Redesigning Elves - An Uber-Nerdy World-Building Exercise

My first attempt at creating elves did not go according to plan. 

I love fantasy as a genre. Which is odd to say on introspection, because the amount of fantasy literature, films and games that I have indulged in and am genuinely fond of is rather limited. It's basically limited to these options... 

Literature: Discworld and The Malazan Book of the Fallen series, The Hobbit and Mogworld. 
Films: The Lord of The Rings trilogy and the made-for-Netflix film Bright. Don't judge me, dammit, I likes what I likes. 
Video Games: The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim, Dragon's Dogma, Darkest Dungeon, Bastion, The Battle for Middle Earth II and Dark Messiah of Might and Magic. Wow, I might play too many video games. 

You'll notice that most of Tolkien's literary works are missing from the literature section. You'll also notice that no direct Dungeons & Dragons product is in there at all, aside from the IP that was directly inspired by it (which to be fair, is a lot if not most of it). This is because I have a weird relationship with the D&D universe, particularly the older versions. As someone who has never actually played D&D, I might very well be talking myself into a corner for the internet to beat me in. But Lord of the Rings and D&D has had such huge influence on modern fantasy worlds that there is actually such a thing as a 'standard fantasy setting'. To paraphrase the words of Yahtzee Croshaw, that kind of undermines the point of having a universe where our imaginations can run wild. 

One particular gripe I have is with elves. Elves are pretty boring in a lot of fantasy settings: they're skinny, immortal, idealised humans with pointy ears who generate immortality-based angst as a secondary bodily function. They're also very much prone to the kind of 'all tarred with the same brush' treatment that fantasy doles out to entire species and races. To summarise 90% of all fantasy stuff in the last 100 years, here's how the elves (or elf-derived beings) usually go:

High Elves = pale-skinned, good but arrogant. 

Wood Elves = pale-skinned, good or neutral nature lovers. 

Dark elves = evil, dark-skinned or anti-heroes at best, except for classic Marty Stu Drizzt Do'Urden. Man, I hate those books. 

Goblins = green, ugly usually-evil elf knockoffs. 

Orcs = green (or not), ugly evil-or-at-the-very-least-totally-not-elves-at-all-honest. 

I am by no means the first one to point out the awkward implications of internalised racism in default D&D style elf setup, especially as it pertains to dark elves. Hell, that kind of debate started back when Tolkien first wrote Lord of the Rings. I'm probably (scratch that, definitely) not even the first one to have a go at coming up with a more scientific and historically inspired set of elves for a fantasy universe either. To be fair and honest, fantasy and D&D in particular has matured a lot in this regard over the last 100 years, since the role-playing crowd has generally realised that if nothing else it's rather dull to always have the same species be good/evil all the time. It's always more fun to have a variety of things to stab. 

So that's what we're doing this time. We're making up some fresh elves with the power of science, history and a heaping helping of my own preferences, opinions and biases (because I can't exactly borrow anyone else's, can I?). The main objective here is to try and think of elves (and goblins and orcs) as distinct genetic populations and cultures rather than as different races or species, since that's more interesting and more 21st century than the old-style D&D 'elves are different for gameplay reasons and so you don't have to feel bad about killing the evil ones'. The artwork is all the property of their respective artists, and the names are in (Google-translated, sorry) Icelandic because that's the closest thing we have to Old Norse, where our Grand-Daddy-of-Fantasy Tolkien first got his ideas for elves. And also because it sounds cool. 

Hell, let's imagine a fantasy viking sailing around documenting elves just for giggles. 

"Svo byrjar saga álfa, eins og ég er sunginn..."

High Elves (Hár álfur)

According to the first page of Google image search, High Elves in your average fantasy settings typically look something like this...

Or this:

Or this. 

Pale, ethereal beings who frolic and make war in eternal summer, the sun shining off their... pale... skin... 

Hang on a minute. Not that there's anything especially wrong with pasty elves, but do they all wear magical sunscreen, or are they just immune to the skin cancer they would inevitably get after centuries of having picnics in the sun? 

