I've been working on my next book in fits and starts lately. I write a few stanzas of poetry here and there as something jumps in my head. Or I sketch out some ideas I want to explore. It has been slow work.

Slower than I am used, if I'm honest.

Or at least it was until something hit me this past weekend when I was working my booth at PeoriaCon. An idea struck me as I was staring at another artist's manga inspired work across the aisle. It has nothing to do with anything. It just cleared out the detritus.

So now I need to share. Share thoughts about elves. How they've been done dirty by game designers and fantasy authors. How Brian Cox has portrayed the most perfect elf on screen ever and you don't even realize it.

I know, I know. Like we need more thoughts on Tolkien and elves essay. Reams have been written about this nonsense. Dead trees fill shelves in basements all across the land with deep thoughts about elves.

And I will admit, I have no idea if this is an original notion. All I know is that a bunch of swirling bullshit in my head came together. Out of that mess came this. And now the writing is flowing a bit easier for other things.

ADHD is a bitch. What can I say?

So elves. You either love them or hate them. Tied to the fairy realm of myth in some way in most cases. Always have some connection to the natural world. Every single instance since the Professor wrote about them are a reflection of or contrast to his incarnation.

Or are they?

I mean, on the surface level, every roleplaying game catches the trappings in some way or another. You got your tree hugging recluses with their ancient society living like hermits. They got the pointy ears, the bows, the sneaky feet in the woods. Always ancient. Always grieving.

And they are always just somehow better than everyone else and know it. Insufferable bastards...

Oh, and they are always in decline. Once long ago they were great, but now not so much. Sometimes, they are for some reason unable to have babies because of some weird thinly veiled eugenics crap in the writing. Other times it is a straight rip of the "boats to the West" narrative in the Professor's works.

Either way, they are on their way out. It is what justifies their inability to fix the world's ills with all their superior abilities. The Superman paradox, if you will.

Of course there are outliers to the tropes. For the most part those simply take these ideas past these narrative stopping points. They move the culture past the decline stage to the collapse stage. Think elves from Dark Sun, where they are living in an apocalyptic landscape.

And yet, I think this is all surface level adoption of what makes the elves of the Silmarillion so dynamic and interesting. All the magical trees and fairy shit created blinders to a different set of cultural undertones. Ones that, if you look at the nature of Númenor I start to sound less crazy.

Or to put it more directly, Tolkien's elves are more like mythic Greeks than people like to admit.

It is so obvious to me at this point. The hubris. The tragedy. The wars fought over ridiculous bullshit as well as not ridiculous bullshit. The intervention of the gods in their lives. The family drama that runs for generations. The incest.

As cowards have the Valar become; but the hearts of the Eldar are not weak, and we will see what is our own, and if we may not get it by stealth we will do so by violence. There shall be war between the Children of Ilúvatar and Ainu Melko. What if we perish in our quest? The dark halls of Vê be little worse than this bright prison… 

I mean seriously? How can you read that and not think Greek tragedy?

Also, I now understand my life long dislike to every manifestation of elves that isn't in the Silmarillion. Most ignore the juicy stuff and grab hold of the bows and the trees. They wrap themselves in the costume but not the soul of the Professor's mythology.

As an exercise to prove my own point to myself, I dug through my shelves and was hard pressed to find anything close to what I am getting at here. The Burning Wheel comes close as far as games go. Moorcock's Melnibonéans might be the closest thing in fiction to the elves found in the Silmarillion.

Outside of those two, it was a lot of squinting to find anything else.

Elves should be wearing those great big Greek tragedy masks. They are mythic. They are larger than life. They are egotistical lunatics defying the gods for their own glory. For greed. For lust.

Fëanor swore an oath of vengeance. Not an oath of making tree houses. Give me hubris! Give me folly! Give me bronze and blood and Lady Macbeth!

Just please stop giving me another round of Sierra Club activists with the serial numbers filed off.