An Indepth essay on Night Elf politics by Barlowe of the Earthen Ring
Itâs hard to tell, but the broad approach of the Night Elven authorities seems to be that they donât meddle in very many thingsâŚbut when they do, they do it with an iron fist.
I had a long discussion about this on another forum once but it seems to be inaccessible, so Iâm going to see about getting hold of it. In the meantimeâŚ
The Sisters of Elune are described on Wowpedia - citing an official Blizzard encyclopedia now seemingly also inaccessible - as âthe major active night elf political factionâ, fulfilling âthe role of magistrates, officials and the like for the night elf government.â Their highest members are âprivyt to the governmentâs most major secrets.â The Night Elven government is basically a theocracy: the Temple is in charge, with the priestesses representing Eluneâs will on earth and the Sentinels as the Templeâs military wing enforcing Her dictates. The Cenarion Circle is an alternative centre of power, but not one likely to offer any kind of political opposition or strife when led by Malfurion, effectively married to the Templeâs head. Certainly the druids are not supposed to mess with politics and government. Things seem a little different with Staghlem there, just as the situation now is generally more complicated than before the war. There are also many semi-independent forest creatures, Ancients, Dryads, Grovekeepers, etc, who presumably operate their own community power structures distinct from the Temple but loyal to it as long as it protects the sacred forests of which I would assume mainstream night elves to consider themselves the divinely-appointed stewards.
If you check out the wowpedia page on âNight Elfâ, most of which is ripped from lore books, youâll find that âvirtually all remaining kaldorei consider it their sworn duty to maintain the safety and balance of the natural world.â This idea of a universal duty does not really sit well with the idea of a forgiving authority; neither does their description as âa strict but just and sometimes even compassionate people.â Compassion and mercy exists, but within rigidly-defined boundaries that I suspect are made up of explicit laws and implicit social taboos in equal measure. Remember especially that their entire social organisation is effectively a response to one of the worst wars Azeroth has ever seen - and a response to the form of government that allowed that war to happen. That means they are a revolutionary state (they did after all purge the mages), and revolutionary states are not known for their laxity.
Towns and villages seem to be ruled by councils of their elders, maybe elected semi-democratically, who are left to draw up and enforce their own local mores as long as they donât transgress against the Temple. I tend to go out on a limb and imagine that many other forms of mini-society are possible as long as they donât mess. So, for example, my character in times past was part of an all-male scholar cult venerating Aviana (messenger-goddess of knowledge) as well as paying respect to Elune, tending to barrows full of ancient texts. In my own personal and mostly private conception of Kaldorei lore, there were a few such cults, who were allowed to exist as long as the Temple was assured that their primary loyalty would be to Eluneâs order. Technically the night elves are polytheistic and worship the Ancients and various demigods too, but Iâm pretty sure they consider Elune to be the âruler of the godsâ as it were, so you may well have a situation where little devotional cults are allowed, but remain subordinate to the state cult, i.e. the cult of Elune.
So in short a weird mixture of anarchism and authoritarianism - anarchism within certain bounds, swift and merciless state action to maintain them. Maive offers a hint as to just how âswift and mercilessâ it would be. Until recently these bounds unquestionably excluded use of the arcane (at least among natives), but Iâm not sure what the situation is now. It may be like Death Knights in Stormwind - itâs allowed on the condition that itâs accountable to a particular group/faction, i.e. the exile magesâ court. The bounds still very strongly exclude all fel, demonic and shadow magic, and may also forbid unsupervised or large-scale employment of technology.
Similarly, the class system is both simple and strange to us. Before the Sundering, the Highborne were an incredibly hierarchical society; I think of it like an ornate bauble of a government enforcing rigid and fine distinctions between a thousand classes of nobility. The Sisters of Elune (i.e. the Temple - I reckon Night Elves would say âThe Templeâ in the same way that Americans say âWashingtonâ or âThe White Houseâ) were one of the few merit-based organisations. Even the army of the old regime was class-based. Lore says the Temple were the ones who reorganised the army and who were the main organisation taking charge immediately after the apocalypse. So class doesnât exist as such. The big distinction is: are you a civilian, or are you a Priestess/Sentinel? If youâre the former, who cares? And if youâre the latter, you have your own structures of rank. Of course in such a long-lasting and static society there might be quite ossified ideas about what one does with oneâs life, producing many fine gradations that arenât quite in a hierarchy - town elves, councillors, scribes, craftsmen, wanderers, hunters, religious cultists, etc⌠so maybe class is just like the organisation of society generally: pluralistic but dominated by a unitary distinction.