If you have a look at modern peoples who hang out in direct sunlight all day, you'll notice that they all have something in common: darker skin. This goes for the pale people who crispy-fry themselves on the beach to get that fashionable burnt sausage look and the genetic populations around the world who've been living under the baking sun for millennia. The rough geographic/genetic boundary in which native peoples have dark skin starts pretty far north and ends pretty far south, since pale skin is (relatively speaking) a recent human adaptation to get the most vitamin D in areas where UV radiation is low. So to me at least, High Elves which are at least Mediterranean-complexioned make somewhat more sense than the pasty glamour models you see more frequently. Thankfully, the internet has beaten me to it and there is art which is pretty much exactly what I'm thinking of when I think of darker-skinned High Elves. 

Not the same thing as Dark Elves by the way, we'll get to that in a bit. For those of you fretting about the lack of variety, there's still plenty of room for shenanigans with eye and hair colour. Pale hair even makes some sense, seeing that prolonged exposure to the sun (like during a centuries-long lifespan, for example) will bleach hair (and also damage it, so them High Elves better have some pretty High End hair-care products). 

But why am I so insistent that High Elves would hang out in the hot sun? I mean, the original legends come from Norse mythology, right? Where they are specifically described as 'bright', as opposed to the 'Dark Elves' (according to some interpretations) which are described as 'swarthy'? Well, there's no particular reason for it to be this way. I'll just say this is me exercising a creative license while being informed by history and science. High Elves are generally seen as the most socially, culturally and technologically advanced of the standard elven subgroups, and that only can happen in places where agriculture can support large populations, a.k.a usually warmer climates. Throughout most of human history the equation is pretty straightforward: 

Warmer weather = more crops = more food = more populous and more sophisticated civilisation. 

Ta-da!

This is why the earliest evidence for agriculture and the largest and most populous pre-industrial civilisations were not to be found in frigid areas like Northern Asia, Canada or Western Europe, but in the Middle East, North Africa, Eastern and Southern Asia and Central and South America. The warm periods throughout human history also correspond very strongly with increases in population and societal complexity: the stability or instability of European cultures during the Medieval period for example follows very closely periods of warming and cooling that affected how crops grew. To summarise:

Early Middle Ages (500 to 1000 CE) - Climate cools slightly. Bad harvests lead to mass migrations of 'barbarian' peoples from Northern Europe and Central Asia into Europe and the Mediterranean, resulting in the fall of the Western Roman Empire and an overall decline in European societal complexity and scale. Political power in Europe gets decentralised, leading to the beginnings of Feudal society. 

High Middle Ages (1000 to 1300 CE) - The climate warms up, being named very imaginatively the 'Medieval Warm Period.' Better harvests in the milder weather fuelled a flourishing in Western Europe of complex culture, population growth and technological advancement. Contact was re-established with the Middle East (mostly via the Crusades, oops), allowing the exchange of new technologies and concepts. 

Late Middle Ages (1300 to 1500 CE) - Climate cools again. Bad times ahead, as colder weather and less food to go around lead to societal upheaval resulting in events like the Hundred Years War. The Black Death also killed damn near everyone (two thirds of Western Europe's population), the immune systems of European populations being compromised by lack of food and inclement weather. 

So generally speaking, warmer weather means your High Elf High Society can be more High, more Elf and more complex. Thus, the highest population of elves with the greatest civilisations would logically be found where it is warmer and they can grow larger crops of elf oats or whatever it is that elves eat.  

Aesthetic-wise, the intrepid fantasy imagineer (I am so thrilled that's actually a word), has a lot of inspirational material for a warmer-weather High Elf civilisation. A mix of North African, Middle-Eastern and Mediterranean-style cultures and aesthetics would suit well. Ancient Mesopotamian designs would be pretty good too, as in my opinion we don't see enough influence from ancient civilisations in modern fantasy. 

I would totally dress like this if people didn't already think I was weird. 

Wood Elves (Viðarálfur)

Wood elves in fantasy generally come across as archery enthusiast hippies that lurk in forests and occasionally murder people who 'disrespect nature'. And according to the first page of Google images, they look like this: 

Pretty consistent depiction here of green clothes, green backgrounds, smugness and archery. So how much can we deviate from this?

