High Elven

High Elves are a branch of the ancient elves who hold to a old elven belief in elven superiority. This manifests itelf in a belief that elves are destined to rule the lesser races, and a strong focus on racial purity that leads them to look down on elves of mixed race.
High Elves are found in the High Kingdom of northern Gundara, and also in the eastern continent of Ardaling, according to Ilsig travellers.
The high elven ideal is that they are created or born to rule other races.  The high elves form a noble and warrior caste, and they protect those of the lesser races that they rule over, and allow them to prosper in peace and security.  Those lesser races then, in turn, propser as farmers, herders or merchants, and as a result, out of their gratitude, provide for their elven masters.  Unfortunately, this chivalric ideal was rarely held to in practice, and the ancient high elven kingdoms became places of harsh oppression and noble decadence, until they were overthrown in a series of rebellions and the human cultures and kingdoms that we now see in Vanareon came into being.
High elven culture, like all elven culture, is driven by the problems of being a race that lives for many centuries.  Amongst the problems this raises:

• Rulership is not lifelong, because historical examples show that this causes stagnation and decay.  The high elves are masters of magic, and their kings are magically linked to their realms, such that the realm will prosper so long as the king is vibrant and strong.  This allows high elven kingdoms to propser in lands that other races could only scratch a living.  The downside is that if the king is young and inexperienced, or old and declining, the land will suffer similarly.  For this reason, high elven kingdoms always have two joint kings, so that sudden death will not plunge the kingdom into environment crisis, and also kings serve for a set number of years, before a new king is elected, often only a century or so.
• Inheritance is a rare thing in a race that rarely dies.

Ideals

Relationship Ideals

High Elven familial relationship recognise that in such a long lived race, lifelong monogamy is not an easy option. Therefore the most important relationships are sbiling or parent-child ones.  Descent is traced in all lines, and understanding high-elven genealogy is something that only high elves can do it is said, especially because it is entirely proper and common for a high elf to have a child with their own great-grandmother for example, if both parties think that this would be advantageous or are minded to do so. The high elves have no real concept of marriage in the human sense.  Rather high elves will contract themselves in a relationship for a set period of time, normally because it will advance the cause of both of them.  Children are born, not to cement an alliance, but because they will heir to advantageous bloodlines or abilities.

Diverged ethnicities

• Wood-Elven

Encompassed species

• Elf