Drow and Dark Elves; the Other Other

Kelsey Harrison

Monster Are Us

Before I start, I think it’s important that I admit my biases, both for myself as a writing

and so I can be honest with myself throughout this essay. I love elves. I love every kind of elf

there is and has been and will be. I love high elves and wood elves and dark elves and space

elves. For me, elves have always been an ideal of beauty, freedom, and the fantasy of an abled,

perfect body accompanied by magical powers and pointed ears. Nights have been spent reading

“Lord of the Rings” self-insert fan fiction, imagining myself as a beautiful elf, falling in love

with Legolas or Thranduil or Glorfindel. Being a disabled person, the Otherness of Tolkien’s

elves was and is an enticing lure for me.

When I first got into gaming, I played “Skyrim” with gusto, always either a Dark Elf or

High Elf, simply because I found them most beautiful (and I love elves, as discussed at length

before) but it was tempered by reading in to “Skyrim’s” complicated discussions on race, which

made me more curious about the history and politics of this world of The Elder Scrolls.

So, when I finally started playing Dungeons and Dragons with my cousin and her son, I

was quick to pick and create my beloved Drow ranger, Rae, who was on a quest to rescue her

kidnapped father. However, as I investigated the history, culture and presentation of the canon

Drow I was more than a little horrified to realize that they, as a culture, had been characterized

with, a bucketload of racist, colonialist, sexist and orientalist stereotypes. They existed as a

caricature, a challenging NPC, but not a living, breathing culture.

 I suppose I have been somewhat spoiled by the portrayal of the Dunmer in “Skyrim”, so

having such a poorly thought out race of people in a game really irritated me.

Irritation was about the worst of it, though, and at the beginning of my research for this paper, I

did not realize the great amount of pain and alienation that canon D&D Drow gave to Fantasy

fans of color.

In this essay, I will explore the idea of Dark Elves, from the origins of the modern idea of

fantasy elves in Tolkien, to the problematic Drow in “Dungeons and Dragons,” to the more

nuanced but still somewhat lacking portrayal of the Dunmer in “Skyrim.”

Elves have existed in European folklore since at least the 1300s, but probably longer (Sturtevant,

“Race: the Original Sin of the Fantasy Genre”), but Tolkien’s fantasy works were the origin for

the idea of elves that we have today.

For Tolkien, elves existed, conceptually, as humanity without the taint of Original Sin

(with the added bonuses of long life and extraordinary beauty) (Poor, Digital Elves as a Racial

Other in Video Games: Acknowledgment and Avoidance), but they were essentially human, in

that they could mate and have fertile offspring with humans. Strangely, all the examples I will

look at in this essay will mirror that.

In Tolkien’s world, there were different groups of elves, each with their own complicated

history, but there were no dark elves. Well, there were no dark-skinned, Gothic, edgy elves

(except Maeglin and his dad, but that’s another story for another essay) but there were elves who

were called “dark” because they refused to go to Valinor (the promised land of the elves) and

thus they were turned into orcs by Melkor, Sauron’s (the Big Bad of Lord of the Rings) boss

(Tolkien, The Silmarillion, page 50.) By the time of Tolkien’s death, elves as we know them

today were codified into the fantasy genre.

 In the 1970’s, a new way for fantasy fans to experience the genre had been invented; the

tabletop role playing game Dungeons and Dragons. Players could select a race, skill set, and

backstory (the problematic aspects of having a character’s personality traits dependent on their

race has been criticized by many people, including the author of the article “Race: The Original

Sin of the Fantasy Genre”.) One of these races would become one that would influence the genre

for years to come; the Drow.

The Drow, based on the Norse svartálfar, existed to serve as antitheses to the normal

(white) elves of Dungeons and Dragons, with pitch-black skin, a dystopian and dysfunctional

society, and an inherent evil streak (Sturtevant, “Race: the Original Sin of the Fantasy Genre”).

Because of these reasons, in the lore of Dungeons and Dragons, Drow were killed on sight by

many people, which draws many uncomfortable parallels to the way black folks are treated in

real life (Wiggins, Troy L., “Elves of Color, The Color of Elves”.) Worse still, within the world

of Dungeons and Dragons, this kind of behavior is completely justified, because with few

exceptions, Drow are evil by default.