Well, let's start with the forest-dwelling thing. Assuming your elves function in a similar way to humans, forest dwelling is actually quite hard to justify. Human-like civilisation and forests usually don't mix well, because forests generally don't mix well with large-scale agriculture. Assuming that the elves aren't a hunter-gatherer society or hippie tree magic isn't involved, any elven civilisation that runs on similar logic to humans can't have a large population and also be completely at harmony with nature. Where my mind immediately goes with this is that Wood Elves would be considerably less numerous than other elven populations, living in small settlements hidden within vast swathes of deciduous forest. Their tendency to be exceptional archers in media can be fully justified, as hunting and fighting in woodland requires good stealth and good aim. You can even broaden that ranged talent to other ranged weapons like throwing knives and axes, slings, spears and javelins. 

A smaller scale of civilisation means a generally lower technology level (although how much magic we have in this setting can even things up a bit). So Wood Elf society would be somewhat more primitive and less complex than that of our previously discussed High Elven friends. Living at a higher latitude in shady forests away from non-solar sources of vitamin D would also perfectly justify them having paler skin. Having a less varied diet could even justify a smaller physical stature, and green dye for linen and cotton would be easily available in the form of plants like woad, weld and dyers greenweed. 

As for society and culture, having scattered settlements segways neatly into having a heavily decentralised government, on par with Europe in the Early Medieval period (Dark Ages, if you need labels, man). Stylistically I would say ditch the green tights and anime-pretty-people look and make them VIKING ELVES. Or more specifically, draw from Celtic, Saxon, Norse and Slavic aesthetics. That'd make for some bad-ass wood elves. 

Just imagine pointy ears on these guys. It's really easy, since most of them are wearing helmets.

Dark Elves (Dökk álfur)

Once again, we hasten to Google image search to see what Sensei Google has to show us...

As you can probably guess by the style of fancy dress, Dark Elves are often more than a little evil, and that bugs me. It always struck me as sounding like non-Dark Elf propaganda. 

The first thing that springs to mind with Dark Elves is why they tend to be 'dark' in the first place. Things that live underground or in darkness like they often seem to do tend to have pale skin, since there's not much point in having skin pigmentation in the dark. Having dark skin due to being cursed doesn't make much sense either (like how it is in D&D and the Elder Scrolls series) since it's not much of a physical handicap. And let's face it: it's a little rude to all the (billions of) dark-skinned people in the world that a generally evil race happens to have dark skin. 

So my Dark Elves will be pale, and also as not-evil as any other culture. The reason for them being called 'Dark Elves' (as opposed to 'Pasty Elves') would be due to their nocturnal/subterranean lifestyle, and their eye or hair colour. Once again the internet has beaten me to it (on the same front page on Google image search no less), so here are some pictures demonstrating that I'm not the only one bothered by the fact that a race that lives  in darkness has dark skin:

Pasty, pasty underground goodness. 

Dark Elves are often depicted as having a matriarchal society, which we can roll with because truly matriarchal societies are rare in both real life and fiction and we still want them to be different from other elven societies. As for how to justify the ladies being in charge, classic D&D does it by female dark elves being larger, stronger and more domineering than the males. So we're going to do something similar yet a little different: we're going to take inspiration from one of the few truly matriarchal mammals around. 

Spotted hyenas. 

HI THERE

Now aside from the hyena ladies being bigger and meaner than the boys, there are a few cultural tweaks we can get from them (which is brilliantly demonstrated in the excellent online graphic novel, Digger). Most first-time hyena cubs are stillborn and many first-time hyena mothers die in childbirth (because they're giving horrifically painful birth through a pseudo-penis) Being inspired by this, Dark Elves as a population could suffer from genetic quirks that favour a matriarchal society:

- A high rate of mothers dying in childbirth due to a combination of narrow hips, hormone imbalances and longer-than-usual pregnancies resulting in bigger newborns. Which leads nicely to...
- Artificial/natural selection favouring physically larger ladies better able to survive natural childbirth, who then can boss the boys about with a combination of brawn and societal value. Ironically, favouring larger ladies leads to larger children, which means that childbirth is still an ordeal and the cycle continues. 

The higher risk of childbirth could also justify a very conservative, risk-averse society, so no wonder they prefer to hide underground. On that note, Dark Elves often are considered synonymous with dwarfs in original Nordic mythology, so Dark Elves and Dwarfs can be the same thing: bearded craftsmen that are materialistic and hostile but primarily just wish to be left alone. This segways neatly into the D&D inspired Dark Elf veneration of spiders: spiders are builders, creatures that seem to value order and hard work and they are valuable pest control, so a society which hates disorder could see much to like about them. Any stories about dark worship practices (sacrificing babies to spiders, being generally murderous and so on) can be explained as misinformation, by the Dark Elves being very reclusive and having little interest in interacting with outsiders. 

