On Elven Memory

It is widely believed that Elves remember everything, a belief encouraged by the unnerving frequency with which an Elf will correct a Human’s account of an event occurring two centuries before the Human’s birth. The obvious conclusion is that Elven memory is perfect. The correct conclusion is that an Elf who personally attended the coronation is generally a better source than a historian whose evidence consists of three contradictory letters and a damaged painting.

Elven memory is excellent in certain respects, but it remains memory. Details fade and events become simplified. Later knowledge contaminates earlier recollection, and embarrassing incidents are forgotten with a reliability suggesting that this last faculty is shared universally among the Principal Peoples.

I once interviewed an Elf who had witnessed the signing of the Treaty of Serevin approximately four hundred years earlier. He recalled the weather, the arrangement of the hall, the names of several minor delegates, and the precise wording of a joke made by an ambassador during dinner. He could not remember whether the treaty itself had been signed before or after luncheon. Three Human historians subsequently cited his account as proof that the signing occurred in the morning, which is why witnesses are evidence rather than scripture.