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Rude Elvish Gesture With Meaning Akin To Our Real-World “The Finger”

In the Realms, the elven equivalent of “the finger” is to crook one middle finger in an inward (towards oneself) curve, while bringing that arm up across your body in an ascending diagonal. For added insolence, end the gesture by licking the tip of your crooked finger...languidly, while staring hard at your target.

Elven Funeral Rites

Rites vary widely (by elven subspecies, region, community, and family), but always include a prayer of remembrance uttered (often whispered) by the living. When many mourners are gathered, they often murmur responsive lines of this in unison, replying to the individual praying, to create what to many human ears sounds like a “humming chant.” Praying occurs as remains are being treated, as follows:

Wood elves in the Misty Forest “plant” (bury) bodies of their fallen beneath seedlings, or plant new seedlings above a burial. Esteemed and powerful are entombed within a living tree (opened and resealed by magic).

In Ardeepforest, elven corpses were “seeded” with particular mosses, which grow on the decaying flesh, then put on small canoe-like barges, taken to fast-flowing streams and rivers that empty into the Sea of Swords, set alight by night, and sent to a “grave both fiery and watery.”

In Evermeet, particular sorts of trees (notably the curving, “grotesquely-boughed” antharimm) are wounded (cut open in vertical cuts as long as the corpse is tall) and the corpses bonded half-into the cuts with flaerarra, a secret-recipe mixture (of natural ingredients, “awakened” with a simple spell). This dark brown syrup causes the remains to be glued to the living innards of the tree, and the tree to grow with astonishing speed (feeding on—and therefore emptying out, into a husk—the remains to do so) to expand and cover over the corpse, and then “grow new bark” to heal itself.

Treetop Holy Communities

Treetop elven holy communities, these tend to be small, VERY “secret,” and found in such places as Shilmista (at the south end of the forest, just north of Riatavin); the southernmost point of the western half of the Gulthmere Forest (where it juts into a bight in the mountain range bordering it to the south); in the heart of the Reaching Woods (at about the midpoint of the east-of-the-River-Reaching portion, not far from the river itself); in the High Forest on the east bank of the river that runs from the Star Mounts east and south to join the Delimbiyr upriver of Loudwater, about a day’s travel (by experienced foresters) north from trees-edge; and deep in the heart of the Yuirwood, at about its east-west midpoint. There are many others, but they are smaller or not in the part of Faerûn most covered in print so far.

Wood Elf Agriculture

There are at least three foodstuffs that wood elves could grow in big community gardens: the meaty, sustaining mushrooms known as thraevyn; nuts; and berries.

Unlike, say, modern real-world “button” or “stuffer” mushrooms, which have almost no nutritional value, thraevyn are both filling and a starchy staple like squash. They grow on blueleaf and duskwood trees, look like nut-brown hemispheres with lime-green front edges, and grow sticking out horizontally from the bark of trees in small clusters (“shelf fungus”) of six or seven thraeves each (a given tree can have as many as six clusters, though three or four are more common). They can be eaten raw (not nice, but safe), cooked (can be very pleasant), or cooked and dried (sustaining trail food with an agreeable nutty flavour). The nice thing about thraevyn is that it grows rapidly, given sufficient moisture, can be watered directly to increase growth, and if broken off (harvested), the “rime-root” that remains behind regrows even faster. If regularly harvested (a thraeve can grow to useful size in a tenday, except in the coldest months), thraevyn don’t degrade the tree they’re growing on all that much.

Elves ‘seed’ thraevyn to new trees by breaking off a growing thraeve, taking it to a new tree, cutting a small notch through the outer bark, thrusting the thraeve into it, and leaving the tree alone for a growing season; in rare cases the thraeve will wither and die, not ‘infesting’ the tree, but usually the tree will have sprouted at least one thraevyn cluster by the next year. If harvested lightly, this cluster will usually spawn more on the same tree.

