Tag: fantasy races

Fantasy from A to Z: R is for Races

What is your favorite fantasy race?

Races are to fantasy what aliens are to science fiction. This is especially true of traditional epic fantasy, which often features elves, dwarves, and other mythical beings living alongside humans. Every author has a slightly different take on each fantasy race, and many authors get creative and invent their own, but there are some common tropes and archetypes.

Almost all fantasy books include humans in some capacity, usually portrayed as somewhat more medieval than we currently are (to capture that yearning sense of nostalgia for a lost world or time that is a defining characteristic of the fantasy genre). They are almost always the default, meaning that if there are no other fantasy races, then the characters will all be humans.

Elves are typically forest people who live closer to nature than the humans, and as such they are usually more mystical and more magical. They are often immortal, and stand out visually by their pointy ears. There are, of course, many other takes on fantasy elves, ranging from Santa Claus’s primary labor force to the nasty little gremlins who like to steal babies, but most elves in modern fantasy are derivative of Tolkien’s elves, who are immortal, ethereal beings of glory more akin to angels than to humans.

My favorite take on the elves is probably from Tolkien himself. Perhaps I need to read a little more, but I haven’t yet encountered any other take on elves that seemed to do it better. Though I did appreciate Larry Correia’s trailer park elves from his Monster Hunter International series. That was hilarious.

Dwarves are much more industrious and mechanical than elves, and tend to live deep underground, where they mine for ore and treasure. They are short but stubborn and ferocious warriors, who tend to drink a lot and grow long beards (even the lady dwarves, in some accounts). Their preferred weapon is usually an axe. 

My personal favorite take on dwarves is the game Dwarf Fortress, which has so many ways in which your adorable little dwarf colony can die, including the “catpocalypse” where the cats adopt your dwarves as pets, then start to breed faster than your CPU’s cycles can keep up with them, so to keep your game from crashing you have to cull a few of them, resulting in their pet dwarves losing their minds and going berserk, causing other dwarves to lose their minds and go berserk, and the next thing you know everyone in your adorable little fortress is dead. Dwarf fortress is… a quirky game.

Most traditional fantasy books will also feature a race like the orcs, who are inherently and irredeemably evil. I’ve dedicated a whole other blog post to orcs, so I won’t recount it here, except to point out that in some iterations, they aren’t inherently evil so much as inherently savage. Basically, the orcs are the barbarians of the fantasy world, providing your aspiring Dark Lord with plenty of mooks and cannon fodder. Occasionally, you’ll get a story from the point of view of an orc, or more commonly a half-orc. Expect lots of graphic violence from these stories.

Hobbits or halflings are another common fantasy race, especially for fantasy that is derivative of Tolkien. As far as I can tell, this is a race that Tolkien made up on his own, and his books were so influential that the hobbits soon became a standard fantasy archetype in themselves. The original hobbits were basically little furry-footed British people who prefer to stay at home and eat lots of food rather than go on adventures. Perhaps this is why they became so archetypal: they’re the perfect kind of hero to refuse the call of adventure, a key step on the hero’s journey.

Those are the standard races. You’ve also got things like vampires and werewolves, the fey, and various other monsters like trolls, ogres, and dragons (though many of these are portrayed as beasts and not as people, even when they can talk). There are also various hybrids, such as half-elves and half-orcs, usually interbred with humans. Shapeshifters are also quite common, and can make for some very interesting story.

Why so many races? For many of the same reasons why science fiction has aliens. It gives us a chance to look at strange and foreign cultures without carrying any of the baggage that can come from using a real-world foreign culture. As with most aliens, most fantasy races aren’t truly any more foreign to us western readers than the Japanese. But it can go deeper than this, giving us a chance to play around with things like immortality or magic so that we can ask ourselves “how would we be different if we had that characteristic?” Because ultimately, no matter the race (with the possible exception of orcs), all of the characters who belong to these races are still people.

Trope Tuesday: Our Dwarves Are All the Same

Yes, you saw that right: Trope Tuesday is back, at least for the next few weeks.  I dropped out for a number of reasons, most of them having to do with my own interminable disorganization.  I really love writing these posts, though, and you guys seem to love reading them, so I’ll do my best to keep the series alive.  Here goes!