All of this fits very well with the loreâs claim that Kaldorei are âcontradictoryâ creatures - âboth highly spiritual and pragmatic, an often sophisticated paradox.â The parodox here is how a strict, powerful state maintains a pluralistic society. Of course, maybe itâs not that much of a paradox after all: a society that is so long-lasting, where old people stick around for so long, and where the same faces are seen for hundreds of years, is going nowhere fast, and will generate extremely strong social taboos that may actually regulate peopleâs individual behaviour as strongly and as harshly (with de facto punishments like rumour and ostracisation) as laws might otherwise. That said I donât think the majority of night elves around now are the same ones that were alive in the Sundering. I have my doubts about the limits of any mind to cope with proper immortality, and I think it is indicated in lore that many Kaldorei, after a few hundred or a couple thousand years, wander off and just kind of disappear. Maybe they follow a sort of thousand-year curve from youthful vigour through responsible adulthood to reclusive old age to wild wandering to eventual disappearance. Maybe ritual suicide is a common thing, but maybe itâs taboo to let anyone see it happen, so everyone just âdisappearsâ. And of course some do genuinely stick around for ten thousand years. It probably depends on the individual. I deliberately avoided the problem by playing quite a young night elf - only a few hundred years old and very sheltered.
In any case, since the Kaldorei are also described as âhono[u]rable to a faultâ, I think this paradox combines with an OOC lore paradox to give us a decent conception of what night elven âhonourâ means . The OOC paradox is: how is it that the Night Elves have maintained a 10,000 year empire that is supposedly utterly without political strife, when no possible conception of intelligent creatures and their behaviour allows for that long without any arguments? And anyway, how would anything be interesting without arguments and conflicts? Maybe the answer is that night elven honour is about drawing a distinction between talk and action, or rather between minor and major action.
You can talk all you want, disagree with someone, spit on the ground before them. But when it comes down to it, when youâre threatened, you have your duty and you do it. Night Elves may argue, but theyâll drop the argument in a second to fight Orcs. And it may be a pluralistic society, but when the enemy appears on the horizon, everyone falls into place, ready to fight and die. Barlowe, with his decidedly un-kaldorei pseudonym, would prefer to think of himself as having entirely abandoned the traditions of his people. But his analytical brain manages to be willfully blind to the fact that he advocates exactly this kind of behaviour. As a doctor, he treats his patients even though he thinks most of them would be better off dead. And his frequent criticism, from a Republican perspective, of Royalist âhonourâ - that itâs about allowing your stupid emotions and stupid pride to pollute your ethical behaviour, that you so often choose not to help someone because they offend you - is also in fact a disguised criticism from a Kaldorei perspective of human behaviour in general. Honour among elves: you do what you like with your life, but when duty calls you to protect the forest, thatâs your goshdarn job; you say what you like to your friends, but when the war begins you stand to attention.
Of course, thereâs one big thing weâve forgotten: gender. In WoW, Blizzard made it so that females and males were all equal because they did not want the controversy of having an in-game race that was actually sexist. But, wanting to have their cake and eat it, their lore is full of statements that gender was overwhelmingly divided before the Third War. Any player characters now will be dealing with the legacy of that divide, whether or not theyâve got over it.
During the Long Vigil, the Kaldorei were a matriarchy. That means that all the apparatus of political power was in the hands of females, which means that a lot of attendant ideology will have grown up around the divide. Since men had some of their own power structures, it wonât exactly be the same as how women have been treated in our own history: you should think in terms of a âdivideâ, equal and equally bitter on both sides, than exactly oppression. Nevertheless, men were locked out of the highest levels of political participation (though they were probably able to be village elders or serve on similar councils) and that will have had an effect. They had their own structures.
If youâve already read the link above youâll have seen that I imagine cults to have been one of these âoutletsâ for male participation. It seems to me ludicrous to propose that every male was a druid, though a big proportion of them might have been. Men must also have been threaded through the ordinary lives of some communities, but, depending on the place, might have had their little corners: imagine a village where most of the population are women but where sometimes young women go out to court the all-male charcoal burners on the edge of the nearby forest, or the all-male fishermen who live by the river. And of course, there were wanderers: transient populations travelling the limits of the empire, just passing through.
