Excerpt from a Treatise on the Reproductive Compatibility of the Principal Races

It remains one of the more tiresome peculiarities of the popular imagination that the so-called half-blood should enjoy so vigorous an existence in tavern anecdote, penny romance, and provincial superstition whilst remaining altogether absent from the ledgers of nature. One hears, with monotonous regularity, of men possessing an Elvish grandsire, of Dwarves whose unusual stature is attributed to some Human indiscretion, and even of those supposed marvels who claim descent from three races at once. Such accounts possess precisely the evidentiary value one would expect of stories ordinarily recounted after the fourth glass.

This is not for want of opportunity. Matrimonial records extending back more than seven centuries contain no shortage of unions between the Principal Races. Human and Elf, Human and Dwarf, Elf and Dwarf, and combinations still more improbable have all been solemnised before magistrate, priest, clan-speaker, or whatever local authority circumstance demanded. Some such marriages endured for decades and are, by every surviving account, entirely genuine in affection and domestic arrangement. Yet not one has furnished scholarship with a verified, fertile offspring exhibiting inheritance from both parents. Not one. Considering the enthusiasm with which certain antiquarians have searched for precisely such a specimen, the absence is by now rather more eloquent than any amount of folklore.

Pregnancy itself is, regrettably, possible often enough to perpetuate the myth. Conception between races has been medically attested on numerous occasions, but successful parturition has not. The usual conclusion is miscarriage in the early months; less commonly, the pregnancy proceeds much further before ending in stillbirth. Physicians unfamiliar with the phenomenon have occasionally mistaken the latter cases for evidence that a viable hybrid was nearly achieved. This is an error born of optimism and insufficient anatomical training. External resemblance to an infant is not synonymous with viability, and the internal discrepancies recorded at examination are frequently profound.

There are, moreover, cases which polite scholarship has tended to omit from popular summaries. I see little merit in such delicacy. In a small but persistent fraction of cross-racial gestations, development does not simply fail; it proceeds in a fashion which cannot sensibly be called fetal at all: tissues forming without their expected organs, organs appearing without their expected arrangement, and in several notorious instances growth continuing after any ordinary pregnancy would have terminated. Such cases are exceptionally dangerous to the mother and have accounted for more than a few of the lurid legends surrounding “changeling births.” They disclose no hidden intermediate race. What they disclose is that nature, when presented with incompatible instructions, does not always have the good manners simply to stop.

Thus the matter may be stated without romance: the Principal Races may share cities, households, religions, fortunes, and beds, but they do not appear to share a reproductive lineage. Whatever common antiquity the mythologists insist upon assigning us, our present physiologies have diverged beyond the point at which heredity can be successfully combined. That poets and publicans continue to populate the world with half-Elves is their affair. Science is under no obligation to accommodate them.