Appearance-wise, I'm thinking lots of robes, layers of clothing and intricate metalwork that befits a materialistic, conservative people. Basically a lot like the Dwemer of the Elder Scrolls series, just less genocidal and considerably less extinct. 

This picture is shockingly close to what I was imagining. I guess if originality isn't dead, it's in a pretty deep coma.

Green Elves, a.k.a Goblins (Græn álfur)

Since I feel that the Dark Elves (as a fictional people) have had kind of a bad rap due to the need for bad guys you can feel guiltless about murdering and plundering, I have similar feelings about other archetypal 'evil' fantasy races. Maybe I'm just a naive optimist, but I feel that true, genuine evil is rarer than people generally think it is. Selfish, anti-social behaviour is detrimental to the long-term cooperation needed for a functioning society, so an 'evil' society doesn't exactly work in the long-term. There has to be at least some altruism, selflessness and some kind of virtue in a community in order for it to be at all functional. Otherwise who'd actually do the things that need doing, like taking out the trash or looking after children? How would the society change for the better, progress and solve problems? 

On that note, let's ask Google what goblins look like... 

So we can clearly see or infer that stereotypical goblin-like features are:
- Being evil as heck.
- Being short.
- Being green.
- Having big noses.
- Hiding underground.
- Being greedy. 
- Being filthy. 

Incidentally, one of the recurring things about goblins in fantasy is undercurrents and accusations of antisemitism. A lot of the features I just listed are stereotypes of the Jewish people, which has rather unfortunate implications when you see how common these depictions of goblins are in fantasy (Not all, thankfully. Jews tend not to be depicted as green). Tolkien himself didn't portray goblins like this (the Lord of the Rings novels just have 'goblin' being another word for 'orc'), but he did admit that his dwarfs (or dwarves) were based heavily on Jewish stereotypes: being materialistic, reclusive, few in number, strangers in their own lands and generally keeping apart from other races. So in the interest of not perpetuating hook-nosed stereotypes, we've got to change quite a few things. 

To start, let's look at the original goblins of European folklore. Interestingly, they weren't necessarily evil: there are a range of stories which depict them as ranging from dangerous to friendly to mischievous or just neutral. They often bear physical and behavioural similarities to fairies, gnomes or even dwarfs. Hobgoblins were considered outright friendly before Christianity came to the British Isles, the French Lutin could be either benevolent or evil and even the Redcap (the seemingly most objectively dangerous goblin in folklore, with a supposed penchant for dying its hat red with human blood), has variants on its stories depicting it as benign. 

Don't worry, he might be friendly!
... MIGHT be...

Goblins in 'original' (for lack of a better word) British folklore are basically just a variant of the fey folk and fairies, ranging from harmful to just mischievous. So there's plenty of precedent for ditching the potentially antisemitic green caricatures that fill modern fantasy. 

So let's take some inspiration from Fantasy Granddaddy Tolkien's work, in which goblins (and orcs) were technically just another variety of elf. In Tolkien's work orcs and goblins were created when the first Dark Lord Morgoth (who was way cooler than Sauron, just so you know) used dark magic to twist and torture elves into a new foul race of being. Since that sounds exactly like anti-goblin propaganda, we're going to put a different spin on it: our goblins are just going to be a distinct genetic population of elves, who happen to be green with a high propensity for yellow eyes. That's it. But that leads to a pressing question: what makes them green and yellow-eyed, and why would they be green and yellow-eyed?

For background, goblins were never green in pre-20th folklore. The rise of the green goblins (and orcs) in popular culture might actually have started with the Spider-man villain 'The Green Goblin' in the 1960's, right alongside the riding popularity of Tolkien's works. There is a very close correlation between goblins and orcs in fantasy, with Tolkien barely differentiating the two at all and the mixing of colour and species between the two resulted in green orcs and goblins in influential properties like Warhammer, WarCraft and many others. 

