I don’t like elves, dwarves, and halflings in Dungeons & Dragons.
We all know the way they look and feel in D&D was lifted out of Lord of the Rings.
The inclusion of elves, dwarves, hobbits, orcs, ents, and balrogs (don’t get me started on balrogs) into Dungeons & Dragons was a design mistake in my opinion.
My general principle is that a game designer’s job is to make the game fit the genre conventions, the dramatic questions, and aesthetics of the stories or real world thing they are trying to model. Inserting elements that don’t fit is at odds with that purpose.
It might make the game more appealing to a certain subset of the targeted audience to put things that don’t belong into the game but that doesn’t improve the play of the game itself.
Tolkien’s elves, dwarves, and hobbits don’t belong in Dungeons & Dragons.
They don’t fit genre conventions of the sword-and-sorcery genre that was the primary influence on the game.
Gary knew they didn’t fit but included them anyway.
The popularity of Professor Tolkien’s fantasy works did encourage me to develop my own. But while there are bits and pieces of his works reflected hazily in mine, I believe that his influence, as a whole, is quite minimal.
The Influence of J.R.R. Tolkien on the D&D and AD&D Games: Why Middle Earth is not part of the game world by Gary Gygax: Dragon #95, March 1985
Gary didn’t get Tolkien
In the article quotes above, Gary stated that he found the Lord of the Rings to be tedious, laden with excessive allegory, and many of it’s characters confusingly ineffective or two dimensional.
Gary preferred the blood and thunder of a good old barbarian yarn to LotR.
Fair enough. Tolkien isn’t for everyone.
Gary never engaged with Lord of the Rings at a deep level. Not that I expected him or anyone else to do so. It’s not a simple text and even scholars with a similar education as Tolkien sometimes struggle with the details.
Gary’s thoughts on Tolkien’s work are mostly about Gary’s tastes and were not thoughtful criticisms based on close reading and deep study.
Gary in effect, criticizes Lord of the Rings for not being Red Nails.
Lord of the Rings and Red Nails are different stories in different genres with different intentions. They are not going to give you the same experience, and they weren’t intended to.
The assumptions of Middle Earth don’t fit D&D.
The characters, plots, and themes that undergird Middle Earth are not the characters, plots, and themes of the sword-and-sorcery genre. Gary stated in various places that sword-and-sorcery was the primary influence on D&D. This is well known and not worth rehashing here.
Let’s take a look at a few of the major elements from S&S and LotR and see how the match up.
The characters in Lord of the Rings are the aristocrats of their world. The Bagginses were well off before Bilbo came back from The Lonely Mountain with bags of gold. Gandulf is an angel in disguise. Aragorn is the rightful king descended from heroes of the First Age. Legolas is the son of the king of Mirkwood. Gimle was first cousin of Balin, Lord of Moria and descended from Durin. Boromir was the son of the regent of Gondor.
Sword-and-sorcery characters with a few exceptions have a low pedigree. The Grey Mouser is an orphan. His companion Fafhrd is a barbarian though the son of important people in his village. Conan becomes king but he is not born one. Elric is the emperor but he is so unlike his people that he chooses a life of exile and eventually betrays them.
The Fellowship of the Ring are on an epic quest across Middle Earth. They are trying to save all the free people from enslavement and tyranny. They know that they will suffer and probably die. This isn’t appealing to them but they go anyway because they feel is their duty. If they fail, all of Middle Earth will suffer.
Sword-and-sorcery characters are seeking wealth, attractive sex partners, survival, or a laugh. For the most part, they are trying to get rich quick. If they fail, the consequences are only dire for themselves not everyone on the continent or even the neighborhood. In most cases, they chose to go on their adventures and for selfish purposes.
Lord of The Rings has many themes but the main one is about the corrupting influence of power, even when it is used for what the wielder perceives to be a good end.
Sword-and-sorcery tends to be cynical about and skeptical of social and civilizational norms. Get what you can through violence and guile because someone with “legitimate” authority will likely take it from you.
