I have read lately have been rather color neutral lately. I had no idea Genly Ai in LeGuin’s “Left Hand of Darkness” was black until a third of the way through the story. Why? Because she didn’t embrace any dialog that was characteristic/stereotypical of someone of color at that time. Genly Ai didn’t talk “jive” as would have been accepted. He just talked. His pigmentation was mentioned only briefly, possibly because the people he was studying were very Nordic, due to the winter world and all, and that would have made him that much more alien to the people he was studying.
With that in mind, who is to say what characters in fantasy books are necessarily white or black? Many books don’t even go into detail like that anymore. The character is given a name and their traits are more about what kind of clothes they wear or car they drive.
I recently reviewed Albert Cowdrey’s story in F&SF on my blog, and decided that due to his Detective Fournet character’s dialect, we were to assume he was black. But no mention of his color was really ever made. It was actually sort of strange to see the dialog used in this way. Mostly because you never see it in stories these days.
It got me to thinking though, who are we to assume someone is black or white or Indian or Asian, etc. anyway? What clue do we get in most stories if it isn’t in the text itself? The cover art. Most cover art for fantasy books is the white people’s brigade. Why? Is it because that is the demographic who buys most books? This information collected by who? And why is it “they” assume that people have to have “recognizable faces” to appeal to their sense of commerce if this is the case? What, are we infants?
This is seriously stupid. Who is it going to kill to put some people with some pigment on the cover of a book once in awhile?
8 • Cheryl Holland said:
August 29th, 2008 at 10:23 am, permalink
Hi Nora
If I remember correctly (and it’s been a while since I read those books), the elves were darker because generally they tended to spend more time outdoors, and their colouring was seen as intrinsically a part of that culture. The elf who had “gone native” did so among city-dwelling humans on another continent. I seem to remember that his paler colouring was taken as him going soft and losing his roots.
And they’re elves, so it wouldn’t be a “short term” adaptation.
*…There was a D&D movie? More than one? How did I miss that? ::clueless:: *
There was, and it was all kinds of dreadful. It included the world’s weediest Beholder, and a wizard who conveniently “forgot” that she could cast any spells after about the first ten minutes. The second one was a made-for-TV/straight-to-video affair, and I can’t actually remember what happened in it except that it was marginally better than the first.
Clint – Ged in the Earthsea series is dark-skinned too, and again it’s something that isn’t made a big deal out of. I remember I didn’t actually catch on until the second book in fact!
9 • Michael Gordon said:
August 29th, 2008 at 11:46 am, permalink
As usual I like Randy’s points about the possibilities of abandoning elves altogether or throwing them in with similar races from other geographies.
I think it’s important for an author to ask her/himself first, “why do I need this magical race?” and “how did they come about?” Don’t just pick up from Tolkien, because you’re not writing the same story. Don’t give them pointy ears just because it’s familiar. Unless you’re doing parody, rehashing the same old ground is boring.
Personally, I just ditch the pointy ears and think of elves/fae/sidhe as human groups that have separated from the rest of the species and become magical. Hence they can be from any race.
10 • Michael Gordon said:
August 29th, 2008 at 11:52 am, permalink
Much as I love Tolkien, he really did aggravate this problem when he brought the fae races out of the Otherland. Afterall, since a year in Faerie is 100 years in our world, elven evolution would be really really slow. So, in fact, depending on what the original elves looked like, they should be a pretty homogenous group.
Why do you think they steal human babies? Gotta improve that gene pool.
11 • Juan said:
August 29th, 2008 at 3:45 pm, permalink
I must have missed alot with this Elfquest series. I had pretty much given up on almost anything with Elves in it–for most of the reasons in this article–along with much of fantasy in general. I would extremely love some different, non-white, non-European, non-ugly problematic portrayals of elves myself. Along with something different about them entirely besides pointing ears, paler than the palest white person [unless they're black, brown and/or blue if they're evil] and able to walk on water because their shit don’t stink and such.
Otherwise, the whole things with elves has as much complexity and interests as the vampire genre, if that makes sense.
Clint, the human-aliens in “Left Hand of Darkness” were brownfolk not white.
12 • Nora said:
August 29th, 2008 at 10:36 pm, permalink
JS,
I’m aware that color isn’t strongly linked to equatorial origins, and I didn’t mean to imply that. It is strongly linked to UV exposure, which tends to be strong in equatorial places just because the sun is closer and more intense there, but most of Africa isn’t equatorial, nor are other parts of the world where dark-skinned peoples exist, as you point out. The sun is quite powerful in those places where dark-skinned people originated (Africa) or migrated to and stayed dark (Australia), particularly in savannah or outback climates where there’s little tree-cover. So the link seems strong to me. With the exception of white people and possibly Asians/Native Americans/Pacific Islanders, whose lighter coloring may be the result of random mutation according to a recent study, most of the world’s races that settled in any place for a length of time developed coloring adapted to their local environment’s UV intensity. Those are the theories I’ve read, at least.
I’m also aware that people of whatever coloring can migrate to whatever environment and do quite well there. That was my point about developing seafaring tech; there’s no reason why the elves even in fictionalized Europes should be all white. The people of real Europe weren’t all white; there was the long occupation by the Moors, interaction with Asians via the Silk Road, etc. Medieval Europe was really very diverse, unlike the disturbingly whitewashed medieval Europe that we see in fiction. Why wouldn’t elven societies be similarly diverse?