Part of the beauty of Dungeons and Dragons is that players can choose to disregard

problematic bits of lore and make the game into something more inclusive, but the base of the

game is built on racist stereotypes regarding people of color, which by it’s very nature alienates

certain players.

The Dunmer (“Dun” meaning “dark” and “mer” meaning “elf” in their language) of

“Skyrim” are a completely different can of worms. They are dark skinned, and they have a dark

aesthetic like the Drow of D&D, yes, but they are not inherently evil. Rather, they are presented

as a living culture throughout the games, with their own nuances and history, their own

oppressions and oppressiveness. (Skyrim, Bethesda, 2011.)

 When the game starts, the Dunmer have fled their home land of Morrowind in the wake

of an invasion by the lizard-like Argonians (who the Dunmer had enslaved and colonized in the

past) to the land of Skyrim. Skyrim is in the middle of a bloody civil war between the imperial

yet inclusive Empire, and the independent yet racist Stormcloaks. The majority of the Dunmer

refugees live in the Stormcloaks capital of Windhelm, where they are pushed into a ghetto called

the Grey Quarter, after their skin. Upon entering Windhelm the player sees two Nord men

standing in front of a Dunmer woman, the following scene goes like this:

Rolff (Nord on the left): “You come here, where you’re not wanted, you eat our food, you

pollute our city with your stink and you refuse to help the Stormcloaks “(one of the factions that

it is possible for the player character to join. It is a Nord nationalist group, although there are

members of other races in the army, it is centered on the “true” inhabitants of Skyrim, even

though the Nords colonized Skyrim from the Snow Elves, who they committed genocide against

and drove to near extinction. It should also be noted that the player character meets only one

two Snow Elves in the game who have not “devolved” into the inhuman and savage Falmer.)

The Dunmer woman, Suvaris Atheron: “But we haven’t taken a side because it’s not our

fight.”

The male Nord in the middle, Angrenor: hey, maybe the reason these grey-skins don’t

help in the war is because they’re Imperial spies!

Suvaris Atheron, outraged: “Imperial spies? You can’t be serious!”

Rolff: Maybe we’ll pay you a visit tonight, little spy. We got ways of finding out what you

really are.” (Skyrim, Bethesda, 2011.)

 This scene, which merely added nuance to the game when I first played it is chilling. It’s

even more chilling when, on further conversations, Rolff implies that he will lynch Dunmer he

suspects of being spies. This is a deliberate echo of lynching in the post-Civil War south.

This shows that, in the city of Windhelm in the game, there is a huge culture of

institutionalized racism on the part of the Nords, who’s attitudes eerily mirror the words of white

supremacists.

These three examples, while not representative of elves in all fantasy stories, show elves,

and particularly dark elves, as first an idealized Other, then a Demonized Other, and finally, an

Other that they player character can experience being in the game, given the right

circumstances.

Fantasy has always been about escapism, but that escapism has come at the cost, many

times, of people of color by excluding them from the narrative. Even though I praised “Skyrim”

for its representation, it is not free from its fair share of problematic storytelling elements. The

only solution that I see is this; people of color must be the ones telling their own stories in the

fantasy genre, be it in books, board games, or videos games. The fantasy genre should belong

and vbe for everyone, not just white people.

Purdue University “Critical Race Theory (1970s-present)”

owl.purdue.edu/owl/subject_specific_writing/writing_in_literature/literary_theory_and_schools_

of_criticism/critical_race_theory.html

Wiggins, Troy L., “Elves of Color, The Color of Elves” Afrofantasy.net,

afrofantasy.net/2014/08/22/elves-of-color-the-color-of-elves/, August 22, 2014

Strurtevant, Paul B., “Race: the Original Sin of the Fantasy Genre”, Publicmedievalist.com,

www.publicmedievalist.com/race-fantasy-genre/, December 5, 2017

Poor, Nathanial, “Digital Elves as a Racial Other in Video Games: Acknowledgment And

Avoidance”, sagepub.com, journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/1555412012454224, August

17, 2012

Tolkien, J. R.R. The Silmarillion. 2nd ed., Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2001.

Skyrim, Bethesda, 2011