If you put Samwise Gamgee in the Hyborian Age, he wouldn’t last long. At best, he’d end up as a slave trimming the hedges in some Nemedian king’s garden. Conan might fit in with the Rohirrim for a while, until he got drunk and killed another warrior in Théoden’s hall and had to ride for his life.
Gary understood his borrowing was superficial
The seeming parallels and inspirations are actually the results of a studied effort to capitalize on the then-current “craze” for Tolkien’s literature. Frankly, to attract those readers- and often at the urging of persons who were playing prototypical forms of D&D games – I used certain names of attributes in a superficial manner, merely to get their attention! I knew full well that the façade would be dispelled by the actualities of play.
In other words, Gary borrowed from Tolkien so he could sell more copies of D&D.
The inclusion of hobbits, elves, dwarves, ents, orcs and the rest was a money decision.
In my experience, when a game designer makes a choice about what to put in their game based primarily on what is going to entice people from outside of the main target audience to buy the game, it produces a contradiction. There are exceptions but in general it’s better just to leave it out what doesn’t fit.
Conclusion
Gary lifted the skin of Tolkien’s work, which he didn’t like and didn’t understand. He draped it over some game mechanisms that he felt was more in line with his intended human-centric game world inspired by the military history of Europe and the swashbuckling stories of the pulps.
Borrowing from Tolkien certainly sold more copies of D&D but I don’t think it works and has caused a lot of conflicts due to Gary’s lack of understanding and poor implementation.
The primary reason why I don’t like elves, dwarves, and halflings in Dungeons & Dragons is that they come from a realm alien to the primary source material for the game. Their inclusion was mostly about money and not making the game better.
Elves, dwarves, and halflings never really fit and had to be shoehorned in with level limits, name changes, and other modifications to keep both the rules lawyers and IP lawyers at bay.
I understand why Gary included them, but I don’t like them. I don’t include them and most of the other Tolkienisms he borrowed in my campaigns.
Grumpy Wizard 
The only D&D that may be sword-and-sorcery genre-specific is the original. Even then, Arneson’s Blackmoor pulled from science fiction now and then. And certain monsters were lifted from fairy tales, folklore, and mythology. Very quickly, D&D became a gallimaufry of fantastic elements pulled from any source that struck any given writer’s fancy.
For me, that’s part of the charm of D&D – seeing how weird things are going to interact when disparate elements from different sources interact. And, over time, this is what gave D&D its distinct feel. I’m not sure I’d feel as fond and nostalgic for vintage D&D had it kept Emerson’s “foolish consistency” as its prime focus.
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The platitude that consistency is not desirable depends very much on the context in which Emerson was using it. He was talking about areas of life, such as science, politics, that when new knowledge or thought is revealed, remaining consistent to ones old opinions can be damaging. This is different.
Let’s flip the context. Let’s play Middle Earth Roleplaying and make the Battle of Five Armies into the Battle of Six Armies!
From orbit, the Klingons are watching the battle and think it would be great fun to transport down to the surface and join in the fight. They’ve recently killed a Jedi knight and reverse engineered his light saber. The Klingons gleefully blast eagles from the sky with disruptors and cut dwarves clad in plate armor in half. The battle field reeks of the burned flesh of men, goblins, elves, dwarves, wargs, and eagles alike. The scene ends as the Klingons drink dwarf ale from the skulls of elves aboard their bird of prey. Might be a hoot as a one off convention game but I don’t think it would make anyone who wanted to play a Middle Earth game very happy as it would not produce the experience of being in Middle Earth, doing Middle Earth adventures, with Middle Earth characters.
Context matters. Tolkien’s elves, dwarves, and hobbits have to be beaten and hammered to fit into the context of a sword-and-sorcery like adventure world.
