On Obsidian Trilogy Elves

Autumn weather is returning, Fulton Sheen is finally Beatified, and so it’s a pretty good week this week.

I am hoping to finish off Assassin’s Creed: Revelations this weekend. I just want to buy some books in-game, and see how that goes, but darn are some of those books expensive.

For Hispanic Heritage Month: here are Mas y Menos from Teen Titans.

Obsidian Elves & Etiquette

As you may have noticed, I think a lot about the Obsidian Trilogy by Mercedes Lackey and James Mallory (Goodreads calls it ‘the Obsidian Mountain Trilogy’; I don’t know for sure why either name was picked, honestly), particularly the way that elves are presented in it. I mentioned it in a July Saturday Note about immortal/long-lived characters, for instance. Outside of Tolkien and Paolini, it’s one of my go-to references for elf worldbuilding. There are obviously plenty of other fantasy stories with elves in them, but a lot of them, like those based off of (whether officially or not) Dungeons & Dragons usually go with something like, “Yeah, elves, you know what those are! Moving on–”. And then you have Pratchett who does not develop interiority of elven culture very much, because they’re played more as an invading force more than anything else–which is also very cool, it’s just not that their culture is that developed aside from a few references here and there.

[That I recall–I think it’s possible that we might get a bit more in The Shepherd’s Crown, I just haven’t read it since it came out. It’s on my re-read schedule, though.]

The elves of the Obsidian Trilogy were always kind of interesting to me because they often felt like a very good example of, "culture that is both familiar and different”. Our protagonist, Kellen, finds sanctuary with the elves after fleeing his home city when he’s sentenced to death there. And when he gets to the elven city, he has to adapt to their culture enough to navigate the city without overt supervision, picking up on certain cultural subtleties. I’d argue that he does it too quickly, honestly, though I am also fascinated by how their culture works. As I mentioned in the other Note, they’re perfectionists because they have long lifespans to allow them to get very good at things. This also extends to etiquette, so you cannot make demands of others in polite conversation–and that includes asking questions.

Now, imagine if you will, trying to make your way around a city you’ve never been to before, without Internet, without a phone… and you can’t ask questions. Obviously, there are ways to get that information, you just have to find out how to phrase sentences not as interrogative sentences. So, “How do I get to the library?” becomes “I am trying to find the library; it would be good if someone could show me the way.” Which can sound simple enough, though as Kellen finds out, trying to rephrase all the questions you have before you voice them can be tiring and frustrating. He makes a point of going and searching for someone who does not care about etiquette specifically so he can ask some questions without being considered overly rude–a child. 

A wonderful scene in the first book has an elven knight switch to “wartime manners” with Kellen and ask a direct question, much to his bewilderment. Also a nice touch–that war gets its own set of etiquette rules. Because, yeah, in wartime, you need direct information. You can make demands. Makes sense.

There’s also the custom of greeting. Elves say, “I see you,” when they meet each other, and you have to say it back. Again, Kellen picks up on this pretty quickly. Thankfully, the sequel series rectifies this, when the two protagonists meet the elves and don’t pick up on what this greeting means, and don’t respond appropriately. It leads to the two humans being passive aggressively led through the wilderness by two elves who now refuse to acknowledge that they’re there. The elves in question were ordered to lead these two humans to safety, so they have to do it, they just don’t have to be happy about it. It isn’t until one of the humans works out why the elves are being so cold towards them that he’s able to give the proper greeting and move forward with their interactions.

But elves in this series can also be incredibly condescending, in ways they don’t even really mean. A conversation between Kellen and an elderly elf has the latter attempt to be kind in the way he says that humans can’t understand this or that because they live too short lives and can’t be expected to know better because of it. 

I don’t know, what strikes me about all of these examples is that they actually feel like another culture. There’s a lot of fantasy out there that when they introduce a fantasy race, they’re sort of just ‘Ah yes, this race is good at blacksmithing!’ or ‘This race is made up of people who recite poetry!’ or whatever. They might just be a warrior race, in which everything is centered around combat–fiction is filled with those. The protagonist doesn’t actually have much trouble communicating, they’re just people who all have a similar interest or something. And to be clear, building a fictional culture that is both different from your own and memorable is difficult. 

Yet here, it feels like a different culture. The elves are not all of the same occupation, it’s not that their culture is centered around a certain trade or something. It’s that there are rules of conversing that are entirely different from what you’re used to, and you’ll look like a massive doof if you don’t work those out quickly. 

I just really hope I can come up with worldbuilding that interesting in my own work one day.

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