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To repeat what others said:

R. Scott Bakker’s outstanding Second Apocalypse pentology has an amazing take on Noldorim/High Elves. Immortal, vastly superiour to humans in all aspects but numbers. Ruled the world thousands of years ago. Took the Silmarillion-like real battles against the Enemy eons past and defeated him for a terrible price. Erstwhile tutors to the fledgling Human civilization, but also their scourge.

Warning: you have to wait a fair while until you actually see some of them. (Imagine Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings, with a very gradual revelation of the Silmarillion written into that narrative.)

Brian Ruckley’s flawed Godless World trilogy has really cool Silvan/Wood Elves. Tribal, alien, heavily inspired by Native Americans. Remind my of the Wood Elves in Warhammer world.

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Bakker has a really twisted take on them in his Second Apocalypse series (makes sense, since the whole thing is part tribute, part brutalisation of Middle Earth

i'd argue that tolkien twisted, and bakker untwisted them.

I could be wrong of course and you're wider read than me, but I strongly suspect that despite the similarity between Struldbuggs and Non-Men, it'd be a fallacy to draw a line between them that goes through Tolkien's elves. Those were an adaptation of elves and fairies from Germanic and Romantic folklore and the idea of immortality already existed in some versions.

Pratchett like mentioned, his elves are great! No one ever said elves are nice. Elves are bad. (part of a great poem on elves / words / meaning)

Pratchett seems to be one of several authors mounting a campaign to take back the words 'elf' and 'fairy' from the Tolkienistic and Disneyfied connotations, respectively, modern culture has given them... there are strong elements of fairy folklore in Pratchett's elves (unsurprisingly, since he's partly riffing on Midsummer Night's Dream, though his elves are more directly evil than Shakespeare's). I suspect he's also partly influenced by Gaiman's earlier take on the subject, because of the similarities in the way both their versions use Glamour that I haven't really seen elsewhere, but I don't know enough about both of their sources to know where Gaiman took that from.

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strongly suspect that despite the similarity between Struldbuggs and Non-Men, it'd be a fallacy to draw a line between them that goes through Tolkien's elves. Those were an adaptation of elves and fairies from Germanic and Romantic folklore and the idea of immortality already existed in some versions

that's an extremely reasonable position. what i regard as tolkien's innovation (and could therefore be dead wrong) is the attribution of civilization to elves: mechanisms of state and civil society that do not arise out of a static fey otherland, but out of a politicized history, complete with specific material goal orientations. his elves are rational economic and geopolitical actors, rather than arbitrary, vaguely malefic, supernatural micronians.

RSB retains the civilized component but strips them of tolkien's elves' rationality and long memory as the price of immortality. however, instead of concomitantly stripping them of their civil rights and political power, as in swift, RSB's cunuroi retain all of it.

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I've always been fond of Warhammer Elves, and King's Tyrion & Teclis series does a pretty good job of showcasing them as the decadent, declining imperialists that they are. (and those are the *good* elves)

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what i regard as tolkien's innovation (and could therefore be dead wrong) is the attribution of civilization to elves: mechanisms of state and civil society that do not arise out of a static fey otherland, but out of a politicized history, complete with specific material goal orientations. his elves are rational economic and geopolitical actors, rather than arbitrary, vaguely malefic, supernatural micronians.

That's as neat a summation of what Tolkien did to the mythos as I've seen. I wonder how much of it was a deliberate decision and how much was a natural progression of the rigid linguistic and historical framework he was building. And looking at it, that seems to have become the defining distinction between the use of 'elf' and 'fairy/faery' in modern fantasy fiction - apart from Pratchett's use, 'elf' seems almost exclusively to apply to a civilisation rather than the otherworldly, often almost (and sometimes literally) elemental type.

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that distinction works well: the fey is a hazard of the (super)natural environment, afflicting livestock with disease, obstructing travelers, and so on, with no obvious political will of its own. tolkien's elves, by contrast, don't act like a blizzard or a flood, but to obtain valuable properties in land and chattels.

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That's as neat a summation of what Tolkien did to the mythos as I've seen. I wonder how much of it was a deliberate decision and how much was a natural progression of the rigid linguistic and historical framework he was building. And looking at it, that seems to have become the defining distinction between the use of 'elf' and 'fairy/faery' in modern fantasy fiction - apart from Pratchett's use, 'elf' seems almost exclusively to apply to a civilisation rather than the otherworldly, often almost (and sometimes literally) elemental type.

I think it was an inevitability given his source: at its most fundamental root, Tolkien's entire mythos was an attempt to explain the divergence of Sindarin Elvish (heavily influenced by Welsh) from Quenya Elvish (heavily influenced by Finnish). Thus he needed to tell the tale of an actual people, with leaders and goals; he needed to civilise the Elves, as Man had not yet arisen.

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Swedish has actually (thanks to Tolkien largely) acquired a linguistic difference between the two: "Alv/alver" are tolkien-ish immortal civilized beings while "älva/älvor" are fairies who like to dance around in the mists, cause diseases, and leave mysterious rings in the fields that you absolutely must not piss on.

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that distinction works well: the fey is a hazard of the (super)natural environment, afflicting livestock with disease, obstructing travelers, and so on, with no obvious political will of its own.

Interestingly, some writers do have fairies with internal politics - Jim Butcher's Dresden Files spring to mind - but they're still based on intrinsic natural/supernatural traits and their interaction with the human world is almost entirely non-political.

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Swedish has actually (thanks to Tolkien largely) acquired a linguistic difference between the two: "Alv/alver" are tolkien-ish immortal civilized beings while "älva/älvor" are fairies who like to dance around in the mists, cause diseases, and leave mysterious rings in the fields that you absolutely must not piss on.

German also has that to a degree, with "Elb" being a Tolkien-style elf and "Elf/e" the other sort. Though it's not consistent, Warhammer or D&D elves are written the second way in German translations despite being obviously Tolkien-inspired.

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