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Agree 100% with Marty here. Gary may have borrowed from Tolkien, Vance, Moorcock and others, but D&D developed its own unique flavor by mixing together all these elements into something new and greater than its parts. Part of the enduring popularity of D&D is that by having such a broad base of influences makes the system flexible for telling sword & sorcery, high fantasy, and even sci-fi stories. The game is stronger and more appealing for it.
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“D&D developed its own unique flavor by mixing together all these elements into something new and greater than its parts”
I agree that D&D created a blend of these things to create its own new sub-genre of fantasy.
Greater than its parts? I can’t agree with that at all. The majority D&D products from about 1983 onward have little appeal to me. The few I like, went away from the high fantasy melange D&D had become. Dark Sun being the best example.
I don’t think flexibility of the system has anything to do with D&D’s success. You can play any kind of fantasy you want with West End Games D6 system, BRP, Savage Worlds, GURPS. I think I could make a good case that it is less flexible than what you can do with BRP or D6 system in particular. If flexibility is the major selling point, why wouldn’t someone just play BRP? Roll d100% below the skill is about as flexible as it gets.
Popular and good are not the same thing. McDonalds is popular. Corn Flakes are popular. Old Navy is popular. Their primary appeal is that the customer knows what they’re going to get probably won’t suck. They aren’t going to get something great but won’t get something terrible either.
Reliable mediocrity is usually the most popular thing in the market place because most people fear shit more than they desire gold.
They’d rather buy the thing they know is OK than take a risk on the thing could be totally not to their liking even though it could also be the best thing they’ve ever experienced. They aren’t willing to take the chance.
I see this all the time in film, and music. I go to local shows with bands that are unusual and far more interesting than the major labels put out. Those guys have a hard time filling even a small bar. A lot of people are willing to spend $20 on the summer block buster movie but won’t get off their ass to go see a low budget indie film if someone gives them a free ticket to a screening.
I don’t know I completely understand D&D’s success and it has multiple causes that may not have anything to do with the game itself. Network effect, marketing budgets, brand recognition etc.
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Great article Travis, and it expose a disconnect I had felt but hadn’t really understood.
I would be interested to hear more concrete reasons why you don’t like these races in D&D however. I can give you mine… halflings can feel too twee, for example, while elves can feel too perfect and ‘above’ the other humanoid races. I find it hard to create believable elf NPCs. Their epic lifespans just defy world building logic. If they are smarter than humans, are naturally inclined towards magic, and their adult lives are 10 times as long, they would surely all be archmages and dominate any aspect of the world they wanted to. An elf roadsweeper / cobbler / barman etc. just doesn’t make sense.
Dwarves are the one race from Tolkien that I can make peace with, although I still prefer to reduce their lifespans.
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Thanks!
I agree with all those reasons and my own dislikes are basically those. I have a hard time seeing hobbits as adventurers. A thing I have done in the past and is more or less the way not-humans were handled in Dark Sun is to make the totally not like their Tolkien counterparts. A couple of campaigns ago my elves were nearly extinct pleasure seeking nihilists who only became adventures because they were seeking death.
I can live with dwarves as they are but I usually change them. The last time I had dwarves in a campaign they spontaneously generated from very rare rock formations, were OCD about making things but the things they made were totally utilitarian and usually ugly. Their “architecture” looked like soviet brutalist office buildings.
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I understand your argument and can even agree on some levels, but wasn’t D&D intended to be an anything to everyone game? The inclusion of those races would allow players to play in a fantasy Middle Earth before any game of that nature came along. Currently there are so many games that cater to very specific niche interests that I can see what you mean. For me 5e D&D is a strange beast with its overwhelming amount of races and classes that it has become an even worse mess.
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My sense of OD&D was that it was intended to be a tool box for you to create your own fantasy campaign that you could make to be however you wanted. If you wanted to have elves, and dwarves and hobbits, that’s cool do your thing. If having elves as Tolkien envisioned them in your game didn’t work, that’s OK too. So for me, no elves like Tolkien’s. Elves like Poul Anderson’s _The Broken Sword_ well that’s a different thing.
