Of all the traits of Tolkien's elves, even purely physical, pointy ears were very minor...

Of all the traits of Tolkien's elves, even purely physical, pointy ears were very minor. Given that D&D elves (and by extension, those in much of modern fantasy) are overwhelmingly inspired by Tolkien, how come they of all the others became so completely central to the image?

In before some of you faggots who learned all of your mythology from Scion sourcebooks says this: no, there's very little evidence, if at all, that the ancient Norse OR Celts depicted their elves or close equivalents with pointy ears. By all accounts, they mostly just looked like very pretty, occasionally glowing humans.

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>Given that D&D elves (and by extension, those in much of modern fantasy) are overwhelmingly inspired by Tolkien

This is not a given at all.

>why is the most distinct and obvious physical trait so completely central to the image?

>Given that D&D elves (and by extension, those in much of modern fantasy) are overwhelmingly inspired by Tolkien
DnD elves were inspired by Sindar and Legolas, and many fantasy settings followed this instead of taking inspiration from Tolkien.

I guess it's easier to process than "they're just like the most beautiful humans but 10x as beautiful" because the only frame of reference we have for beautiful people is the people we have seen. The radiance of the Elf is incomprehensible to our human minds and as such "pointed ears lmao" becomes a much easier way to differentiate between them.

Have you actually read The Lord of the Rings? The pointy ears are barely mentioned at all. To the point that it's doubtful to what extent they even truly existed.

Pointy ears on Tolkien elves are like wings on the Balrog. The only evidence we have of them is roundabout references which may not refer to the reality of the book.

And they were never a feature of any major mythology's elf equivalent.

The beings who tended to be consistently drawn with pointy ears were demons and fairies, but D&D elves are clearly not the first and have little to do with any depiction of the latter modern enough to include said pointy ears (by the point in history their image settled like this, it also tended to include stuff like butterfly wings and antennae)

because pointy ears are the most superficial part of Tolkien elves and D&D is one of the most superficial roleplaying experiences out there, what did you expect?

For my elves, the two key traits are the cheetah-like absence of body fat, and eyes that don't make any rational sense but function great regardless.

You just wanted to post the picture, didn't you?

Draw a picture of a tall, pretty human.
Draw a picture of a tall, pretty elf.

What is going to be the most distinct difference?

It's actually the picture that got me to think that. The character has virtually no trait one would normally associate with "elves". If not for the pointy ears, nobody could've ever guessed she was meant to be one, yet because of them everyone does so. It intrigued me why.

One of them actually has a dick

this. since hobbits had to be renamed, we can assume it to be a given that elves and dwarves were shoplifted too.

Unless it's a D&D elf, probably the fact that it's shining, or that it's significantly prettier than the human. If you're going to say that they're "exactly as pretty", then you've got a picture of what might be the most beautiful human ever and one of the ugliest elves, which is very much not representative.

>They are defined as a different race and need optical representation of that to identify them by. Ears are the only trait at hand that is unambiguous.
>Pointy ears are a minor alteration from the human form and thus don't impact desirability.
>Rarely get in the way of item or character design based ion humans, little special considerations.
>The pointy ear is easily visible when interacting and can function as an indicator of archetype and position like a headpiece would otherwise.
>Parallels can be drawn to emotive animal ears, which is considered cute by many.
>Symbolizes sharper senses and higher awareness visually by making a sensory organ more prominent.
>Critical mass of exposure begets imitation.

>the fact that it's shining, or that it's significantly prettier than the human

Would you call this an elf?

As an ancient Norse dude, very possibly.

>then you've got a picture of what might be the most beautiful human ever and one of the ugliest elves, which is very much not representative.

Representative isn't the point.
You've got to make certain it's not just a very pretty human that fell into some glitter.

If you cut a D&D elves' ears at the tips, how could you tell it's not a short slender human?

No you don't. There are literally stories in Nordic and Germanic folklore of people who MARRIED elves, had children with them, and didn't pick on it until the elf pointed it out.

A Knowledge (Local) check with a DC of 5 + their challenge rating.

Different eye colors, finer facial features.

Same for the one who looks like a glowy human, then.

Refer to

Holy shit that elf is fat

What did she do, eat an entire factory of Lembas bread?

They actually have some messed up physiology in D&D. Their eyes are much larger and set at downward sloping angles, their skulls are narrower and taper much more sharply, and it's less about being beautiful and more about them being angular.

But, my guess is the ear scars will still need to e examined for final confirmation.

>liking fat elves

If you're asking for why a distinguishing feature of elves has become central to their visual design, and then want to say elves should be mistaken for humans, I think your issue is that you just want to argue.