So that's the how. But why did it catch on so much? There are any number of answers that I found, some more convincing than others, but they can be boiled down to three options:

1. Green is an exotic, fantastical and interesting colour for a humanoid creature. One apocryphal story is that a Games Workshop employee accidentally painted their orcs green, everyone liked it and so they just rolled with that colour from then on. 

2. Green is a sickly, inhuman colour, associated with illness, death, decay, poison and venom. Having the bad guys be green emphasises their inhumanity and filthiness. 

3. In a combination of the above two options, having generally evil humanoids be green (a completely non-human colour) could be seen as a way of dodging accusations of racism. As said before, people cottoned on quite early that describing goblins (and orcs) as having skin that is dark or sallow has unfortunate racist undertones towards dark-skinned or East Asian peoples (or even overtones, if the author of the work isn't being subtle about it). 

So shall we keep goblins green or not? Well, we don't have to, but for the sake of fantastical variety and to explore the limits of race and genetics (option one, basically) I reckon we can keep the colour at least. But how do we justify green skin?

Popular examples of justified green people ('people' used in a loose sense) include the orks of the Warhammer 40k universe. These violent aliens have a symbiotic relationship with a photosynthetic fungi in their skin that facilitates their reproduction and resilience, their green pigment caused by this aspect of their biology. Meanwhile in the Artemis Fowl novels, goblins just happen to be reptiles. Fire-breathing reptiles, to boot. These kind of explanations won't do for us, however, as our goblins are not aliens and they certainly aren't reptiles. 

Pictured: not a goblin. Also pictured: the first image result if you Google 'reptile'.

 
As it turns out though, a naturalistic explanation for a green-skinned humanoid is problematic. Green is a surprisingly difficult colour for animals to achieve and there's pretty good reasons for there being no green furred or green skinned mammals. The main reason for this is that green and blue colouration tends to be structural rather than pigmented, which is why birds, reptiles and amphibians can be green whereas mammals are generally not. Mammalian hair is too rough and irregular in texture to have the structure to reflect green light, and mammalian skin generally lacks the kind of structure to properly reflect green light as well. There are diseases such as Hypochromic anemia that can add a green tinge to human skin, but having an entire race of people suffering from the same disease is a little weird and hard to explain away all the side effects that come along with such a contagion. Skin colour can also be potentially changed by diet, but that tends to either be temporary or imply a very limited and/or unhealthy supply of food, so let's not do that either. 

So what's left? There is one potential path open for us which I found on this website:

"We can imagine mammals with green skin, made by adding a yellow pigment to the Tyndall blue of a mandrill's cheeks, but it is difficult to imagine a selective advantage for them. Green is a camouflage colour, not a signal colour. To be useful to a mammal, it needs to be in the hair."

So it is extremely unlikely for a mammal to be green-haired and even more unlikely for a mammal to have green skin, but thankfully it's not completely impossible. Goblins as a genetic population would need to have remained separate from other beings for an extended time, long enough for a mutation for both yellow and blue skin pigment to occur. You could even have yellow and blue goblins running around as well as the green, just for the sake of completeness. Of course if you really want to wuss out from reasoning why this is you can just say 'it's because of magic, dur' but I feel that magic in fantasy is like swear words and ammunition: save it for when you really need it, and it has greater effect. 

Don't mind him. He's just mad I didn't give him a magic staff or a gun.

So what benefit would green skin have over other colours? Why would it be selected for? 
- Camouflage? Probably not. If goblins are to be anything like other elves or humans, camouflage would be far less important for survival than social networking, tool use and cooperation. 
- UV protection? Possibly, but dark pigments (like in our friends the High Elves) do that job perfectly well already. 
- Sexual section? Alright, now we're talking. It would pretty much be luck of the draw whether the first yellow/blue/green goblin would be reviled or revered, but if they were seen as beautiful? Then more green babies could follow, and generations later you have a mostly (if of not completely) green elf population. 

On the subject of yellow eyes, that's comparatively easy. Eye colour is determined by a greater or lesser degree of melanin, with pink albino eyes having the least, blue having only a little, green having more and brown the most. Yellow or golden eyes fall on the same scale: it's actually amber, a shade of brown. Amber eyes are extremely rare in humans, but our goblins can have yellow eyes as a genetic population quirk: their eyes just have a little less melanin on average than regular human eyes. 

I can imagine the sensual goblin fan-fiction already...