I don’t think OD&D was intended to be an “anything to everyone” game. I think it was a “take the framework we’ve provided and make it your own” game tool kit. That is to say, it wasn’t intended to be fixed. Gary’s thought about that seems to have changed. That led to AD&D and more his prescriptive tone. This is how you play or you’re not playing AD&D.
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Quite the hot take. Each to their own :P
To me, saying elves & dwarves don’t belong in D&D is like saying dragons don’t belong.
I may not like Tolkien races personally, but I could hardly say they don’t belong. In fact, didn’t Gary have to try really hard to keep them out? Instigating level limits and such to discourage people because, dang it, people kept wanting to play these fantasy races and he wanted it to be all humans?
Looks like he lost that battle long ago. A version of an edition D&D may have not meshed with high fantasy, but it has since grown and evolved to the point that taking elves out of not only D&D but any fantasy RPG is almost unthinkable.
Gary very much wanted people to play a specific game. He lost that battle a long time ago. I think this is a good thing.
I have no fantasy races in my current game, but this is because they don’t match the particular story I am telling with this specific adventure. It’s not because elves and dwarves don’t belong in the game engine. Incidentally, it is a folklore inspired game where the players start out as playing normal villagers – much more Miyazaki than Howard. Gary would be so disappointed.
But then again, each to their own ;)
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I would say it is a very well considered and argued take but hey, each to their own.
Talislanta famously put “NO ELVES!” in its ad copy in Dragon. Astonishing Swordsmen and Sorcerers of Hyperborea has no elves. Black Company- no elves. Song of Ice and Fire- no elves. Joe Abercrombie’s First Law series- no elves Most of the classic Appendix N stories didn’t have elves and if they did, they were nasty bastards and not to be trusted.
I would say what happened is that D&D became it’s own genre of fantasy and inspired the twee YA fantasy fiction that pollutes the shelves of most book stores. It’s a vapid blend of the least interesting parts of the fantasy genres that came before it. The D&D movie last year is a great example. Fun spectacle of a movie but not emotionally moving, in no way challenging, or dramatically intense. Predictable all the way through.
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I did not write elves & dwarves don’t belong in D&D. Read the title again. I wrote Tolkien’s elves and dwarves don’t belong in D&D. That’s a very different thing.
Poul Anderson’s elves? Certainly. Dwarves from the Prose Edda or the Nibelungenlied? Absolutely.
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Indeed, your title is “Tolkien’s Elves, Dwarves, and Hobbits Don’t Belong in Dungeons & Dragons” but your first sentence was “I don’t like elves, dwarves, and halflings in Dungeons & Dragons.”
Your conclusion was “The primary reason why I don’t like elves, dwarves, and halflings in Dungeons & Dragons is that they come from a realm alien to the primary source material for the game.” and “Elves, dwarves, and halflings never really fit and had to be shoehorned in”
I both think
a) the underlying assumption wasn’t proven
b) the conclusion doesn’t follow from the assumption
So say that gary didn’t engage deeply with lord of the rings. That doesn’t necessarily imply that the realm is alien to the primary source material for the game. LOTR is included in appendix N! The implied setting of BX is a big kitchen sink of a bunch of different fictional works. There’s efreeti, demons, gnolls, goblins, orcs, trolls, gnomes, etc. It’s a huge mishmash of a bunch of different elements taken from different cultures and combined with original ideas.
I definitely agree that the genre being emulated is much closer to swords against death than lotr, but that doesn’t mean that the elements from other words don’t fit.
More specifically, in a world being roamed by goblins, orcs, giants, dragons, wights, hydras, and dinosaurs, stuff like elves and dwarves fit right in, even if they’re tolkien-style elves instead of poul-anderson-style elves or whatever.
Given that the world is this broad place with all of these fantastic beings in it, it seems acceptable that some of these non-humans would be trying to, alongside humans, set up lawful civilizations and fight the forces as chaos.
It seems acceptable that tolkien-style elves and dwarves might be some of the ones to help the humans out.