They're just Koreans with Down's Syndrome.

It's because it's a distinguishing physical characteristic, so it becomes exaggerated in depictions.

But it's never been their distinguishing feature. Their distinguishing feature is being inhumanely, perfectly beautiful. Just like not every deathly pale person with protruding fangs is a vampire, not every very beautiful person is an elf, but that's the identifier if you go by the older stories (Tolkien included). "You could've been an elf" was a valid compliment to beautiful people in some places and times. It's the etymological source of several Germanic names.

>But it's never been their distinguishing feature.
taste of a liar.jpg

not that user but you have a weird purist personal interpretation of the subject, and you're expressing confusion over why it's a certain way while refusing to acknowledge the things that have made it that way

this is a non-starter, and fairies with pointy ears sure as fuck predate Tolkien

Don't bully.

fun fact: elves in tolkein are never actually described as having pointed ears

>being inhumanely, perfectly beautiful.

Draw that please.
In a way that would get people to not assume it's any one of several hundred inhumanly, perfectly, beautiful creatures, which funnily enough includes humans.
And, please, don't do something insanely stupid like give them two-foot long eyebrows. It's got to be aesthetically pleasing.

I think your issue is that you're kind of oddly gung-ho about having elves not be distinguishable from pretty humans. I hope you're not going to go and demand artists to stop giving fairies butterfly wings.

It's quick and simple visual communication.
Also, honestly, no one really cares that much about the old myths. They're fine for inspiration and ideas, but Tolkien already took most of the better ideas.

>They're fine for inspiration and ideas, but Tolkien already took most of the better ideas.
fuck off

>this is a non-starter, and fairies with pointy ears sure as fuck predate Tolkien
As I've mentioned - yes they do, but they share very little other characteristics with his elves and even less with D&D's, making the choice of pointy ears once again extremely arbitrary. Why not wings? Why not insect legs? Why not being dressed in flower petals?

Elves were often drawn that way before LotR (with pointy ears) but it was actually the Shannara series that originally vaguely copied the LotR formula and ears WERE emphasized there, including the whole "half elves do not have as pointy ears" thing, and unlike Tolkien the Shannara books were successful while the author was actually alive.

Cue lots of copying of the basic formula.

Depending on your drawing style it shouldn't even be hard. If you illustrate all the humans as looking like something from Warhammer or what have you, just by drawing the elves "classically beautiful" with clean skin and no wrinkles will create more than the effect you're looking for.

40+ years and DnD fags are still in denial that their game is primarily lifted from Tolkien.

Why is it so hard to admit that the entire premise of a party of multi-racial adventurers going on dungeon crawls to find treasure and fight evil (which is THE central aspect of DnD) was entirely based on Lord of the Rings
while they freely admit that DnD also took inspiration from Conan and Elric.

It's like reading that embarrassing essay by Michael Moorcock where he bashes Tolkien for being more successful than him.

Gygax denied it as well. What a hipster hypocrite.

I attended university classes on Tolkien and everything was great and interesting until some douchebag inevitably brought up the pointy ears question. Stole fucking 10 minutes of potentially good discussion from everyone.

Here's the answer; It doesn't fucking matter.

Maybe some illustrator just depicted them with pointy ears and Tolkien liked it and it stuck.
Like how the german translation called them "Elben" instead of "Elfen" which Tolkien also preferred.

>Why not wings? Why not insect legs? Why not being dressed in flower petals?

Those are way more invasive in relation to tolkien's descriptions and narrative. Way more alien than pointy ears except for the flower dresses.

>fuck off
t. Guy who likes to wear dresses and get fucked by eight-legged horses.

>Here's the answer; It doesn't fucking matter.
It evidently does, given that it's become the one identifying characteristic for elves as a species in the mind of nerds world over. You could draw a person looking just about anyway (re: OP pic), give it pointy ears and people will call it an elf.

Shawhat?

>Shannara
What the hell is this?
I've never even heard of it.

*wanking motions*

>40+ years and DnD fags are still in denial that their game is primarily lifted from Tolkien.
Yes, because it isn't.

>unlike Tolkien the Shannara books were successful while the author was actually alive
Don't talk out of your ass.

Tolkien had a vast cult following since the 60s and his works entered academic studies as early as the 80s.

>I wonder if random words would work in lieu of a real argument...

A pity that you can't and shouldn't make all settings and art-styles to be "like warhammer". Most people doesn't like that level of visual grittiness.

You only seem interested in jerking off to yourself, dude. Nobody is obligated to give you a reach around.

