The Literary Culture of the Drow

20 Oct, 2024

What do the drow read?

This was a question posed to me on Reddit, in response to my post about the literary works I made up for my D&D campaign (see the series index for more about that).¹ Because I was looking forward to an extended Underdark adventure (see here for more about that), I decided to take a crack at answering. This time, instead of simply making up fantasy works from real-world genres, I decided to make up whole genres, with examples of each. Here are three.²

The Genres

Genealogies

Originally noble houses would have prose genealogies made up as precise but workaday texts, but over time the genealogy became a much more elaborate and generically codified form. They usually read as something like what we would call a family epic, though they differ in that drow genealogies each investigate the various branches of a particular individual's lineage, with exciting and dynamic episodes throughout. Contemporary authors of genealogies are expected to present their subject as a solution to a problem within the lineage, and the lineage as a solution to a problem within the culture; that said, such solutions are usually only implied or prophesied, since writing too much about living people is dangerous. Most of the work focuses on those of the subject's ancestors who are now deceased. Many genealogists also include long digressions on subjects they find interesting: changes in architecture, travel narratives, fashion history, and so on. Although a genealogy's subject was once usually its patron, too, patrons now more often commission genealogies for newborn relatives as a gift they can grow into. Titles are usually formulaic, identifying the work as a genealogy and naming the individual whose ancestry it details.

This genre, of course, tells the players that drow are obsessed with ancestry–or at least the wealthy and cultured ones are. However, it can also be a way of giving context for drow nobles you have introduced to the campaign, or soon plan to introduce. The information in the genealogy is clearly biased, and may not be exactly true, but it could nonetheless tell your players something about what is widely believed about the relevant noble houses. If your players come to possess such a book, consider promising them one free question about the noble house, any time they like, which you will answer honestly. Alternatively, if the book contains commentary on some subject, they could get advantage (or a similar benefit in whatever system you're using) on knowledge checks to do with the subject, provided they have the book handy to consult.

Examples

• The Ancestry of Fiirnel'ther of House Tirin, which includes a lot of commentary on architecture
• The Ancestry of Lucia Tlabbar the Pirate Priestess, which includes a truly improbable amount of swashbuckling and beautiful lower-class men and women
• The Bloodlines of Quenthel of House Calefar
• The Bloodlines of Sarith Veladorn, a rare genealogy of a drow man
• The Expanded Genealogy of Miz'ri of House Kzekarit, the second genealogy written on the subject
• The Genealogy of Vadalma of House Ousstyl
• The Genealogy of Xalith Dalambra, which includes a lot of mycology
• The Intrepid Genealogy of Prath of House Baenre, another rare genealogy of a drow man, this one full of travel narratives
• The Lineage of Mez'barris Xorlarrin, which includes a lot of fashion history
• The Splendid Ancestry of Yvonnel Fey

Sestinas

Sestinas are real-world poems with thirty-nine lines and a very complicated scheme of repeated end words, which you can find explained at the Poetry Foundation here; it can be challenging to write a sestina that is pleasant to read. Among the drow of my campaign, the original sestinas took as their subjects sensual delights or ekphrasis³ of courtly fashion, entertainment, and decor, but the sestina gained traction as a learned poetic form when poets used them as vehicles for philosophizing and lyric contemplation. Certainly these latter developments were improvements, with many fine examples. Unfortunately, it was also the start of a trend which has in recent generations made sestinas more tedious: they have become a common form for moral or political polemics. The difficulty and experiential complexity of the form is a large part of its appeal to a culture which appreciates baroque artistic production requiring patience, discipline, and skill. Elven languages in my setting use quantitative rather than qualitative meter.

Sestinas emphasize the drow's appetite for ever more elaborate aesthetics. The polemical sestinas, furthermore, can be useful for seeding or reinforcing particular political elements into your campaign. In my game the local drow are embroiled in a civil war between the slavers and the abolitionists, so I made sure to include sestinas on that topic.

