On the Elves and the Consequences of a Long Life

The most troublesome circumstance in the study of Elven physiology is the readiness with which a thousand years of life is accepted as an explanation of everything else. An Elf is patient because he has centuries before him; obstinate because he has centuries behind him; melancholy because he remembers so much; frivolous because he has forgotten the proper use of memory. Such accounts possess the convenience of surviving every possible observation; I propose to surrender that convenience. Longevity supplies an Elf with opportunities unavailable to a Human or Gremlin, and greatly exceeding even those of a Dwarf or an Aesir. Whether he employs them profitably requires a separate enquiry, preferably conducted before he is appointed to a committee.

The Elven frame presents a useful warning against judging strength by appearance alone. Its slender proportions and comparatively light bones impose real limits upon the force it can exert and the burdens it can safely bear. A railway contractor who assigns identical loads to Elven and Dwarven porters has confused uniformity with fairness, an error which becomes expensive when the injured men cease working. Elven connective tissues, however, withstand repeated extension remarkably well, and their economy of movement favours prolonged exertion. On the western survey I initially attributed our Elven assistants’ superior walking performance to familiarity with the country. I therefore arranged a second trial upon a measured road, with loads proportioned to bodily weight. They retained their advantage. I had devised a respectable objection, and they had disposed of it by walking; the result deserved publication, though it afforded me little personal satisfaction. Neither trial showed any corresponding advantage in lifting, sprinting or working hungry.

Their slow ageing demands greater care still. An adult Elf may alter so little during a Human observer’s career that the observer is tempted to declare him unalterable. Successive portraits and family measurements correct this impression, although portraits introduce the additional difficulty that wealthy sitters commonly purchase some relief from accuracy. Elven tissues do change with age. The change proceeds slowly, and its rate varies between individuals. Their repair of injured tissue offers a related, more accessible subject: wounds close at approximately the Human pace, yet the reconstructed parts commonly reproduce their former arrangement with unusual fidelity. I have examined Elven scars whose underlying tendons retained movement that a comparable Human injury would probably have impaired. Scars nevertheless remain, and poor treatment can leave permanent disability. Whether the processes responsible for this fidelity also account for their longevity is unknown; the resemblance between two desirable results is insufficient evidence that one mechanism produces both.

I once had occasion to insist upon this distinction in a telegraph works, where an Elven wire-drawer had suffered a deep wound across the palm. The manager proposed returning her to light duties after three days, explaining that “their flesh knows its way back”. I asked whether the wages would also know their way into her pocket during the resulting incapacity. He found the question extraneous; I found his proposed experiment intolerable. With her consent, I examined the hand alongside the works surgeon and supported his demand for further rest. The eventual recovery was excellent, but its excellence depended upon the wound being allowed to heal. Elves also contract disease, sometimes gravely. A long-lived patient has more years in which to encounter infection, and longevity provides no warrant for relaxing drainage, ventilation or quarantine. Municipal authorities have occasionally required this point to be explained at a length which reflects poorly upon municipal authorities.

The small number of Elven births gives these individual lives a particular collective importance. At two or three births annually per thousand inhabitants, an Elven community replaces sudden losses very slowly. Even Dwarven and Aesir birth rates allow a more rapid response; Human families and Gremlin clutches present demographic conditions sufficiently different to make borrowed administrative rules hazardous. Yet birth figures alone cannot tell us how an Elven population will grow: we require deaths, movements across borders and reliable counts of those living outside ancestral territories. Since approximately half the Elves dwell within the wider societies of other peoples, a census confined to recognised Elven settlements can produce a magnificent demonstration of whatever its author wished to prove. I have rejected several such demonstrations, including one bearing an introduction by a colleague whose eminence would have been better served by reading the tables.

Long life also helps to preserve knowledge, though less perfectly than enthusiasts suppose. An Elven machinist may remember the introduction of an engine which his Human apprentices encounter as an antiquated specimen. His testimony can preserve details omitted from drawings; it can equally preserve an early misunderstanding through several generations of improved machinery. Elven memory fades, compresses and rearranges experience in the ordinary fashion, despite its generally excellent capacity. In examining an old river diversion, I disputed an Elven landholder’s confident recollection of the former channel. He had seen it himself, which he considered decisive. Excavation supported the contemporary survey against him. To his credit, he assisted with the digging and acknowledged the result. Several younger scholars who cite his testimony have proved less willing to amend their accounts than the witness himself.

There is consequently no sound general description of Elven character that can be deduced from the Elven skeleton or span of life. Traditional Elven regard for plant life has substantial consequences for agriculture and construction under Tribal Law, but an Elf employed in a royal foundry cannot be assigned those convictions merely by inspection of his ears. Nor does the resemblance between Elves and Drau establish a shared ancestry; the necessary evidence remains wanting. What we can describe with confidence is a body built for endurance, whose injuries often repair with exceptional fidelity, in a people whose generations succeed one another so slowly that a single Elf may live with the consequences of his decisions for centuries. I have found that Elves themselves become considerably more interesting once one ceases requiring every one of them to explain a millennium.