Where do Woodsy elves get their metals from?

The woods

Alright, son. Since you asked so nice-like, i'll tell you about the Woody elves.

Cute name, ain't it? Woodsy elves. No doubt some pampered scholar in the capitol went and thought that up. Never worked up an honest day's sweat, never felled a tree, never feared the thrice-damn elves would drop an arrow through his skull at five hundred paces just for making a living.

Now, these elves, these are a terrible breed. If they don't want you to see 'em, like as not you won't. They've got bowmen like you've never known, they've got trackers who will follow you home and put a mark on your cabin so's they know which one to ransack next time they come a-raiding, and the word has it they have witches as evil and beautiful as they are alien.

But fact is, they don't make life too difficult for us.

They can't.

Because they need us.

See, they don't forge their own metal. Sure, they probably have deposits in their woods somewhere, but I ain't never seen an elf fit for a miner's life. Worse than clerks.

Anyway, they knows how metal is made. They could probably do it better than us if they were so inclined. But they ain't, and i'll tell you why.

It's the fire.

Sure, a forge is safe enough if you know your way around it - but what about woodland creatures? Vines? Falling leaves in autumn? Nah, there's all sorts of shite out in the woods as could mess up your workshop right proper and cause a forest fire into the bargain.

And the elves don't want that. They're 'Woodsy'.

So instead they look in on the village. Oftentimes you'll spot when they're jonesing for a bit of metal 'cause you can maybe spot one or two of 'em on the forest verge if'n you know what to look for.

Most folk don't. And even when we do the extra guard is never enough.

See, they stake out the village 'til a child is born, and then they sneak in and take it.

They scamper off to their trees cackling and tittering like it's a grand ole joke, and leave in the babe's place some pug-faced ugly dwarf-thing. Bit like a gnome, only smaller, uglier, and with a more annoying voice, if you can believe it.

Well, this changeling piece of shite will usually have a list of demands. Often try pranking folks before revealing it though. Got to shake it out of him. Usually it's just "Tribute for the lords and ladies" in exchange for the village kid's safety. The place'll have a whip-round to get the smith all he needs, and it's all bundled up out in the open for the elves to take.

And four out of five times, we get the kid back.

Fifth time? Eh, don't ask about the fifth time.

Suffice to say, you'd prob'ly have better luck warding off elves by putting arrowheads above your doorways instead of horseshoes.

They can touch metal fine, they just don't like to work it.

well, depends on the metal.

I'm from Michigan, and we quite literally have raw copper that can be dug out by hand. Not much anymore, almost all the stuff on the surface got dug up a long time ago, but I do mean copper, not ore.

Copper is soft enough that the native people worked it without needing forging.

>hating fire.
Controlled fire is part of a healthy forest life in many places.
Woodsy elves would probably have restrictions or even taboos about fire, but not ones that forbid all fires.

At the beginning of time Man discovered fire and shared the secrets of fire with the elves.

The Elves heard the spirits of the fire and discovered magic and shared the magic with the world.

The Orcs tilled the earth and made wheat and shared the secrets of farming with everyone

>elves using copper for weapons
Ah, a Glorantha man, are we?

>Glorantha man
I mean, I like the setting, but this is stuff I grew up with. Copper is part of our history.

For weapons they mostly used stone, flint, or if they could find it obsidian, if they needed a keen edge, copper if they needed something that wasn't brittle. A fair bit of the copper was shaped into wire.

Steel arrowheads are nice, but if you aren't trying to punch through armor stone heads work.

From the Woodsy Lord.

Bog iron?

In my novel setting, the Wilderness Tribe elves either went full Amazon and stayed the fuck away from everybody else which saved their asses during the Collapse when several cities were the detonation points of Godslayer warheads or gradually merged with the other races to the point that it's barely even worth differentiating in-universe whether an elf is from a certain tribe or not. But then, the Goddess played favorites a LOT, and more or less everybody had metallurgy before long.

I wanna make elves based on Finnish mythology.
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Haltija

Looting corpses (of the knights, especially)

How? Is he hocking his jewelery to them like a pawn shop or what?

No, he pays master thieves to nick it from abandoned cathedrals full of zombies and annoying fetch quests.

DEPENDS ON THE SETTING

Now that this is out of the way, I'd like to mention that any setting using the old school "elves are always fighter/mages" style can easily justify how they get iron
they get their lords to cast iron wall

Then they can forge it normally. It's not like elves are afraid of fire, I don't know where Veeky Forums got this idea.

Their Bards deliver all the Metal they'll ever need.

Came so say this

Metal and tools bes no the domains of the Leafie Lord

>the elfen lords have gold weapons
>the lesser nobles silver weapons
>the regular elves copper weapons
I don't think that would work so well.

You know how a vegetable's roots has bacteria that absorb nitrogen?

Woodies have a variety which does the same with metals: bioleaching through magic.

They just collect the iron-grapes, silver apples and golden bark afterwards.

Trade for it, like the Native Americans did

Garden variety Tolkien-type elves were perfectly happy to mine and smith, and infact were the best at it. Because elves.

If your setting is more Gloranthan or Dwarf Fortress and elves are militantly anti-industrial, then you just say that they use magically hardened "ironwood," summon it straight out of the ground by blowing earthspirits, or recycle it from dead human armies.

You can't make things out of the iron produced by iron wall.

no, that's the Metal Elves, whose society is broken up by how the elfen lords weild weapons of Power Metal, the lesser nobles weild weapons of Glam Metal, and the common elves are split into two castes, one weilds tools of Heavy Metal and the other (untouchable) caste weilds tools of the quasi-forbidden Metal of Speed.

Outside the realms of the Metal Elves there's the Extreme Elves, and their 4 clans of Black, Death, Doom and Thrash, named for their use of the forbidden metals.

The reason a lot of other elves hate industrialism is because Elves in folklore were weak against "Cold Iron".

Magic, you whore

From the fucking GROUND like everybody else, the fuck you were thinking OP? That forests are made just of trees floating in the thin air? That they don't grow on mountains? WHY ARE YOU MAKING ME MAD OP?

From the mines beneath Menegroth/Thranduil's Halls, of course.

...

>A sword, a spear, a longbow and three knives

Why did they put this memester on the cover again?

neat

Copper is a VERY bad weapons material. Stone and bone weapons and armor can be much better for must purposes. And bronze already requires some basic metallurgy.

Also, point is - the social system of nomadic tribal huntsmen strongly collides with the requirements for many crafts, metallurgy and metalsmithing among them, which is one of the reasons civilization moved to settled life.

they take it from your corpse

Bullshit plants that concentrate minerals in the soil in their bark, branches, or leaves over a period of years.
gets it.