High Elves 8e Army Book said:
THE SHADOWLANDS
The Shadowlands are a dark and desolate region, but were once part of a mighty Elven kingdom called Nagarythe.... Nagarythe was destroyed and many of its people fled with their evil master to the cold lands of the New World. They became the Dark Elves - evil kin to the High Elves of Ulthuan. Today, what little remains of the once-proud Kingdom of Nagarythe is treated with fear and disgust. It is uninhabited but for wanderers and beasts.
'Uninhabited (except for the nomadic population that has been there for thousands of years)' is the sort of statement that's really easy to skim over, but really deserves a more critical look.
There was a tooltip in some long-ago Paradox game (EU2 or 3, if I had to guess) that said 'there can be no peace between nomad and settler!', and that always runs through my head when the topic comes up. There is an ancient tension between those two modes of living, older than history, and surprisingly often it rears out of the ancient mire of prejudice that predates judicium. Racism against Native Americans, gripes about migrant workers, prejudice against all kinds of 'travelers', from Romani to the 'van life' subculture, even anti-Ukrainian sentiment, it crops up over and over and in all sorts of places. One big historical motivator for it, I personally believe, is simple: the quality of life of the average nomad was higher than that of the average settled person until some point in the 1900s. Sour grapes.
Would Elves be immune to this prejudice? To that I say lol, and furthermore, lmao. Ellyrion and the Ellyrians are described as 'wild', despite being a very clearly meticulously engineered magical landscape designed to make navigation impossible to outsiders. Chrace gets a similar treatment, with the incredibly skilled scouts they produce being overlooked as a signature unit in favour of the White Lions, which play more to the 'warrior peoples' trope that allows the Chracian way of life to be put in a neat little box. The Avelornians are treated
weirdly, described as somehow too energetic and too complacent at the same time, as if they're trying to dance around criticizing the homeland of the Everqueen by throwing out a bunch of conflicting positives that allow them to write them all off as on Elf Drugs. There is that same tension between the settled agricultural population and the nomadic hunter-gatherer or pastoralist populations, a dismissal of anyone not living in a city or on a farm.
We know very little about what Nagarythe was like before the Sundering, but from the maps, the east was mostly hills and the west mostly forests. I think that when the cities were ripped out of the mainland and left for Naggaroth, the remaining people were ones that did not require much adaptation to begin living as nomads. I suspect that they'd live the way they do even if they didn't have the specter of Malekith looming overhead, and I think that's as much a part of the reason as why it's referred to as bleakly as it is as the actual effects of the Sundering. Oh,
those people. They're not like
us, are they? And besides, the part of Nagarythe's history where it had cities lasted for less than two millennia, while the part of it where they've lived as nomads is at over five. Reflexively looking down at Nagarythe's nomadic present for differing from the settled past is a very deep-rooted instinct, but one that should not go unquestioned.
