Elven Jewelry Monikers: A Tradition of Decoration

A common cultural facet inside all of the elven subraces. Elves use jewelry to tell tale of specific important aspects of their life, and to share those facets of themselves with others.

Elves live for a long time. Many things happen in their lifetime, many things change, pages turn, their age is met with growth and events that symbolize who they are becoming. In an attempt to preserve memory, and wear their victories and chapters of their lives to help define who they are in this vast, everchanging realm, the tradition of the elven earrings was born, as though it were a dazzling form of book keeping.

Colors

Color brings the most important meaning into the earrings an elf might wear. Simply looking at the material used to create the jewelry can paint a picture of the life that was lived by the wearer. It tells of relationships, successes, battle, failure, and loss, creating intricate storytelling about their lives through the pieces on their ears.

Copper
Often symbolizes growth, whether that be through reaching milestones or learning from failures of the past. It is a color and metal associated with a grounded and worldly nature. It is common in multiple elven cultures around the world for the parents of children to bestow a gift of a bronze earring to their children on their 40th birthday. 40, like other species, is a milestone of maturity for elves, associated less with physical growth and more with worldly experience.

Silver
Often symbolizes an important event in one's life. Silver is believed to be a mirror to the soul, helping us to see ourselves as others see us, telling the truth in its color, a notable chapter that has taken place. It is common for these silver rings to be engraved with designs, markings, reliefs, or inscriptions that denote more detail about the event being symbolized.

Gold
Often symbolizes wealth or victory. The color gold is the color of extravagance, wealth, riches, and excess, and shares several of the same attributes of the color yellow. The color gold is a warm color that can be either bright and cheerful or somber and traditional. Gold earrings and other jewlry are typically bestowed upon those closest to the individual. There are specific golden band and earring styles meant to be shared between fiances, between spouses, between adopted children and their parents, and between best friends who consider each other lifelong allies.

Cobalt
Often symbolizes loss or death for a wearer, and is unique in color compared to its three counterparts. The deep blue is not just for sadness and depression, as mourning does not just include weeping, but hope and conserving memory. It is most commonly worn in remembrance of a parent who has lost a child, a child who has no living caretakers, or in comemeration of a grandparent. This isn't a hard or fast rule however, and many people use these earrings and adronments to commemorate all sorts of somber events.

Elven Locks
These ear decorations are the same as ear gauges that other species cultures have sometime been known to wear. In many Mahavida and Golden City slave rings, it is customary for gauges to be utilized with slaves, these extenders are sometimes worn even by those who have been enslaved in the past but are not currently, sometimes because of difficulties removing or healing the modification, and others wear it in a form of self described symbolism. The practice was meant as a demeaning amarkation of servitude and loss of agency.

Slavers typically would hook a chain into the gauge strung in between a line of elven slave or in between a slave and the wall. A whole line of slaves marched connected to each other was a symbolic display of subservience used to demean and dehumanize the slaves.

Chaining to the wall, also given the cruel nickname of "shelving" was another tactic to degrade the moral of slaves, in which once chained from their gauge to the wall, was left there along with whatever other bonds were utilized when kept stowed away. The gauge was placed in such a way that trying to rip the ear free of the chain almost always resulted in the threat of ripping off the entire ear, therefore being too debilitating or painful to even attempt.

Date Submitted
July 15, 2022
Contributors
Kashii, Taylorzilla