When I was a child what I knew of elves came from English books written for children—these tiny little creatures with green tunics and peaked green hats who sat under red and white toadstools and sewed. I was never sure what they were sewing. As a young child I adored these little creatures, but I got older and left all the ‘fairy’ stuff behind me. Elves were for kids.

I’m not sure where these images came from, because elves have been around in folklore for hundreds of years.  In most tales they are human-sized and human-like, with some powers. It took Tolkien to breathe life back into the old-style elf with The Hobbit and Lord of the Rings.  Suddenly elves were fashionable, and Tolkien’s depiction of elves as more beautiful and longer-living than humans was the accepted elf-standard—or stereotype, as many people now say.

I loved these elves. Give me a stunningly beautiful elf with power and talent, and have him/her struggle with some truly human emotions like friendship and moral right, and I’m hooked. If I thought I could get away with it I’d write a lot more elf stories myself.

But anything that’s fashionable eventually goes out of fashion. Elves are out.

If you’ve even got a whiff of an elf in your story, then your story is doomed. Or so popular opinion has it. They’re old hat. No-one wants to read about them any more.  But … but.  I want to read about them. Am I the only person in the world who wants to?

I don’t think so, no.

But they’re stereotyped.  They’re always beautiful. They’re always haughty. They’re always arrogant.

So. Tolkien’s definition of Elves is what we have come to know and expect. It is what we, the writers, bring to our books that makes our elves special.  And it’s not the fact that they’re elves, per se, that makes the stereotype, it’s how we round out, or don’t round out, the characters to make them complex, multi-dimensional people.

I don’t mind starting with the stereotype.  I’ll read a book about a long-lived elf who considers his race slightly superior to humans as much as I’ll read a book about a stiff-upper-lip Englishman, or a post-traumatic stress disorder war veteran, or a hairdresser who minces around the salon and talks in a high voice. (Incidentally, I have a hairdresser like this. He’s got an elegant, graphic artist wife whom he absolutely adores and they have a two-year old son called Benjy he can talk about for hours.)  All I care about is where the author takes it from there and how they make the character someone I care about.

The mincing hairdresser and the stiff-upper-lip Englishman have gone the way of elves. Out of fashion.  The ptsd veteran will go the same way. It’s fashion.

Fashions come and fashions go, but they usually come around again.

I want more books about elves.  Maybe I’ll just have to wait until the next generation of readers comes up. The ones who haven’t read about elves before (because they were unfashionable and they were too busy reading about their own fashionable creatures—vampires and werewolves) and look on them as something new.

Maybe, because they’re so out right now I should start writing a novel about elves. It takes a long time to create a book. By the time I’m up to the fifth draft elves might be fashionable again.

I’ve got lots of ideas.

In Defence of Elves, part 1.

Are elves really past it? Are they just stereotypes now? Cardboard cut-outs with no personality that no-one bothers to make human any more? (If I can call elves human, that is.)

Sherwood Smith, over at Oached Pish, posted an article on the Glamor of Elves.

Tolkien’s Elves were fairly benign, but the elves in many of the derivative fantasies that followed on don’t look all that different from what we could imagine finding in a world a thousand years after a Nazi victory: the horrors at the start are long forgotten, but now there is a master race. Unfair?

Unfair . . . or kinda boring? Does anyone else feel their heart sinking when Elves show up in a story? Especially elves with glowing eyes? Or is the current crop of urban fantasy with the super-pretty, utterly amoral elves still got appeal outside of YA? 
Bittercon: The Glamor of Elves, Sherwood Smith (sartorias), 16 February 2008.

A lot of us still like elves, and I’m one of them, although we all agree that there are a lot of stereotypes. One of the posted replies (by Anna Wing) stated:

… Tolkien’s Eldar are fascinating because they allow all sorts of interesting cod-anthropological speculation about what a society of indefinitely longaeval people would actually be like. Bearing in mind that Tolkien himself said that his elves were the artistic and scientific aspects of human beings taken a bit further…

She got me thinking about elves in the context of my own aging. I am what they politely call ‘middle-aged’ now, and the upper limit of middle age seems to be increasing roughly in line with my own age. I know I have changed since my youth, and I don’t want to go back there, even though it had lots of advantages. So if we take how I have changed over time and extrapolate it further, might that be a valid basis for an elf?

So how have I changed?

I don’t do things on impulse any more

In my early twenties, and even into my thirties I would pack up and go without a moment’s thought. Think about taking off for the weekend, no sooner thought than done. I changed jobs and homes on whim. And as for holidays, nothing was ever planned. We got got in the car and drove.

I don’t do that any more. Everything is considered before I do it.

What does this mean for the elves? They’ll take ages to decide to do something.

I am more financially secure

I still have a mortgage but as the years go by the debt burden becomes less and less. I look forward to the day when I will be debt-free. I am also making money from investments. Eventually I expect that I won’t have to work to pay the bills at all, and if I don’t want to work I won’t have to, but I can if I want some companionship, or to stretch my mind.

For the elves: They won’t have any debts. They will have an assured income. They will have shelter, presumably a home of some sort.

I’m not climbing the corporate ladder and I don’t live for work

I choose work now that interests me, not on how it will improve my chances of promotion. If I don’t like it, I look for another job.

Work is only part of my life, and not the most important. I have family, I have my writing, I have other things to do. Sure, I work hard while I’m at work, but it’s not my whole life any more. I’m through with these places that ask you to work until midnight every night and all weekend.

For the elves: They will only choose work they enjoy, and a lot of that will be creative or stretch the mind.

I am way, way less ’self’ conscious

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