So Elves are Celtic right...

So Elves are Celtic right? They've even got those weird pseudo-Celtic sounding names to go with their hippy dippy forest dwelling culture

They're depicted as such for God knows what reason, but they're actually Germanic. Spoken of quite frequently in Norse mythology, where they come from Alfheimr.

Celtic elfs are vastly different from Nordic elves, which are closer to what most fantasy elves are like.

Norse elves were demigods, tall and powerful, graceful and masters at crafts, magic and battle.

Celtic elfs are tiny folk with a dozen variations of different sorts of fey. They dance on toadstools, wear flowers as clothes and throw stone arrowheads at you to cause curses.

This thread was more directed at their inspiration in DnD, not the literal cultural difference between Norse and Celtic Elves you fuck

Actually, those are just fairies, not Celtic elves

Calm the fuck down, man.

Well their inspiration depends on the setting so

And their inspiration for DnD was primarily Norse, with a few Celtic touches.

Depends on the setting.

Tolkien's Elves speak Sindarin which is based on Welsh, who are Celts, so I guess they are yeah.

The Tuatha de Dannan were more likely the inspiration for modern elves more than any of the various fair folk from Celtic mythology.

Go read the concept artist Turner Mohan's notes on his Tolkien sketch blog

tl;dr Tolkien Elves are all Scandinavian Alfir at their core - semidivine "other" race of man. Eldar, the "Light Elves", exemplify that identity with their warrior poet philosopher artisan king deal, while the Sindar, who never saw the light of the two trees (which is like having god speak to you through the telephone game) and are thus the "dark elves" inhabit this more Celtic Fair Folk kind of territory, but are still at heart a race of semidivine "other men".

>Some concept sketches of the Green Elves of Ossiriand. While the high elves in Tolkien's world, like the mighty Alfir of norse mythology, are presented as these great, wise, superhuman beings whose friendship and knowledge is given to (and greatly benefits) the people of other races they encounter, the dark elves of middle-earth seem to me more in keeping with the (perhaps somewhat more celtic) conception of the elves as elusive nature spirits; alluring and mysterious, but ultimately inaccessible to humans (the sindar, it seems, are somewhere in between)

>all these studies grew out of a desire to take a stab at Denethor son of Lenwe, king of the nandor elves, the least lofty and "enlightened" branch of the eldar we get to know much about (and probably a good representative for what the various tribes of Avari who never made it over the blue mountains are like) it's fun to envision elves that are more savage and primitive than they're usually presented ("less wise and more dangerous" as it is remarked of the woodelves in 'the hobbit'); fairies dancing lithely through the dense, old growth canopies of tree-covered middle-earth dressed in nothing but leaves and skins, their king this great, ancient guardian of the forest bedecked in giant elk antlers as if, through countless centuries of confused retellings by men, he would one day find his way into ancient celtic mythology as the prototypical "antlered god" figure. actually my first attempt at that antler crown was the much more conservative design on the bottom right side, closer in keeping with the typical Tolkienian circlet, but those big ones, warcraft-y as they are, have really grown on me; they're just so much more wild, the kind of onamentation a "savage king" would have (it helped my perspective on the character to learn that "denethor" was not his name at all but a title and a sindarisation of "Ndani-tauro" meaning "savior of the dani," a much better sounding name for a more feral character, I think)

>Aredhel, daughter of Fingolfin, and her cousins Curufin and Celegorm, sons of Feanor, back in their hunting days in Valinor.

>The picture painted of the Noldor at this time (thanks in part to Melkor's influence, but also to their nature) is one of a strong, fierce, proud people; independent, industrious, arrogant, and possessing this lurking, untested eagerness for violence - traits exemplified by Feanor but shared to one degree or another by many of his kinsmen - all of which, when put to it, erupts into bloodshed at Alqualonde, committed against the peaceful (and mostly unarmed) Teleri. Their subsequent expulsion from paradise is well earned, and their suffering on the Grinding Ice and long struggling in comparative humility in Middle-Earth seems a well-needed tempering of the Noldorian character. I picture them here, the King's royal grandchildren in the flower of their youth, as being like big cats; swift, graceful and deadly.

