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| AN ELVISH SOCIOLOGIST VISITS THE SUBURBS OF NEW JERSEY (originally published in Ossiriand Sociological Review) |
| In "Theories Relating to Human Aggression", published in the Mithlondic Journal of Elvish Ethnology (Finglas, Hethorel, Wingthel et al., 1972) Athelion Finglas put forth the view that human's fondness for aggression was nutritional in its basis, and notes the severe lack of nuts, berries and mushrooms in the typical human diet. Later, as stated in "Alternative Explanations of human demonological behaviors", by Estilion and Tauril (Elvish Critical Review, 1988) it was pointed out that there are some small groups of human who do eat traditional elvish foodstuffs, yet are hardly better than the typical backward, violent human. They tended to see these behaviors as genetic in nature, and pointed out the many deficiencies in humans' genetic structure (i.e., "ageing", "disease", and other oddities). However, we do know that humans are not biologically much different than we elves, as we know, and they share much of the same DNA (Hrathwen, Silearien, "Elvish and Human Biochemistry", 1993). Therefore, a purely genetic basis is dubious. I put forth the theory that the root causes of the yrch-type behavior we now see among humans is actually due to the peculiarities of the human culture, and not due to any innate tendencies. To test my hypothesis, I set out to find a typical community of humans, and chose a suburb in New Jersey, which shall remain nameless. I managed to secure a human-style dwelling, which took some getting used to, as there were no green things or moss inside: furthermore, it was coated with several layers of toxic substances; dried liqiud poison had apparently been sprayed onto the walls, and some sort of poisonous fibers had been attached onto the floor. It became apparent that living as a "human" would be more difficult than previously imagined. I managed to get rid of the poisonous substances (I did so at night, to avoid the attentions of the nieghbors) and was pleasantly surprised to find that under the squishy toxic.stuff, the floor was made of wood; this comforted me greatly. I then had to dispense with my daily robes, and buy some typical human vestments...I noticed that they tended to favor a blue type of leg covering, and bought a few of these, along with several shirts. The ears presented a bit of a problem, because human ears are typically ill-formed and small, so my exquisitely large, pointed ears would have attracted far too much attention. I neatly solved this problem, however, by wearing a hat, and keeping my long hair over my ears at all times. Now that I had dispensed with the preliminaries, I took to my work, namely, observing humans in their natural habitat, and trying to understand their peculiar behaviors in light of their natural sociological functions. The Human Social Structure Apparently, human society is very hierarchial, and centers around its members following a series of meaningless rituals and rules. Members who refuse to follow these rules are often severely punished in a brutal, barbaric manner. (I will not dwell on details here for fear of frightening the delicate Elvish sensibilities of the reader). As we have seen earlier, humans imprison and torture both animals and other humans; the sole difference seems to be that they do not eat the humans they imprison, but merely hold them captive for their own pleasure. Curiously, despite their reputation for bloodthirst, at least a few humans I spoke to seemed uneasy to talk about these things, as if they knew, on some level, that there is something wrong with such behavior (I will not conjecture on whether or not humans have a God-given conscience; I will leave that to the Theologists). One thing that struck me immediatly after living among humas for some time was the inordinate amount of potions they seem to have available to them. We elves have potions of course- for flying, invisibility, etc., useful things like that- but humans seem to have invented a huge array of potions that have no real purpose. These potions, which are supposed to bring health, fertility, popularity ("unpopularity" is a subject of great superstition among these folk), are often highly toxic and of dubious benefit. Despite this, every human is supposed to own many of these, in the hopes that the right combination will grant success and happiness. |
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| by T. Thalionwing |
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