The nuts most used by wood elves grow on their own trees, stunted dwarf shade-loving trees that grow in the gloom under taller trees in the deep forest, and look almost like huge brown thorny vines. These are alaphrin trees, and they grow in segments, with a trio of long thorns with nuts between them at every joint. The oval green nuts can be plucked or twisted off and eaten, though they cause gastric distress in the green state to all but elves, halflings, woodland fey, and gnomes. If roasted, they will split into four “knobbly, like walnuts” quarters, that taste very much like real-world pecans (the fruit of a particular sort of hickory, commercially grown these days across the southern USA and Mexico). Alaph- nuts or alaphs, when roasted, keep for almost a decade, are a plentiful trail food for wood elves, and a wood elf can live on handfuls of them augmented by occasional berries.

Many, many sorts of berries grow wild in the High Forest; a few are toxic, but most are edible. Of the edibles, a handful have medicinal uses, a larger handful are best consumed when made into jams, jellies, and sauces (i.e. boiled with other things), and the majority can be picked and eaten raw. But the only sort that would be farmed are soft-thorn, so-called because the shade-loving creeping vines they grow on have soft, bendable “thorns” (spikes that look like thorns, but harm no one and nothing). Soft-thorn bushes that get sufficient moisture (i.e. growing in wet places, notably the banks of springs and streams) can be covered with fist-sized clusters of soft-thorn berries, which look like (blue, oval) Concord grapes, and taste like gooseberries (tart). If picked, the vines grow new berries with astonishing speed (two days is typical for “entirely replacing” a cluster), and this plus the food value is why soft-thorns are farmed. Elves spread the vines by taking cuttings, rooting them in water in the woods, and “training” them as they grow to drape over branches, fallen deadwood, rocks, etc. to ‘trail’ where they want them to grow; a good, developed patch will typically look like a tunnel of trained, growing saplings of other tree varieties, with soft-thorn vines draped all over the reachable inside and outside slopes.

Star Elves

Star elves are still few and reclusive in the Sword Coast lands in the 1490s DR; most dwell far to the east, in the Yuirwood (Aglarond). Those who live in the Sword Coast lands tend to keep to forests (notably The High Forest, but also in the southern most Moonwood [southernmost Glimmerwood], the Misty Forest, and Westwood), and to have willing contact with sun elves, wood elves, wild/green elves, moon elves and half elves; they detest everything about crowded cities (especially the smells) and mistrust humans (whom they see as too swift to violence in all disputes; “you never know when a human will turn on you, blade in hand”). Many humans may mistake a star elf for a moon elf at a chance meeting, and there are star elves who travel, explore, and adventure in the Sword Coast North (not so much in Amn, Tethyr, Calimshan, and other heavily populated areas farther south). Among these are the star elf merchant families of Evemdrel and Saeyil, and the noble family House Dahlmkess (who believe assimilation in a “sentient civilization” of all “civilized” races, against “the Rapacious Ones” [orcs and other goblinkin such as goblins and hobgoblins, illithids, beholders, and Lolth-worshipping drow] is inevitable, and is better managed—so star elves can end up controlling or influencing the “unfortunate” belligerent tendencies of humans—than resisted). In this, Dahlmkess differs from most other star elf nobility, notably the conservative houses of Lalaundura and Rannekho.

Powerful star elf wizards include Varlroke, a gruff and prickly loner (male, old, mysterious); Avaeya Fonril, a kindly advisor and tutor to many (female, charismatic, seen as wise and caring); the star elf adventurers Shasslammaera “Tash” Relouvrin (fiery-tempered, acrobatic, agile, and worldly-wise, usually having back-up plans ready in case of treachery) and Telharl Velvoor (gleeful, whimsical, young, sword-tongued, and fun-loving). Among (all) elves in the region, as much about these individuals is commonly known as I’ve given here (with Tash being the best known), but in, say, human cities and among human sages, only Varlroke has been heard of.

Some star elves of the High Forest are planning a military conquest of The Reaching Woods, to make it a new home and exterminate or drive out the gnolls. Others think this is an unwise, overbold idea that will inevitably give star elves too high a public profile.