It seems acceptable that players might want to play as as a tolkien-inspired elf or dwarf in a sword and sorcery setting.
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I both think
a) the underlying assumption wasn’t proven
b) the conclusion doesn’t follow from the assumption
So say that gary didn’t engage deeply with lord of the rings. That doesn’t necessarily imply that the realm is alien to the primary source material for the game. LOTR is included in appendix N! The implied setting of BX is a big kitchen sink of a bunch of different fictional works. There’s efreeti, demons, gnolls, goblins, orcs, trolls, gnomes, etc. It’s a huge mishmash of a bunch of different elements taken from different cultures and combined with original ideas.
I definitely agree that the genre being emulated is much closer to swords against death than lotr, but that doesn’t mean that the elements from other words don’t fit.
More specifically, in a world being roamed by goblins, orcs, giants, dragons, wights, hydras, and dinosaurs, stuff like elves and dwarves fit right in, even if they’re tolkien-style elves instead of poul-anderson-style elves or whatever.
Given that the world is this broad place with all of these fantastic beings in it, it seems acceptable that some of these non-humans would be trying to, alongside humans, set up lawful civilizations and fight the forces as chaos.
It seems acceptable that tolkien-style elves and dwarves might be some of the ones to help the humans out.
It seems acceptable that players might want to play as as a tolkien-inspired elf or dwarf in a sword and sorcery setting.
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What is the underlying assumption as you perceive it?
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D&D emulates no setting but its own settings, even in the cases where they meant to do otherwise (every time someone tries, they show plainly how original and non-generic D&D actually is). That being said, Elves and Dwarves that borrow less from Tolkien and more from Poul Anderson are fitting inclusions.
As opinionated as Gary was, I question the narrative that he was a total pushover sellout on this issue, because elves were always in appendix N and were in Chainmail with the fantasy supplement. How far outside the plan could they really have been?
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What causes you to be skeptical?
It wouldn’t be the only thing he included in a game because someone requested it.
Here’s a response he gave to a question on Dragonsfoot about psionics.
“Gaming fellows from Chicago urged psionics, properly electronically enhanced psychic powers, be included. Foolishly, I accomodated them.”
https://www.dragonsfoot.org/forums/viewtopic.php?p=310037&hilit=psionics#p310037
Gary wasn’t above putting out stuff purely for the money, especially when the business was in trouble.
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D&D doesn’t emulate a specific setting. What would be the argument that Gary’s intention wasn’t for D&D to recreate the experience of reading the sword-and-sorcery or weird fantasy that Gary seemed to prefer?
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Its this idea that D&D is wrong when it strays from its canon inspirations that gets my hackles up. Appendix N is not a cage!
So I hate that you could be right this time. But riddle me this: who added the Drow? And I do think Gary undersold Lord of the Rings a little, purely out of frustration that people missed every other story even after he provided a list. Were treants and wights also added by popular demand?
Gary made his own Sword and Sorcery world, and matching other Sword and Sorcery worlds perfectly was not quite the goal. Granted, stealing from stories and B-movies was about half of the creative process. I see D&D”s implied setting / Greyhawk as successful, and its differences as either intended or at least acceptable, not failures in being a purist generic Sword and Sorcery emulator. The game is its own weird style of Gygaxian Sword and Sorcery, and thats good.
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Do most writers and world builders try to perfectly match other creators worlds?
Certainly they draw inspiration and one does have to hit the genre conventions to be part of the genre. One must have sword swinging warriors and sorcerers at the very least. In my experience, they try to do something different.
It’s not so much that I think original D&D is wrong when it strays from its canon inspirations. It is more that Tolkiens elves, and halflings don’t fit Gygaxian Sword and Sorcery any more than they would fit into Melnibone (except maybe as slaves or as a canvas for Dr. Jest to perform his art). The dwarves are less of an issue. They have the self focused, “I can’t get no respect” kind of attitude that characters in a sword-and-sorcery story tend to have.