Now, backing up — I’ve read both Diamond’s GG&S and also Collapse, and I don’t recall him pontificating on why various human color variants developed. Why their cultures developed at different rates, yes, or migrated in particular patterns, but not that. Can you point out that reference to me?
13 • Nora said:
August 29th, 2008 at 10:46 pm, permalink
Clint,
With that in mind, who is to say what characters in fantasy books are necessarily white or black? Many books don’t even go into detail like that anymore. The character is given a name and their traits are more about what kind of clothes they wear or car they drive.
The problem is that in predominantly white societies that have a history of racism, whiteness is the “default” assumption that readers tend to make whenever a character’s race isn’t mentioned (or obviously marked through cues like stereotypical dialect, cultural trappings, etc.). So when a book doesn’t mention a character’s race, I believe that most readers in that predominantly-white society will assume the character is white — even if the author intends for the character to be read otherwise. So since racism has imbalanced the situation by setting the default to white, authors generally have to restore the balance by explicitly mentioning the character’s coloring if they want the character to be seen as something else.
Some authors have deliberately used this tendency on the reader’s part to mess with their expectations — LeGuin’s a great example, as mentioned upthread. But unfortunately (IMO), many authors just don’t deal with it at all, whether out of fear or simply an unwillingness to deal with a subject that makes them uncomfortable. So they simply don’t mention the characters’ races, leave the reader to form his/her own assumptions, and then try to disclaim responsibility when the readers naturally assume all the characters are white. I find this disingenuous, to say the least.
14 • Nora said:
August 29th, 2008 at 10:49 pm, permalink
Juan,
Elfquest is fecking brilliant. It’s still in print, available in most bookstores in graphic novel or manga format; I think the manga-sized versions were released recently. You should go buy it. These are elves treated believably as a second sentient species struggling to adapt to an Earthlike world’s environments and native people (the elves in EQ are aliens stranded on the planet). All of them adapt different strategies for survival, to greater or lesser success. It’s probably the best worldbuilding I’ve ever seen, hands-down. And after the first few issues or so, the art is simply a treasure to look at, and the plotting becomes so emotionally powerful that it’s stuck with me all these years…
Whoa. I need to go re-read EQ now. =)
15 • Cat Rambo said:
September 1st, 2008 at 4:56 pm, permalink
The Pinis are in the process of releasing all of Elfquest for free online here: http://www.elfquest.com/gallery/OnlineComics3.html
Great column, Nora. I loved the Elfquest comics, so it’s nice to see them acknowledged, but it’s your main point that really deserves some celebrating. Thanks for writing this.
16 • JS Bangs said:
September 2nd, 2008 at 1:41 pm, permalink
Nora:
It must not have been GG&S, but some other anthropology text I read back in the day. If I find the original quote I’ll post it here; sorry I can’t help more
.
17 • Juan said:
September 2nd, 2008 at 3:45 pm, permalink
Nora,
I think you’ve sold me on it. XD
18 • Pamela Freeman said:
September 3rd, 2008 at 1:52 am, permalink
Nora, Clint: Margaret Maron, a crime writer who sets her stories in North Carolina, always identifies her characters as white, black, Latino, Asian, or some mixture – and says on her website that she gets a lot of puzzled letters from white readers who think it’s odd to identify a white character as such, because they have been accustomed to white being the default. I was interested in that because I find the race relations themes in her stories fascinating.
19 • Clint Harris said:
September 3rd, 2008 at 1:09 pm, permalink
Nora,
I totally see your points, and where I agree with you, I think defaulting kind of sucks. As what most would probably consider a “white guy” (though like many of us, personal ancestry goes much deeper than this), I probably read stories as the characters looking like me or people I know. I would hope that this is the case for most people, regardless of color. Descriptions of characters are left blank to give readers that “everyman” feel. Kind of sucks that “everyman” is white.
Thank you for this thread. It really got me thinking about things.
Pamela, I think that’s kinda cool about the Margaret Maron books. It works great when we have a socio-cultural background already established, but in fantasy worlds, how the heck do we go about tossing descriptions in casually? There’s not really a background for Latino or Asian in a world without Asia or Latin America. It’s tricky. I’ve seen it pulled off once or twice, but it was very oblique and I probably missed it the first go around.
The example being Robert Jordan’s character, Faile. The second book she was in, he describes her with very Asian characteristics, especially her eyes.
Even trickier are ways of describing characters without touching on our world’s ethic identities (such as African American, Indian, Asian, etc.) without eventually showing what might be construed in the future as derogatory or no longer accepted as polite.
An example of this would have to be Robert E. Howard’s Conan adventures. His descriptions of characters with African characteristics would be considered borderline racist today, but at the time, simply having a black man in a role other than villain or servant was very progressive. It showed a lot of courage, I think. Times are different today, and maybe in fifty years, the terms we consider accepted will be noted as backward and racist.
I’ve already seen this in college, when one person took offense at the use of the term “black people.” They preferred “African Americans” and went on about the plight of the African Americans in Africa suffering under the yoke of apartheid.
Um? What?
20 • Junior said:
March 25th, 2010 at 6:05 am, permalink
interesting, i recently started rendering artwork to showcase ebony elves.