Examples

• "An Anatomy of Ambition"
• "An Anatomy of Kisses," an account of what it is like to be kissed by the speaker's six spouses and lovers, one of the best sensual sestinas in Elvish, and also a fine example of bragging through verse
• "An Anatomy of Love," a popular but technically unimpressive lyrical sestina
• "The Extravagance of the Two-Hundred and Fiftieth Birthday of Xalith Auvryndar," one of the best ekphratic sestinas in the Elvish, or any, language, still published widely in drow cities
• "The Fate of the Rebel Slaves," describing a slave rebellion which struggled internally and was then brutally suppressed, as obvious anti-abolitionist propaganda
• "The Lost Tapestry of Mazzrobalathra"; Mazzrobalathra is a lost drow city, historical rather than legendary, and its great tapestry was one of the twelve wonders of the ancient world, the appearance of which this sestina only imagines, based on surviving accounts
• "The Magister's Masquerade," a political polemic emphasizing a kind of meritocratic aristocracy over pure aristocracy
• "A Reckoning in Ruins," an elegiac sestina to a better time, with subtle but clear reactionary politics

Harem Comedies

The only drow literary form that has made the leap to the stage, harem comedies were originally humorous tales concerning the harems of two rival nobles, each consisting of anywhere between two and six husbands and concubines.⁴ The harems would engage in various campaigns against one another on behalf of their respective wives, while at the same time the members within each harem would vie for status or privileges. Notably, few examples give any sort of moral or narrative privilege to one of the nobles or the harems: both nobles are depicted as relatively self-interested competitors without casting judgement on them for it, and both are given sympathetic moments. The harem members are nearly always depicted as wholly loyal and devoted to their wife or mistress, though they may well behave treacherously towards one another. If they are ever tempted towards infidelity, they never go through with it in the end. Harem comedies tend to have one or two bawdy scenes, but can otherwise range in humour from slapstick to witty wordplay. Theater is by and large considered a lower-caste entertainment among the drow, but adaptations of the harem comedies are becoming quite popular on those stages and a few are being written direct-to-stage.

If you stick close to the published materials when it comes to drow in your campaign, I suggest having harem comedies performed in the open air of the Foreigner's Quarter, with a hat passed around for payment. Otherwise you can put published versions on any Underdark bookshelf. I like them because they communicate to your players a polyandrous, matriarchal society that approves of open competition. Also, at least one of my players seemed to find the idea very funny.

Examples

• All For a Mere Something, written for the stage and an unusual example, in that the women are competing over a man that each would like to add to her harem, and the members of those harems are very reluctantly trying to help out
• A Feast of the Tongue of Madness, the title of which sounds much better in Elvish; "tongue of madness" is a mushroom from Wizards of the Coast's Out of the Abyss (2015) which causes those who eat it to speak their every thought, and consumption of this fungus is a major, repeated plot device in this story; the comedy is now more often performed than read
• Keptolo Delights
• The Harems of the Sisters Xorlarrin
• The Noblemans' War
• The Priestess, the Captain, and Their Bedmates
• The Rival Honours of the Paragon Brides, technically a precursor of the genre, in that the inter- and intra-harem conflicts only make up about half of the action; even so, it created an audience for works that focus on those dynamics
• Soldiers and Scholars, concerning the harems of two women who have very different tastes in men
• 'Tis a Good Man Who Fights For His Mistress
• The Triplets of House Claddath, in which two identical brothers in a set of triplets end up in rival harems and their sister is contrived to cross-dress, so that there is a pile-up of mistaken identities

Others

Among the drow there are also polemics and histories, but these genres are hardly unique to them. They have also for a while had a vague interest in sonnets, though not nearly as feverish as on the surface.

Although theater is considered lower-caste entertainment, it is becoming quite popular among those lower castes. Plays might be performed in inn squares or they might be performed on carts wherever the troupe can find a place to park it. For the most part the troupes perform plays from the surface especially selected to appeal to audiences in the drow lower castes and in the foreigners' quarter, without angering the powers that be. Therefore the chosen plays are overwhelmingly tragedies or farces which make the surface societies look doomed or foolish despite their merits; histories, romances, and comedies are exceedingly rare, not least because troupes have been executed for performing them unwisely. King Laucian, Prince Galinndan, Queen Torgga, Hell of a Summer, and Maestro's Fall are probably the plays most familiar to lower caste drow and drow slave audiences; these are described in a little more detail in an early post in the series.

Using the Genres

If you like the looks of these genres but don't have drow in your game, you can of course use them to make up a different people's literary culture. Just remember what the different genres communicate about the people who write and read them:

• genealogies suggest that their authors and audience are preoccupied with ancestry;
• sestinas suggest that their authors and audiences especially appreciate sophisticated poetic forms and therefore are familiar with other elaborate poetic forms; and
• harem comedies suggest that the context in which they are written takes both competition and polygamy of some kind for granted (though you can gender-swap them for polygynous cultures).

#for GMs #high fantasy #made-up literature