On Traditional Elven Agriculture, Which Is Not Agriculture

Several generations of Human ethnographers have described traditional Elven communities as “primitive agricultural societies,” a phrase which manages to be inaccurate in three separate ways. They are not primitive. Their social structures are considerably more sophisticated than early observers understood, and in the conventional sense they do not practice agriculture at all.

Traditional Elven belief assigns moral significance to plant life comparable to that afforded sentient animals by most other peoples. A tree is not merely timber awaiting an axe, nor a field an empty space awaiting cultivation. The deliberate destruction of healthy vegetation may be regarded with something approaching the moral seriousness with which a Human community would regard the slaughter of livestock, or, in stricter traditions, considerably more.

This created predictable difficulties when neighbouring peoples wished to clear forests, establish mines, build roads, or perform that most sacred rite of modern civilisation: constructing a railway through somewhere somebody else was already living. The resulting conflicts are often summarised as wars between “nature-loving Elves” and industrial states, which is sentimental nonsense. They were disputes over land, sovereignty, resources, religion, and competing definitions of what constituted murder, and those distinctions matter.

Modern Elves complicate the matter further. Roughly half now live almost entirely within the cultures of other races, working in factories, universities, ministries, armies, and commercial houses with little connection to traditional Elven life. Nothing irritates the traditionalists more than an integrated Elf calmly purchasing a mahogany desk, and nothing irritates the integrated Elf more than being asked to explain himself to Humans who have just purchased two.