Say the word “troll,” and you could mean one (or more) of a thousand different fantasy creatures.  The things same goes with gods, demons, vampires, fairies, goblins, and to some extent, elves.  But say the word “dwarf” and we all instantly know what you’re talking about.  As tvtropes puts it:

You know them. Gruff, gold-loving, industrious, blunt-speaking, Scottish-accented, practical, Viking-helmed, booze-swilling, Elf-hating, ax-swinging, stout, long-bearded, stolid and unimaginative, boastful of their battle prowess and their vast echoing underground halls and mainly just the fact that they are Dwarves … An entire race of miners and blacksmiths, with names like Dwarfaxe Dwarfbeard and Grimli Stonesack, who are overly sensitive about any perceived slight, always spoiling for a fight, unable to speak two sentences in a row without calling someone “lad” or “lass,” and possessed of a love of gold and jewels that drives them to live in Underground Cities where they dig deep and greedily, (often with catastrophic results).

The defining characteristics of this fantasy race basically include:

  • Short.  Should be self-evident from the name of the race.
  • Expert in smithing, forging, metalworking, and crafting priceless artifacts.
  • Prefer to live underground, mining for ore and precious metals.
  • Bearded to the extreme.  Even their women often have facial hair.
  • Fond of alcohol, and often rowdy or violent when drunk.
  • Weapon of choice is a battle axe (or perhaps a war hammer).

In other words, Tolkien set the standard and everyone since has followed it with little, if any, variation.  Tolkien himself got it from Norse mythology, which had a few key differences (for example, Norse dwarves would turn to stone if they were exposed to sunlight), but once Lord of the Rings hit the bookshelves, all dwarves would ever after be the same.

Why is this?  Well, as fantasy races go, dwarves tend to be more like supporting characters than members of the main cast.  Sure, there are plenty of series that focus on dwarves and dwarven culture, but the cultures that shape world history the most are usually human or elvish.  Dwarves are often content to stay in their dwarven halls and do their own thing, far beneath the surface of the earth.

Brandon Sanderson has an interesting take on this question, which he explains in his famous essay “How Tolkien Ruined Fantasy” (which has since been renamed).  Basically, he argues that the fantasy before Tolkien was all “low” fantasy, or fantasy that loosely uses our own world as a template.  This sort of fantasy may have wizards, or magic, or monsters, but the setting itself looks a lot like something out of the pages of a history book.  Tolkien was the first to really write “high” fantasy, where everything about the world is built from the ground up, and he did such a good job of it that we’ve all been copying him since.  Rather than writing high fantasy in an original vein, most authors have switched out the real world for Tolkien’s and have been writing low fantasy in a Tolkienesque world (at least until the last decade or so).

It’s an interesting argument, but I’m not quite so sure how valid it is.  The process that Sanderson describes basically happens in every genre: someone writes an extremely popular book, and for the next several decades (centuries, in the case of Treasure Island) everyone tries to go back to it in some way.  And yet, how many different kinds of vampires are there?  How many different kinds of cops, or detectives, or spies?

Perhaps Lord of the Rings had a much more overshadowing impact than Dracula or Frankenstein ever did, but consider some of the other fantasy races he basically invented.  Ents never really took off anywhere outside of Tolkien, and trolls never universally became the big, dumb, evil, brutish creatures that they are in The Hobbit.  Elves, which really were popularized in a huge way by Tolkien, have taken on a life of their own, differing fairly significantly from the immortal angel-analogues in Lord of the Rings and The Silmarillion.  Orcs, too, are becoming more like “green klingons” in games like World of Warcraft, with an extensive honor system and intelligence on par with humans and elves.

Is there something about the Tolkienesque dwarf that fulfills a deeper storytelling need, transforming the stereotype into an archetype? Or am I wrong, and dwarves just haven’t had the same makeover as elves and orcs?  I don’t know.  But I like dwarves, and I’m a political nerd, so I’ll leave you with a fascinating Marxist analysis of Dwarf Fortress, and an interesting picture of a female dwarf.


Tarin Portrait by =RachelleFryatt on deviantART