On Elves

This aspect of worldbuilding was worked out with James Scott and Claire Tracey

Lifespan and memory

Elves can live to be up to 750, but no mortal creature, including elves, can retain memories for more than a century or so. After that you're not remembering something directly, you're remembering what it felt like to remember it.

Thus no elf over a certain age remembers their childhood. To elves, this what it means to reach maturity; to be an adult means having no memory of being anything other than who you are now.

There are individual exceptions to the above, elves with longer memories, but this is generally due to magical intervention or contact with the Feywild, which tends to affect memory in weird ways.

Some elvish sub-ethnicities have longer memories than others; the longer the memory, the shorter the usual lifespan. Memory has weight. In fact, elves very rarely live out their entire possible lifespan. Long before that, they start to lose interest in life, and become careless of their own survival. At some point, most elves who live long enough start to get peculiar; they wander into the forest and forget how to talk in human language, or become cruel because they forget other people truly exist as real individuals, or in some other way pull away from the concerns of other people.
The process that begins with becoming careless of your life, and progresses through withdrawing from the world, is known as the Diminishing — as elves live in the present for a longer and longer life, as the number of things they've forgotten pile up, they slowly stop being who they are. The stories of elves being whimsical and cruel with shorter-lived beings generally originate with older elves who've forgotten that they're part of the world.

Memory and lifespan amongst types of elf (as encountered so far)

Note: These numbers would mean nothing to elves, who don't keep track of their age.

	Length of Memory	Age of Getting Careless	Age of Getting Odd	Median lifespan
Wood elf	75	475	625	250-300
Sea elf	65	520	700	250
Mountain elf	100	400	600	300
High elf	120	375	550	400
Deep elf	140	320	500	500

Wood elves and sea elves both live dangerous enough lives that they rarely live longer than 250-300 years anyway.

Inner names and common names (and the nightly trance)

All elves have at least two names: an inner name, and a common name.

When an elf is born, one of their biological parents (it varies) enters into a magical trance and speaks the baby’s inner name into their ear. The parent doesn’t remember the name after they come out of the trance, and the baby doesn’t remember being told, but they always know their inner name for the rest of their lives. Knowledge of their inner name is what allows them to enter the rest-trance; they’re essentially meditating on their identity.

An elf who doesn’t know their inner name, can’t enter the trance. This is very sad and considered a disability by other elves. It’s very rare, but it can happen if they’re orphaned at childbirth, for instance. The way elves put it is, an elf who doesn’t know their inner name doesn’t know who they are.

Common names are what the person is called publicly; Mossevel, Nykomin, Crane, and Heron are all common names. (Sattr is Erling Sattr's common name, and Saturday is his further nickname, which many other Maveren think is ridiculous.)

In some elvish societies, people use the same common name their entire (very long) lives. In others, a person will sometimes adopt different common names over time, based on changing circumstance. Crazy Bob Facebiter might later be known as Staid McRichperson, because they're living a different life now. This makes elvish history somewhat confusing, even with the help of skaldic sagas; it isn’t always clear who was who (and the elves themselves might not remember, and rarely explain themselves).

History and other stories

Skalds have an important place in elvish societies, as keepers of oral history—which is often also personal history. Two old friends might only know that they know each other because they both appear in the same sagas.

There are individual elves with large libraries of personal diaries, or arcane memory retrieval devices—for instance, an adaptation of sending stones as a kind of physical memory: a single stone that can repeat its message to whoever holds it. However, most elvish cultures frown on these items (including written histories). Oral history is important to elves, but written history is vulgar and boring, if not downright immoral. After all, writing stories downs just means freezing some single person's present-tense version of the past, and pretending it's "history."

