So I was reading the other day that Malfurion, Tyrande, Illidan, Shandris, Maeve & Jarod to name a few, are exceptionally old, with them all being alive since before the sundering.
It got me thinking, at what point did the night elves become immortal? I believe it was tied to the world tree, but prior to that, did night elves live for longer than the average mortal?
I think I read somewhere that Tyrande and Malfurion are like 15,000 years old and I’m sure that the sundering was around 10,000 years ago, meaning they were alive for roughly a few thousand years prior to this. At what point did they gain immortality - and prior to this - did elves have a heightened lifespan anyway.
If it weren’t for becoming immortal, how long would the average elf live? I know that blood elves were once night elves that settled near the sunwell, and that blood elves/high elves etc aren’t immortal but live a long time.
Night elves were always long lived. Chronicles describes them as being virtually immortal, which is to say they don’t visually age, but they weren’t immortal either.
After the Sundering, when the World Tree Nordrassil was created, Nozdormu blessed the tree and with it the Night Elves. That is how they became immortal.
(Alextrasza’s blessing also caused the night elves to be immune to illnesses etc.)
I may be wrong, but I believe the War of the Ancients trilogy is a more recent source and there they are young adults. That makes more sense since night elves only came to existence 15,000 years before current WoW.
This is vague and up to debate, but generally people stick to the idea of 3000 and a bit because Anasterian (the last High Elven king) was described as “old and tired” at after ruling nearly 3000 years.
Not exactly! They created the Sunwell, but they were already altered into (a slightly less healthy form) of the High Elves that we know now. They were altered from their “night elf status” by lack of magical nourishment from the Second Well of Eternity on Hyjal.
It’s fairly commonly accepted that his was a pretty major oversight by the author just to give him a personal stake against Malfurion (which was unnecessary becayse they could have picked whichever other instance Blood and Night elves were pitted against each other). His mother was even older than that, but I doubt this is what blizzard intended.
Not necessarily. But we don’t have any number on that. He could have been anywhere between 18 and hundreds of years. If it’s closer to the former it really doesn’t matter compared to 3000 years.
But that’s why I think 3-5K years is a decent margin.
Before Immortality Tyrande was counted as a young girl. She was ~1 k years old.
After immortality lost, Tyrande in the “Seeds of Faith” story thinks, that she cannot have a child, because she is 2 old.
So, immortality was working pretty strange. It was allowing to grow old, but was not allow to die for oldness.