So that's the biology mostly sorted out. What about culture, society, appearance and all that stuff? Well, in order to be so visually different from other elven populations goblins would need to have been isolated from them for very long time. So they'd live far away from the previously mentioned elven populations, in environments that other elves had little incentive to expand into. Since the High Elves have fertile plains, the Wood Elves have deciduous forest and the the Dark Elves have their underground fortresses, what is left? 

Why hello there, conveniently elf-free biome...

I imagine goblins eking out an existence in an environment like the Taiga Forest, full of unpalatable coniferous trees and subject to cruel winters. Agriculture is generally a no-go in an environment like that, so our goblins are more likely to be herders and hunters, raising cold-weather animals like reindeer, yaks, sheep and goats. This would mean a nomadic lifestyle and a pragmatic, down-to-earth culture like the Nenets (also known as Samoyeds), Mongols or Tibetan herders. 

Which is also an excellent excuse to give them dogs like this. 

Appearance-wise, our goblins could derive materials for clothing, tools and weapons from their animals. Metal would probably be rare, with most things being made from skin, hide, fur, bone, antler and ivory. Ushankas or some kind of hat like it are a must-have, simply because I love ushankas and I say so. 

I'd say that greatcoat is anachronistic for this setting, but he just looks so snug...

Gray Elves, a.k.a Orcs (Grár álfur)

Orcs are a funny thing. Unlike pretty much every other fantasy thing in this post, orcs don't have any origin in folklore and were custom-made to be bad guys in the original works they appeared in: our old friend J.R.R Tolkien. But before we talk about him again, let's Google image search 'orc' and see what we end up with...

There's a few things we immediately are reminded of when we look at the images that immediately crop up:

- There are two visual varieties of orc: the greyish, pasty Lord-of-the-Rings-movie version and the green, muscle-bound WarCraft version. 

- There are two alignments of orcs: the always evil monster, and the noble savage. 

- Never the two types shall meet. 

The evolution of orcs in popular culture from Tolkien's original vision has been an interesting one. Tolkien's stated inspiration for the name of these monsters is the Old English word meaning 'demon', although similar words meaning demonic beings or evil spirits exist (including the Latin-named god/demon, Orcus). As previously mentioned, in Tolkien's works orcs were originally corrupted elves (although he also mentioned other possible origins for them). His descriptions of them are never flattering, being generally sallow-skinned with some being dark-skinned 'as if burned by the sun'. Peter Jackson's Lord of the Rings films has a bit more variety, with orcs generally ranging in skin colour from pale grey to darker shades of brown and black, maintaining a demonic inhuman appearance. The rise of the green orc (and goblin) has also been discussed already, with all the baggage that comes with it. To summarise, orcs didn't start out as green and they became green mostly because enough people seemed to like the idea. Green orcs vary in characteristics from perpetually evil and destructive (like in Warhammer and Warhammer 40k) to having noble, honourable and redeeming qualities as popularised by Blizzard's WarCraft series and the more recent Elder Scrolls games. 

Like with goblins and Dark Elves, orcs have been prime targets for accusations of racist undertones. The orcs in the Lord of the Rings books and films have been compared to unsavoury western stereotypes of both dark-skinned and East Asian peoples. You could even accuse the generally more positively-shown orcs of the WarCraft universe as falling into the old 'noble savage' stereotype. On the other hand, Tolkien himself was very much anti-racist by the standards of early 20th academics and writers, and his orcs cannot be conclusively stated to be singularly representative of any single extinct or extant human culture. So while goblins outside of Tolkien's works can be said to be Jewish stereotypes, the same thing cannot be said of orcs for any particular group of people. So do we even need to change how orcs are depicted for this world-building exercise?

Well, yes, frankly. I'm not a huge fan of either the always-evil-sallow-Tolkien-orc, the savage-but-noble-WarCraft-orc, or the green-and-stupid-evil-Warhammer-orc. Some combination of the three would be good I reckon, treating orcs as a much maligned (partially deserved or not) elven population that combines attributes from all these variants. So what orcish characteristics are we going to keep, what will we leave out and what can we add? One thing we definitely want to do is to differentiate orcs and goblins a bit more than people often do, so like Tolkien's original brand our orcs won't be green. I picture orcs as being like Tolkien's and Peter Jackson's depictions, only less filthy, not necessarily evil and with clearer sex/gender differentiation. Basically they're elves, but with skin (in order to contrast humans and other elves) having a colourless undertone, appearing to range in colour from white to grey to charcoal black. Basically like the natural human range, but somewhat desaturated. 

