a linguistic anthropology of fantasy folk

The nice thing about fantasy races is that they give character creation choices with a good degree of granularity and comprehensibility and are a neat way to pull folkloric material into your game. The bad thing about them is that they mean that race science (that is, the false belief that races as understood by society correspond to biologically distinct types of human beings) is true in your fantasy world.

Honestly, the bad part is bad enough to completely sink the goodness of the good part.

This is another in my ongoing struggle to formulate different fantasy folk in a way that isn't race science, but emphasizing the ways that real people saw themselves and others, particularly before the race-scientific idea became prominent in the modern era.

The problem with making things nuanced is that also makes them complicated; race science is conceptually pretty straightforward, which makes it very game-able. Trying to embed fantasy folk in a realistically nuanced web of relationships with each other also buries the conceptual clarity of a player looking at the list of options and saying, "I'm going to play an elf, that means I live in the woods and don't particularly like dwarfs." One runs the risk of overloading the player with world-building, particularly if one chooses to foreground linguistic groups which are among the more salient in-universe distinctions between peoples.

I'm far from a solution to this, but my current idea is to use somewhat-transparent names for languages (or groups of languages) wherever possible, and doing as little "hard" worldbuilding as possible to keep things relatively setting-neutral, while still keeping things complex enough to stop collapsing into the fail state of race science. It's a tall order, let's see how I do.

When making a character, you must choose a people for them to belong to (or at least stem from). A people is defined by a language, a way of life and an alignment, all of which affect how they see themselves and the world.

To make this your own, you only have to identify the peoples in your setting, their languages, ways of life and alignments. You may choose to give every people a distinct ethnonym; I'm not doing this so as not to overload a player with unfamiliar names. Instead, I'm going to organize peoples by language family, grouping setting languages together into four groups (middling, rhuno-buggish, sylvene and foreigner), the first three of which correspond to actual language families. Each family contains a number of peoples with different ways of life and dramatically different outlooks on the world and their place in it.

alignments and way of life

Characters have to come from peoples, and those peoples have ways of life. Where is home for your people, and how do they see themselves?

• The boats or carts you travel from place to place, plying your trades and peddling your wares. Alignment: civil.
• Grand cities rising from the plain or shore. Alignment: civil.
• Ancient holds cut into the deep earth. Alignment: goodwright.
• Rough warrens in the clefts of hillsides. Alignment: goodwright.
• Sound houses of timber or stone. Alignment: civil.
• Beneath the open sky. Alignment: free.
• Under canopy of thick woods. Alignment: moonfolk.

Alignment describes how a people sees themselves and how they divide up the rest of the world. Some see themselves as worldly and do not share the alignment of their folk. Even those who share an alignment do not necessarily like each other or agree about where one another fit into the order of things.

Civil

A civilized fellow knows that without the nameless gods of heaven to teach mortals the arts of civilization, we would be naked heathens all. Elders who still name the gods of the earth may know no better, but the barbarian who call on demons from behind the sky and beneath the sea. A heaven-fearing fellow knows a 'worldly' one for what they really are: a scoffer not to be trusted.

Civil folk all see the peoples of cities and houses as civil (though they may war with one another just the same), woods-dwellers as elders and nomads under the open sky as barbarians. However, they differ on a few points:

• Boat and cart-folk have a dread of the barbarians of the deep earth but call the herders and traders of the hillsides elders.
• City people consider the half-settled lives of boats and carts or hillsides to be fit only for scoffers, but consider deep earth-delvers old-fashioned elders.
• Dwellers in stout houses see travelers by boat and cart and miners in deep earth both as elders, and raiders from the hillsides as barbarians.

Free

Freedom is especially treasured by those who live under the open sky, viewing the labors of settled peoples as a kind of thralldom. They honor their beloved dead and all the spirits of the air and earth that touch their lives, chanting their names and deeds for later generations. The 'worldly' fellow who scorns these gods is a lonesome one, a tiny fellow adrift without ancestor to guide their feet or shelter them from the cruel winds.

Those of cities, the deep earth and houses are seen as thralls, while those who range in boats and carts, from the hillsides, or in the deep woods are seen as half-thralls. A free neck does not bend to the yoke of a thrall, and a warrior certainly does not fear one.

Goodwright

Goodwrights have learned the secrets of craft from the earth itself. They celebrate the good earth with the work of skilled hands. Though a goodwright will take spoil from war, they detest nothing as much as a thief. And what is a 'worldly' creature who pays no mind to their mother earth but a thief of her gifts?

All outsiders are seen with a measure of suspicion, but wrights of the deep earth and of the hillsides revile one another as thieves nearly without exception. Hillside wrights will treat with most other outsiders, but those of the deep earth consider the folk of boats and carts or the woods as thieves as bad as hated hill-wrights.