>The look for the elves in Valinor is basically an even cross between ancient greek and ancient celtic; all light, billowing fabrics and intricate gold trinkets (the two styles are quite similar as is) and I like the idea of the blessed realm being quite a bit warmer and less harsh than the rugged lands of Middle-Earth, with the elves adopting that more northern/germanic fashion of long hoes for the crossing of Helcaraxe, and afterward in Beleraind. I can picture "cold middle-earth" being an elvish expression, similar to "tree covered middle-earth."

Tolkien's elves lived in forests because they were defensible. When possible they lived in underground cave complexes hidden behind waterfalls hidden in forests because those are that much more defensible.

That said Tolkien also has elves who just wander homelessly in the wilderness singing all day long and that's pretty hippy-dippy, but even those are masters of tracking and survival. The main point is that elves can live in nature because they're so *good* at it, the wild (and grey) elves have been living in Middle Earth a lot longer than you have and have gotten very good at living there. But when the Noldor came over as foreign elves they built roads and cities and castles and shit just like everyone else.

Ya he assigns real-world equivalents to his fictional languages, so English is Westron but he uses Norse names for Dwarves, etc etc

Khuzdul (dwarvish) is based on Hebrew but written with nordic-inspired runes (sorry, I'm a conlang nerd)

If Elves from most fantasy are Celtic/Mostly Norse, what are Blood Elves?

putrid puddle of shit together with the rest of Warcraft

Not really based on any one culture.

Halflings are generally based on Celtic west country folk, wood elves are most like the Germanic alpine people's.

High elves remind me culturally most of the Byzantine upper classes especially Varangians who intergrated and became a part of the nobility.

Dwarves are some form of Nordic combination with the people of Judah, aesthetically they look most like 9th century Norwegians but the upper class are not tribal and king Solomon of Judah is probably the closest you can get to a Dwarf king in the real world.

Can you please elaborate on all of that? I can't really see any of that.

Celtic elves might actually be fucking interesting. A people which once ruled most of Europe at least by culture, pushed to the edge of the world because of an expansionist, southern power - Rome, or in this case, Humanity.

There are also probably a ton of cultural caveats Celts/elves can have which would utterly be alien to the Roman/Human, and hopefully something more than just 'stone circles, druids, and a penchant for drunkenness'.

That's pretty edgy user

Or, fuck it, not even Rome. The Carthagians fucked with the 'Celts', insofar as the southern Gallic and Iberian branches. Humanity could be this culture that stays along the coasts, but still pushing the celts inward as they move up the rivers.

It's funny cause he's right though

Celtic elfs are literally hobbits you guys

I always saw celtic elves as Hobbits or gnomes. Those magic people that lived under hills and collected lots of treasure.

>hippy dippy forest dwelling culture
I assure you that people who live in forests are as far from hippies as you can imagine c.f. Papuans. They lead hard lives and want the forests protected because they live there, the same way you would want to protect your own house.

Actually celts were very close to italics, culture and language wise. This is why they got assimilated relatively quickly and their language dissapeared

That kinda sounds like Tolkien's elves, actually, just a bit more forceful.

Don't tell that the city-dwelling kids of today that have completely false expectations and a romanticized view of a life in the wild.

Elves appear in several different European mythologies.

Tolkien primarily based his interpretation of them on Norse mythology but was influenced by Celtic and Finnish among others when designing their languages. Later on, other fantasy writers, and D&D in particular, copied only the most shallow elements of Tolkien's work and because the Sindar (the Elves who spoke a Celtic sounding language) were the most prominent Elves in LotR all Elves afterwards became entirely Celtic.

Sindarin was beased on welsh, incidentally.

>live in the city
>everyone around me is a cuck
>just want to live in the pepe new guinea with my primitive island people and tribal ways and sacrifice white people to the war gods

tell me more
give me sum reading sources

Galadriel and Elrond were Noldor, but even they did speak the celtic-influenced Sindarin in LotR due to Italic-Latin-Finnish Quenya being a ceremonial language at that point

Much as it's fun to prod obviously Bumhole Blitzkrieged sperglords I can't deny that the overreacting spod is not wrong.

Didn't he base elvish on Finnish language?