What myths would this create? Well, as Nhani (a night elf RPer on my own realm) argued in the link I have failed to find and intended to summarise but have in fact spent a good couple of hours building upon in full that females would have a broad belief in menâs unsuitability for government. This was supported by the vanished encyclopediaâs reference to âa common belief that the deepest mysteries of Elune can only be comprehended by womenâ, which I think gives broad assent to the idea that gender norms and gender myths are incredibly important to Kaldorei culture. Nhani reasoned that females might see government as their own business, because theyâre stable, compassionate, social, communal, responsible creatures who stick things out and care for territory like a mother bear. They might equally consider males to be inadequate for ruling because theyâre savage and volatile, propelled by instincts, by their anger and sexual desire. Of course, my feminist convictions demand I claim that these attitudes probably came about from each sexâs place in the structure of government (i.e. women are seen as good for government because they ARE the ones in government, and government always justifies itself), rather than the other way round. Imagine the Sentinels going to war assisted by a company of all-male mercenaries; imagine a matriarchâs attitude to these soldiers (âsavage things, but good as a weaponâ). Males ruined the empire before because of their petty striving and their starry-eyed slavery to Azshara; tussling with each other for her affections, their drives towards sex and death collaborated in their destruction. Females, on the other hand, have created an order that still stands after ten millennia.
Male attitudes to females might conversely owe much to the duality between the two most prominent female divinities availabl: Elune and Aviana, the mother and the harpy. Of course, Avianaâs a pretty benevolent diety, but for thousands of years her harpies have raged out of control. For the male with strong sexist beliefs, females might represent solace and care, peace and stability, but also grasping possession, the strictures of government, winding you in rules, trying to enfold you in her wings. These opposites combine in the figure of Azshara, the beautiful, smiling head of government who dispenses her affections and favours in accordance to vicious power politics. Really misogynist night elves with no first-hand experience of the old regime might well talk in private about major continuities between it and the new one. Naturally I donât mean to overstate the case: there are probably plenty of males who are okay with women in government. Either way, after thinking about these kind of attitudes in the night elves, I realised they were once again on display in my character, even though heâs an ostensible humanelf. ADULT CONTENT APPROACHING While I have never bothered to fully imagine his sex life, being unsure whether Iâd prefer it to be filthy and active or rare and frustrated, I can see him seeking comfort in the bed of a particular favoured harlot for a few months before deciding that he has to âkickâ the âaddictionâ, never seeing her again, and eventually falling off the wagon into a different pair of arms. Nobody escapes the legacy of 10,000 years of gender separation.
What would that separation have meant in practical terms? For a start the sexes may have wished to stick to themselves. Literacy might be more common among females than males, because the females operated the government and thus had to run its bureaucracy and courts (although in such a long-lived society maybe everyone learns to read and write at some point). It may mean female domination of the literary canon, though, at least post-Sundering. It may have created intricate courtship rituals if courtship between males and females is seen as âcrossing a divideâ. It may also have resulted in a form of sexual conservatism as regards role-swapping, even sexual role-swapping. I would expect the figures of men and women equipped with the genitalia of their opposites to crop up frequently in Kaldorei oral and written culture, either as objects of revulsion or of satire; likewise the image of the eunuch or castrato and the image of the masectomised amazon. It would likely mean that swear words and curses were specific to the genders: females might profanely refer to violatory, acid-dripping members, while men to thunderous, toothy cavities. Both genders would mix this language with invectives against the fel and the arcane.
Meanwhile, the Darnassian language (quite why itâs called âDarnassianâ is difficult to work out) probably has gendered terms for inanimate objects; as an example, imagine that âswordâ is gendered as male. This isnât implausible (language will be continuous with language before the Sundering) and would cause lots of jokes about females grasping swords etc etc. If your night elf doesnât speak very good Common, consider having him or her refer to individual objects as âheâ or âsheâ, perhaps even developing your own scheme to work out which ones would be gendered which way, taking into account the structures of gender before and after the Sundering, and at whic point the object would have been more common. An astrolabe could be female, because male mages consulted them and âviewedâ them (this wouldnât have changed ever since, there being few astrolabes in Kaldorei use); a bow on the other hand might be female, because it is a primary weapon of the Sentinels. Cue jokes from the males about females grasping bows and caressing their strings. You just canât win! Of course, in this society, maybe itâs the females that make jokes about the men trying to operate a bow, and failing miserably because it doesnât respond to them. Or being impaled by swords.