, It's a relatively successful (been going on forever) but fairly mediocre fantasy series by Terry Brooks.
It started being written around the 1970's, right around the time Tolkien started getting REALLY popular again and more or less totally copied his formula. Unlike guys like Tolkien and Howard who were DEAD by the time that they were famous, Brooks actually made money by copying the Tolkien formula again and again during his ACTUAL LIFE, and so other authors started to mimic it too and this is when you see more derivatives and also when D&D starts to get going.

Shannara was the first "Tolkien knockoff" that actually succeeded financially, and a lot of stuff that you see in bad D&D-style fiction (elves are always better/more heroic then you rather then just being beautiful, sad, and useless like in Tolkien, elves and half-elves have different ears, etc) you can kind of see seeds of in the Shannara books.

Don't quote me on this, but I think MTV made like a TV or something about it?

I really am not a fan of the fake history of fantasy as entirely Tolkien-centric, nor of the denigration of mythology in favor of fantasy.

And Tolkien was pretty much dead by the time the 70's hit and everyone started copying him more obviously (including D&D), living for only three years more.

I'm not talking about Tolkien himself, but people who poorly copied him and actually made legit money off of it while they lived in relatively short order.

>D&D first published in 1974
>Shannara first book first published in 1977
Your theory sure seems legit.

>If you illustrate all the humans as looking like something from Warhammer or what have you

That's an awful idea. If in order for you to have visually distinct elves you need to reduce humans to the ugly melted globs of wax that they are in WH, you are doing something very wrong.

I don't know, I'm not OP and I seem to be participating in a discussion. Seems like a couple more anons do too. You're weirdly butthurt over someone disagreeing with you on elf ears, leave the thread if it makes you so upset.

A series of fantasy novels that is pretty much just a crappy knockoff of Lord of the Rings.
Famous for having the dumbest sounding names of fantasy literature.

It is. The entire premise.
Without The Hobbit and Lord of the Rings there would be no Dungeons and Dragons.
This is a fact.

These threads where everyone is wrong and where they're right it's for the wrong reasons are horrible.

>a well-argumented, non-retarded comment on Veeky Forums
Alright, that's enough internet for today. See you tomorrow, folks.

D&D elves, despite player interpretation, are often slightly shorter than humans. I think that's a call to myths in which they played the party of the "little people", literally shorter humanoid usually fey-ish creatures.

I'm not a fan of people jerking themselves to Norse mythology. It reeks of vikingboo idiocy, especially when they try to say we need to treat fantasy like some stagnant and frozen spectacle.

No need to go that far. Real humans aren't too pretty, and even a lot of classical fantasy illustrations covered them in scars and gave them fairly rough features. All you need is to not give elves those kinds of minor blemishes. It will stand out.

>elves are always better/more heroic then you rather then just being beautiful, sad, and useless like in Tolkien
You have no idea what you're talking about. Just stop.
At this point I'm pretty sure you haven't even read Tolkien.

Yeah, fantasy is only legit when you freeze it at the 60's, not some other period!

>Without The Hobbit and Lord of the Rings there would be no Dungeons and Dragons.
That's not the same as the point you originally made, but you're also definitely overestimating Tolkien's influence on D&D and you probably have a poor awareness of non-Tolkien fantasy of the same and preceding time. I mean what's your take on Glorantha, which appears as a setting at basically the same time as D&D?

Okay? This is still unarguably stupid:
>Also, honestly, no one really cares that much about the old myths. They're fine for inspiration and ideas, but Tolkien already took most of the better ideas.
You probably have not read that many surviving Norse myths and folktales! They definitely are not the same kinda thing as Tolkien wrote!

Wait that's supposed to be an elf? I thought it was a Tumblr cosplayer doing her best to be a short stack.

D&D elves have evolved along strangely random lines between editions. Pointy ears aside, the first couple of editions did elves pretty close to Tolkien, like specifically making them warrior wizards (though I don't think too many Tolkien elves had to use spellbooks), giving them a bonus for using magical swords, special archery abilities or even referring to them being able to sneak well through forests with their "grey green cloaks". Hard to say where "canon" staples of our image of elves like the low constitution or meditation instead of sleep or immunity to ghoul paralysis came from (some people say the sleep thing is a reference to that one line about Legolas, but it doesn't seem to fit the relatively less outright Tolkien-y flavor of the later editions that brought it in).

*slides hand down pants*
>Uh, William Morris didn't exist
*cradles balls*
>Uh, uh, Three Hearts and Three Lions was never published
*fondles shaft*
>L. Sprague de Camp? More like L. Sprague my Cock!
*rubs cock*
>Uh, Jack Vance. Oh, Lord Dunsany
*jerking intensifies*
>Burroughs, Howard, Leiber, ohhh
*ejaculates all over the face of C.L. Moore*

ahh yiss

Gotta love the fat elves.