Basically they run the whole range of the Fitzpatrick scale. 

The wide range in skin colour can be justified by orcs being a dispersed population, having split and migrated all over the place and living at wildly different latitudes. This also would entail orcs being more culturally diverse than other elven populations, which we'll get to in a little bit. Just for giggles, we're also going to hang on to the common depiction of orcs having yellow eyes for the same reasons that our goblins have yellow eyes: it looks cool, and yellow/amber eyes are very rare among upright sapient beings (a.k.a humans) in the real world. Hell, our orcs and goblins can even have amber eyes due to sharing common genetic ancestry, with goblin's green skin being a later mutation. 

As discussed with goblins, the 'always evil' thing doesn't really work for a properly self-sufficient society, so we're definitely not keeping that. We can hang on to them being warlike, as every single depiction of orcs ever has them spoiling for a fight at some point and war is something that most cultures have more than a passing acquaintance with. I can imagine orc culture having a fixation on martial prowess and survival skills, which combined with the orcish diaspora suggests a tumultuous history of warfare, persecution, immigration and emigration in line with the history of the Jewish and Roma peoples.

How about dress and appearance? Well, since they are a dispersed people, orc's mode of dress would depend heavily on wherever they live and whatever their localised orc culture is. I imagine that competition with other cultures would push them out to the rougher areas, so deserts of all kinds can be their forte: both hot like the Sahara and Mojave, and cold like the Gobi or Antarctica. A general fondness for face coverings could be justified in both such climatic extremes, which segways nicely into other cultures having a very distorted view of what orcs actually look like. I can imagine orcs being dressed in clothing and armour inspired by a range of historical and modern cultures: Bedouin, Moroccan, Persian, Mongolian, Turkic, Mexican and Peruvian to name but a few. 

I Googled 'desert clothing' and this was the first result. 
Now I can't stop imagining a sassy desert orc, and I really hope this image isn't culturally appropriating anybody. 

6. Humans? 

So we've been talking abut elves a lot. The question then is, what about other peoples? Where do non-elf genetic populations fit into this world we're building here? More specifically, where do humans fit in between all these races and cultures, and what's the difference between them and elves? Do we, in fact, need to have humans as we know them at all?

Well, sure we can still include humans. Humans are easy to relate to, after all. You the, person reading this, are probably human and probably find it easier to relate to humans than, say, fictional pineapple people. So humans can be there, in all their real-life variety and perhaps some additional varieties. I always liked the inclusion of blue-skinned people in Steven Erikson's Malazan Book of the Fallen, after all. 

As to the evolutionary relationship between humans and elves, we can think of them as two distinct but closely-related species of hominin, closely related enough to humans that fertile offspring can result between them. Which leads to a sexy scientific question: 

How have elves not been out-bred by humans or vice versa?

Ooh, that is some HOT arm wrestling. 

Real-life non-sapiens humans like the Neanderthals and Denisovans were apparently out-lasted by Homo Sapiens less by being out-competed, but bred out: there's currently no evidence of any form of physical conflict occurring between Sapiens and other humans, but there is a fair amount that suggests that they mingled to the point where Neanderthals and Denisovans were no longer identifiable as distinct genetic groups. So how can our fantasy world full of various elves and humans avoid that happening in a way that dodges outright eugenics?

We have a few options here:

1. Maybe humans and elves have stayed apart enough that it just hasn't happened yet, with the genetic populations of both only having recently come into regular contact and still being generally wary of each other. 

2. Half-elves could favour genetic expressions of one parent or the other rather than a mix of both (as is used in the Elder Scrolls series), meaning that appearance-wise at least humans and elves both remain extant. 

3. Elves of all kinds could generally longer-lived and slower-growing than humans, with magic possibly exaggerating this. It's hard to out-breed someone who will outlive your great-grandchildren, after all.

Maybe our hypothetical fantasy viking could be married to an elf, as he sails around documenting all the various elves. Maybe he could finish off his saga like this:

"Þannig endar saga álfa, skrýtin og fjölbreytt eins og þau eru."