how about next time we let the elves be Jewish and the dwarves can be, I don’t know, Jamaican.
Dwarves => Japanese, all clan honor and axes folded in 1 million layers.
I keep telling you guys, they’re Texan oilmen. Take a look at Yosemite Sam sometime and give me one important way in which he differs from the average fantasy dwarf.
It’s amazing the way focus on multiculturalism over class has ruined people’s ability to read art.
Elves are upper class.
Dwarves are working class.
There are traits they have that are references to more ethnic-based cultures, but that’s because our fantasy of those cultures themselves are just projections about class. Ie, the elegant, graceful Easterners are a fantasy about their richness that got projected onto Elves, just as much as stereotypes about Wales and Scotland are based on their lower class relative to England.
Next, people will be like “Uh, vampires are European and zombies are African?”
At least with regard to the Tolkein legendarium (and other genre source texts insofar as they reflect their Tolkein influences), this schema does not work at all.
Dwarves in particular have all the characteristics of an endogamous ethnic minority. They are extremely clannish and xenophobic; their general attitude towards “normal” sorts of people is “we have no use for you;” they are famous for having secrets and customs (crafting-arts, language, magic, etc.) that are powerful but not available to outsiders; they are, importantly when it comes to class analysis, noteworthy primarily for being stupendously wealthy.
Not to mention their folkloric roots in Nibelung-type dwarves, who don’t resemble the “working class” even a little, or for that matter Tolkein’s explicit commentary that various aspects of his dwarf-lore were Judaism-inspired.
The argument makes a little more sense with regard to elves, but even so, they’re too insular and self-sufficient to work very well as stand-ins for the upper-class. They function way better as “Tolkein’s image of an idealized heroic society” than anything more allegorical.
Also, uh…
Next, people will be like “Uh, vampires are European and zombies are African?”
So, OK, not actually African as such. But vampires are creatures of European myth, and zombies are black-by-way-of-Haiti. Their origins certainly don’t reflect everything important to the way we use them now, but they can certainly still be made to matter.
Your favorite metaphors aren’t the only metaphors. Literature is wide.
I was not being that literal, though I understand the misinterpretation (given that I was being that literal with vampires and zombies.) Dwarves obviously also have secret hordes of mineral wealth, while elves are often portrayed as living off the land, etc.
But it’s that dwarves are less based on a _specific culture_ than a particular fantasy of a culture that we often project onto certain ethnic groups. And that is the lower-middle class, insular ethnic groups who often make up immigrant communities: Jews, the Scottish, Eastern Europeans. They have stereotypes of being obsessed with money, crude, hairy, drunkards, relegated to dark places, and have their obscure but sacred hierarchies. The many jokes in Pratchett about dwarves are very obvious as ethnic jokes - not about one specific ethnic group, but about the sort of groups most ethnic jokes were told about.
(The Texas oilmen are famous for affecting a working class attitude, in comparison to those effect Easterners from New Yahk City.)
And elves are the other sort of foreigners, the ones not dependent on us, so therefore scary for being superior to and isolated from us. This fits in with a lot of orientalist fantasy, which is why they make an upper-class projection: they are graceful, full of ancient wisdom, long-lived, and wary of how we will dirty up their place.
You can see it as a spectrum, with our image of ourselves as the normal, healthy non-stereotype in the middle. This is why they are projects, different extremes we see our “normal” culture can choose between.
Now this isn’t solely about economic wealth. Those immigrant communities can have some rather rich members, but it’s like saying a plumber earns more than a graduate research assistant. We still know what class each is usually a part of.
Your favorite metaphors aren’t the only metaphors. Literature is wide.
That line seems silly. It’s the multicultural focused people who are trying to find “what culture are the Elves based on?” I’m saying it’s impossible to reconcile all the stereotypes about Elves with just one specific culture, and that they are a diverse set of stories united by a generic framework. And that framework is… how we see the foreign Other who we fear sneers down at us (as compared the Dwarven other we sneer down at.) A class fantasy.
It’s a bit absurd to argue about the specific positions of people not involved in this discussion, but “I would like to see some Jewish elves” != “elves are only and forever a metaphor for $PARTICULAR_ETHNIC_GROUP.” You will of course find people who argue for that latter kind of thing, and they are of course very silly.
Your “generic framework” is still a pretty specific, limited thing. Tolkein elves != Pratchett elves != WoW elves != M:tG elves, and in each case the driving metaphor is pretty different. (Especially in the last case, where they’re tribal primitivists…)