Moonfolk

The day is for the sun, the night for the stars, but the moon wanders through day and night in its turnings. Moonfolk chase the balance of the moon, honoring the earth in all its seasons. Moonfolk cultivate the woods around them with a gardener's care and live from the game and fruits thereof.

The enemies of the moonfolk are the nightfolk who harry them from the deep earth and open sky, while city and house dwellers are dayfolk and useful allies against the nightfolk when they can be roused to it. Those of boats and carts or hillsides or 'worldly' folks who think themselves wiser than everyone are smallfolk and not worth serious consideration.

Worldly

The worldly are not many, and they are called lonesome, scoffer, smallfolk, thief or worse where they go. Nevertheless, a worldly fellow hates to suffer fools and sees no reason to give up the better parts of life to distant gods. They can't abide the small-mindedness of boat and cart travelers, the cruelty and hypocrisy of the cities, the incurious provincialism of the deep earth, the baseless boasting of hillside folk, the credulous superstition of house holders and open sky nomads both or the sanctimonious mysticism of the woods.

orc-goblins

Last September I re-read The Lord of the Rings, and then over the last few weeks I've been reading it aloud with my spouse (who has never read it before). I have a lot of thoughts about it, in particular how the LotR is very different as written than the received idea that people have about what LotR is like (some, but not all of which can be blamed on the film adaptation). But right now I have the most thoughts about orcs and goblins.

Now, much has already been written on Tolkien's orcs, particularly on the question of the racism in their portrayal. I highly recommend this article on the ambiguities in Tolkien's own presentation of them.

It is actually quite important in LotR that 'orc' and 'goblin' are two words for the same thing. Orc, as I'm sure you are aware dear reader, is a word whose modern usage begins with Tolkien and has only the loosest literary antecedent. And yet it is clearly the preferred word in LotR for goblin. I think that this reflects the dual literary heritage of orc-goblins in Tolkien: on the one hand (as in the hobbit) they reflect Germanic traditions of cruel, underworld 'fairy' (the name being a bit of a misnomer due to their typical unloveliness) creatures, while on the other they descend directly from the foreign masses of heathen/infidel/pagan enemies in premodern heroic narrative.

Elements of both of these can be discerned:

• Like ugly fairies, there is a definitional enmity between orc-goblins and dwarves, elves, ents and hobbits, the other fairy-story inhabitants of Middle-Earth. They also here draw their hatred for celestial lights and growing things, qualities that the 'paynim hordes' of romance do not share.
• Like heathen foes, orc-goblins are both cowardly and cruel, but muster for war in great numbers under captains who command their loyalty, fear or both. They desire conquest of the mortal world in a way that fairy-creatures typically do not.

There are also significant differences in their portrayal:

• Although most epics and romances paint the infidel with a broad brush, individual infidels can sometimes be distinguished either as honorable foes or even turncoats who abandon their foul religion. This is not true of orc-goblins. No orcs, nor indeed any of their captains (with the possible exception of Saruman, who began as a friend and is shown mercy as a foe) are portrayed with positive characteristics. In battle of the fields of the Pelenor, only the evil Men in Sauron's armies muster once the Rohirrim break the lines of the ocs. There are no orc-knights.
• Folkloric goblins are often solitary fairies, living in terrifying lightless places and seeking the ill of those who come there. Gollum, who is not in fact an orc-goblin, comes the closest to this portrayal; orc-goblins, too, dwell in darkness, but only in strength of numbers.
• The reverence of the elves for celestial lights and growing things and the hatred of orc-goblins for the same is the closest this enmity comes to the a 'religious' character that defines the heathen as an enemy. However, there is no sense that orc-goblins could (as Gimli does) come to be elf-friends if they learned to love stars and trees. When Treebeard gives a stretch of the long Entish name for orc-goblins, he mixes descriptions of their physical horribleness with those of their wanton disregard for trees; both, to him, seem to reflect natural characteristics.

I don't have big conclusions here, but I will add. Both source traditions of orcs bristle with racist (or to the extent that they precede the notion of race, anti-foreign) elements. Using orc-goblins as foes rather than historical races or nationalities does not really avoid their identification with those nationalities, especially given 1) the explicit alliance of Eastern and Southern Men with the orcs against the Men from the West and 2) the way the physical descriptions of the orc-goblins align with racist caricature and stereotype. To the latter point, one may not use folkloric goblins as a shield, for European folkloric ugliness aligns quite well with not only racist portrayals of foreigners but also portrayals of internal 'enemies' (Jews and Roma, to name prominent ones).