Oh shut it you mincing little cunt.
I can actually recite the Song of Durin BY HEART; that's how many times I've read those goddamn books.
I mean in the original novels, not the Simarillion. The elves passively help out Frodo, but Elrond outright says that Rivendell and it's folk can't really aid him that directly, and in Lorien they seem even more passive due to just how many are fading in strength and heading west.

"Beautiful and sad" is one of the FIRST words used by the hobbits (the most "normal" characters from our modern viewpoint, though more from a 1920's British countryside perspective) to describe them. And who can blame them for being depressed when they've had to live through like two separate apocalyptic wars and watched the slow but inevitable decline of everything they built, and even most of the things they supported from afar like Arnor.

The central aspect of DnD is a party of adventurers of different races and professions that undertake quests fighting for good against evil which usually involves going into dungeons.

How is this not completely taken from Tolkien?
I'm not familiar with Glorantha. Isn't that the Runequest setting?

I've read my share of Norse. Even took a course on it.

It's nothing special. In fact, compared with what survived among the Greeks and Persians, it's kind of dull.
It's better than what you can find in the Americas and in Africa, and there's plenty of ripe ideas for the picking, but Tolkien really took most of the best ones, like the fixation on metal items and adaptations of the races. Even Wandering Odin got ported over.

I wish people still actively ridiculed fat fetishists for their plebian taste.

>people going on adventures in dark places was invented by Tolkien
Holy shit.

>Oh shut it you mincing little cunt.
Wow, we got a badass over here.

Like I said, unarguably stupid. Hope you're not blinkered by this opinion forever.

Still no arguments, I see.

Reminder that most dungeons aren't dungeons.

I wish people would do it simply on the basis that these creatures are supposed to be elves.

Nice strawman.
Want to try again?

That's cute, did you have to go to Wikipedia's list of fantasy writers for all the hard names or did you make with Google?

That's what makes it cute, though.

Apologies.
I dislike it when people make utterly baseless assumptions about me based on less then nothing; I'm guessing it pisses you off too unless you're some kind of huge hypocrite, and I don't really see any evidence of that at all.

So um....what is Durin's Song again?

No, it's another distortion of this fictional race that is already flexible enough without shitting on one of its defining features for the sake of masturbation.

It's a song that Gimli sings to talk about Moria, though it's only really about Moria at the end.
It's more a song recounting Durin (greatest of the dwarf forefathers) and his deeds while lamenting at how much the dwarfs have lost over time, though it ends on a note that Durin will King Arthur himself back to life one day because he reportedly reincarnated seven times previously already in their history.

Balrogs don't have wings.

>Tolkien invented elves
>You can only do elves in this one specific way or else it's wrongbadfun
>Dwarves are also always supposed to be short, drunk Nordo-Scots who are brilliant engineers

>>Tolkien invented elves
I never said that.
>>You can only do elves in this one specific way
I already stated that elves are flexible, you can do a lot with them and still keep them skinny.
>>Dwarves are also always supposed to be short, drunk Nordo-Scots who are brilliant engineers
I never said that.

Is that all? Really?

Okay, since we have some actual Tolkien lore guys here I want to ask something that's always bugged me; what the hell was that...thing in the lake outside Moria anyway?

>Worst elf
Opinion discarded

Jeez, I didn't to post the same Marcille reaction image again.

en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arthur_Rackham

Based on a Google search, the pointed ear elf comes from this guys drawings of Christmas elves...

Tolkien said some kind of prehistoric protodragon, IIRC.

It's really basic character inversion, dude.

Elves are typically viewed as high-minded and slender. But if they're just people, why couldn't an elf be a selfish glutton? It's cute because it's not what you expect.

It's only ever called "the Watcher in the Water", and only colloquially by the dwarves writing down it's name in the Book of Mazarbul the Fellowship discovers in Balin's tomb.
Gandalf makes a vague comment about there being "older and fouler things in the dark places of the world", but that doesn't actually say anything in particular and in fact he might not know what it is seeing as it's shown repeatedly that he doesn't know EVERYTHING.

Basically whatever it was is totally up to speculation, and like the Balrog of Moria there's probably all kinds of awful shit lurking about in Middle-earth that nobody knows anything about anymore and isn't directly working for Sauron.

There's speculation by one Tolkien scholar that it's a "cold-drake" like you say (as in not an urolaki like Smaug, which were created by Morgoth), but I'm not aware that Tolkien himself commented on it either way.