>this Norse shit again
>from people who have clearly never read source in their lives
The "alfar" who are Tolkien-elf-like are a myth, you double retards. They don't exist in Norse mythology at *all* (there alf is visibly a synonym for dwarf, witness "Gandalf", originally one of the dwarves in the list of them in Völuspá along with ). The only place there are "light elves" mentioned is in Snorri's high medieval work on Icelandic poetry, which is emphatically NOT Norse mythology, and given that the majority of Icelandic women came originally from Ireland, the most likely inspiration for these beings waaaaaaaaas...

THE FUCKING TUATHA DE DANANN

You can't just take David Day or whoever started this horseshit at face value because you read it in a book once, anons.

The views of celts as 'forest dwelling people' are completely wrong.

Continental celts were really advanced. They had built roads all across the different cities where the most powerful tribes had their trade centers, which the romans later used to place their own roads on top of them (because let's face it, building them with stone is a bit better than doing it with wood). In fact, these roads were even better for trade than roman roads, because they formed a huge network, with no centralized node, while roman roads were centered (mostly) around Rome itself.

Celtic (actually La Tene culture) metallurgy was pretty damn good too. Their swords were REALLY high quality, they invented chainmail, and they had the most beautiful jewels and adornments. During the gallic wars, roman armies that defeated the celts usually tried to loot all the armor and helmets they could, because they were of much higher quality than their own (Rome produced a much greater amount of chainmail and helmets, but lower in quality)

They also invented soap, were pretty clean (contrary to popular belief of "hur dur, unwashed barbarians), their cities had 2, 3, and sometimes even 4 levels (Roman cities usually had only 2 levels, granted, they were mostly stone while celtic buildings were a mixture of stone and wood).

They were of course a people that lived separated in tribes and not centralized in cities, but that's just the social structure.

After their assimilation (because the Gallic Wars was actually Romans & Celts vs just Celts), most romans started hiring celtic druids and wise men as the teachers for their sons instead of greek teachers.

In war they had also really effective strategies, and while a lot of their victories are attributed to ambushes, they had some pretty competent commanders. They also occupied and assimilated a LOT of different peoples and tribes for a really long time. Think about the Galatians, living in Ankara.

Long post, I hope some of you enjoy it!

One of the languages.

>most romans started hiring celtic druids and wise men as the teachers for their sons instead of greek teachers
You have to elucidate on this, as far as I know we know very little about the druids.

>The views of celts as 'forest dwelling people' are completely wrong.
Yeah, in the Roman period this is obviously the Germanic tribes, who according to Tacitus just live in little villages in an insanely huge forest (and looking at Vendel and Viking era Scandis this is highly credible).

True, I shouldn't have said exactly druids. What we know about them is that some of them educated some of the celtic nobles (I'm talking about continental celts, don't forget it), but we don't know about how they did it, or how they practiced their rituals, or anything concrete in fact. I should've said wise men and semi-noble types, who in turn were (probably) educated by druids in 'schools' (more like sacred groves and specialized places celts had).

By the way, all the stone circles, Stonehenge and all that were NOT created by the celts. They used those places but they didn't erect them. Although they may have had some menhirs erected in some places.

Another interesting thing; celts were in the process of a 'feudalism' of sorts when the assimilation happened, and some of the most important nobles already had semi-profesional regiments or corps of troops (who weren't nobles) dedicated mostly to fighting.

If the assimilation hadn't happened, it would be interesting to know what could happen. Specially if some leader could at least try to unify the different tribes.

True. Germanic peoples lived in usually even smaller communities, much more dispersed, and didn't even have a lot of agriculture, relying more on animals and meat (even more than the celts, who according to the romans ate a lot of meat).

I also love germanic peoples, but they were certainly less 'advanced' than the celts. Not primitive, not 'barbarians', just a different society with different values and ways of looking at life.

The ancient world is great in that sense, you get a LOT of cultures, really different from each other, and the conflicts that arose because of that

Keep in mind the real names of Dwarves are never actually revealed. The names we call them are actually pseudonyms taken to fit into the land they currently inhabit, hence the Norsey names for the generally Norsey North.

The Romans themselves were one of the many headhunting, human-sacrificing barbarian tribes of Europe. People just ignore that because aknowledging that'd make their reception bumpy.

It's like how each and every reference to islamic faith and theology has been deleted from Rumi's poems in translation.

Celt elves = woodland gnomes
Norse elves = run-of-the-mill fantasy elves

depends on setting