Treants are kind of weird even in Middle Earth. They are not so off the emotional mark of a sword-and-sorcery story. Strange, wild, uncontrollable, angry. Wights also fit into both, partly because Tolkien didn’t modify them very much from the folk tales that inspired them.
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Nice read I include non humans in my games but they aren’t playable to keep them seperate from humanity. Otherwise they just end up as weird looking humans who have an odd liking for trees and rocks.
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Thanks! Humans in elf skin suits is another reason I don’t care for them.
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I don’t think that the problem you describe is inherent to elves, dwarves and halflings taken directly from The Lord of the Rings but the fact that Tolkien’s trilogy as a whole is defined by features that are at odds with how D&D is often played and what it implies. Intended as a new mythos for a secularized West, The Lord of the Rings emulates premodern literature both in terms of content and style – and as such, it is (among other things) not interested in characters as individuals but only as archetypes, ideas and concepts molded into (demi)human form. These characters as well as the events they have to endure couldn’t be further from the factual realpolitik and and compromises that are an essential part of a ‘normal’ D&D campaign. That’s why none of the characters described by Tolkien could flourish in a D&D setting, no matter which race they belong to. I think the dividing line between Tolkien’s demihumans and D&D is not how the specific races are defined by Tolkien but the underlying premises required for The Lord of the Rings to work as a piece of premodern literature.
What surprised me was your notion that the dwarves of the Nibelungenlied and Prose Edda work as a part of a D&D campaign, whereas those of The Lord of the Rings don’t. I’m interested in your reasoning, because the Prose Edda and the Nibelungenlied are the very kind of literature The Lord of the Rings harkens back to.
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” I think the dividing line between Tolkien’s demihumans and D&D is not how the specific races are defined by Tolkien but the underlying premises required for The Lord of the Rings to work as a piece of premodern literature.”
Precisely so.
I like dwarves from the Edda and Nibelungenlied as non-player characters. Supernatural beings of great knowledge, avarice, and skill. They make great sources of information or powerful objects… but there is always a cost. As adversaries or instigators of ugly situations, they are very useful. I wouldn’t allow them as player characters since their potency in the literature is just below the level of the gods, and in craftwork, surpasses it.
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Thank you very much for your explanation. I assumed you let your players pick the dwarves of the Nibelungenlied and Prose Edda as playable races.
Even though I’m aware that the dwarves and elves of D&D were quite heavily inspired by Tolkien’s works, I don’t mind them at all – and even appreciate them as a means of highlighting certain human traits, desires and ideals, enriching the campaign world in that manner, if you want to have these kinds of things in the world you imagine.
Maybe this all come downs to a matter of perception, because even though I know of their source, I don’t perceive Tolkien’s dwarves and elves to be transplants, but as being inevitably and instantly D&Defied from the very moment they were introduced; by depriving them of their strictly literary environment, elves and dwarves (or whatever else you introduce to the game) necessarily underwent certain changes, opening them up to the multitude of possibilities inherent to the game world and the accompanying rules. My point is that by taking something out of a static narration (be it a novel, a short story or a movie) and inserting it into a more open environment like a game, you cannot help but transform it in order to adapt it to its new environment. That doesn’t mean that everything is equally easy to include into an rpg campaign, but by making the conscious decision to introduce some aspect of a static story, you make that very aspect your own and cut its roots at least partially. I don’t see a problem to take Tolkien’s demihumans as a basis and (inevitably) change them in a way that allows to include them (seamlessly?) into your campaign world; yet it would be much harder to integrate the mindset of Tolkien’s characters without first establishing a consensus within the group and very strict rules about how the players have to play their characters; those rules would need to convey how the world works in terms far beyond what the immediate rule set covers. It surely would be interesting, but it wouldn’t resemble ‘conventional’ D&D very much.
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TSR should have had more of an emphasis on what the DM should discard to create to ape certain type of fantasy. Instead they went all in with everything appears in Forgotten Realms because things sell better that way.
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