The difference between history and romances in elvish sagas, in the original sense of "romance," is not huge. By and large, elves are not enormously concerned with what really happened, on the level of mere factual accuracy, as long as the story is essentially true. Permanent consequences, including happy endings, are also rare in stories of all kinds. A passionate romantic story is about the passion the lovers felt in the moment, not about living happily ever after. In fact, they might have lived together happily for fifty years after the end of the story, or for ten, or two, and then moved on to other things. This is perfectly fine with most elvish audiences.

Physical sex, gender, and having children

Elves, being descended from fey creatures, are somewhat more physically mutable than purely mundane peoples. Unlike some natives of the Feywild, they can't change their forms after birth, but intersex births are somewhat more common than with humans (5-6% as opposed to 1.7% in the real world). Also, over centuries of living in the present, elves don't see much problem with a fluid definition of gender. Non-binariness isn't uncommon; neither is changing one's gender over the years.
Birth rate amongst elves is much lower than amongst other races—or rather, much slower. Any individual elf might have as many children as an individual human, but over a much, much longer period of time. Children are generally raised within an extended "family" of community members; the specific ties with one's parents and siblings are rather weak, whether by nature or by custom.

Elvish settlements

In general, elvish settlements tend to be places where elves go to trade, communicate, and have and raise children, and that’s about it. They are generally much smaller than communities amongst other peoples; there's no such thing as an elvish city in the human sense.
Staying in the same community all one’s life is extremely rare; an individual elf might spend some centuries as member of different settlements, as well as wandering around on their own.
Elvish sub-races with the largest, most stable settlements tend to have the longest memories, and also live the shortest lives. What relationship there is between these phenomena, if any, is unknown.
Wood elves have the smallest settlements, generally built into and around trees—in fact, they’re often grown by training the trees to take certain shapes, over decades. These settlements tend to grow and shrink over time, as more or fewer elves live there. Unused houses tend to simply close up, as the trees grow on their own. Wood elves are semi-nomadic; they might entirely abandon a settlement for a hundred years or more, and then come back to re-grow the houses.
There are a number of people with wood-elf ancestry in the country around the Forges (most famously, River dwarves), because a millennium or two ago, some wood elves came down the Tennerill river from further north and settled in the area. After some time, they retreated back north. Current inhabitants sometimes speculate about the reason for this. Was there a war? Were they disdainful of all the lesser non-elves in the country?
In fact, this is just how wood elves do. No currently living wood elf has any idea why either migration happened; nor do they think it’s an interesting question at all.
Mountain elves are a single community in the Forges, descended from the wood elves who came and went from the region. Their names for themselves is the Kammayun. They are semi-nomadic, but as a community they have more common identity than wood-elf communities, and feel more connected to their specific home (rather than mountains generally).
Sea elves live together in communities of wildly varying size, from a couple dozen to hundreds—but not much larger than that. They are entirely nomadic, and communities will merge and break apart, or an individual will wander from one community to another, at will. Despite this, all sea elves in the Sealands are part of the same gigantic hierarchy; every individual knows their precise place relative to all the others. Otherwise they are very carefree people.
Some sea-elf communities live entirely underwater; some live mostly above water, and often use boats. Individual sea elves might spend long parts of their lives in both communities. In general, above-water communities see more of other humanoid peoples, and thus are a bit less, well, alien than those that live deeper.
High elves, who came up with their name themselves, are those who largely removed themselves from the society of other peoples. They consider themselves to be closest in nature to their Feywild ancestors, though this is untrue; wood elves are more like Feywild elves.
High elves tend to stick to their isolated fastnesses, making them some of the largest most stable of elvish settlements. These places are very rarely seen or even heard of by others.
Deep elves (Drow, though that name isn’t used in the Sealands) live in enormous fungal forests, partly above and partly below ground. They tend to stick close to these forests for much of their lives; their settlements are the most stable of elvish peoples. Deep elves have a reputation amongst other elves as being, if not evil, then grim, earthbound people given over to drudgery—which is to say, they farm. Their relationship to the mushrooms amongst which they live is much more like that of human cultivators.