I'm more with Briala on this one - I'm for improving the lot of all elves and if the Dalish want to support that aim, that is good because naturally it will improve things for them too. I'm a fan of elves but I've been wondering about the Dalish of late. Funnily enough that has nothing to do with Masked Empire but rather their attitude to Shartan and the fact that the aravels can be seen to display banners of their noble houses.
Well, Lanaya does point out that the Keepers are usually descended from the nobility who governed the Dales. That might play a role.
First it has struck me that Shartan is an honest to goodness elven hero. He is the elven equivalent of Andraste. Look how the humans venerate her. Now consider how often the Dalish even mention him by name. What's up with them. They admit their "heroes of old" helped Andraste, a human. So why not make him a role model for their young instead of going on about Creator gods who abandoned them to their fate hundreds of years ago? I think the answer is that Shartan was fighting for all elves and effectively he was a flat ear, a city elf, who probably didn't give a stuff about the Creators, just freedom and a homeland for his people. Of course that is a bit of assumption on my part but it certainly seems odd that they have side lined him almost as effectively as the Chantry have.
The fact that a great deal of information about the Dalish is relegated to codex entries, companion banter, and even the World of Thedas is the issue. The fact that the Dalish view all spirits as dangerous is clarified in the religious debates between Merrill and Anders, and WoT; it initially confused some people when Merrill says a spirit taught her, because the developers never allowed Merrill to clarify the matter if the protagonist retorts that it's a "demon" (since the Dalish don't adhere to the Andrastian views of the denizens of the Beyond).
I don't think the Dalish neglect the feats of Shartan - the Dales was his dream, after all. And while some people might only see the worst in the Dalish, we know that they adopted a human infant, who they raised as one of their own, we know they signed a treaty to aid humanity during the Blight after losing everything to humans, and we know that the clans heed the call when the Dalish messenger requests aid from the other clans - it's not even an issue that any of the clans would contest this, and the messenger sounds offended if it's even questioned that any elf might not contribute to the battle.
Too many people are willing to point out how some Dalish view the city elves as "flat ears" and act as though this is attributable to the entirety of the Elvhen, but this isn't true. We also know that some city elves do the same towards elves who try to live outside the Alienage, condescendingly calling them "flat ears", and some of them even denigrate the Dalish as little more than "savages". Aneirin was rescued by Zathrian's clan when the templars ran him through and left him for dead as a boy, an elven mage was welcomed into Ariane's clan, Pol was welcomed with open arms into the Sabrae clan, Velanna's clan positively comments if they see her in the company of humans, and Merrill saw the people of the Alienage as elves.
Second, the elves only had around 200 years to establish a society with a hierarchy and yet apparently some did rise to the top of the pile - possibly because they were the ones with mages in their families - because mages do seem to be at the head of affairs. So if these noble families survived, this suggests that they managed to escape when the Dales fell at the expense of the lesser citizens. Those who weren't killed got rounded up and put in alienages. This could account for the contempt with which the city elves are held because it reflected the original superiority that the nobles felt but it then translated into the idea that they were maintaining and preserving elven culture whilst the others surrendered it - to some extent to diminish their own culpability in abandoning them. You see there is a codex concerning an axe that belonged to an elven general that he threw at his enemies before leaping to his death, rather than surrender, so some kept fighting to the bitter end when escape clearly wasn't possible, so how come so many noble houses escaped?
Not everyone is descended from the nobility, only some are. The hostility also comes from what happened: the elves who refused to submit to human rule became the Dalish, while the elves who accepted human rule had to convert to the human religion and surrender their cultural and religious beliefs. Neither the Dalish nor the City Elves contest this. Some Dalish take issue with the elves from the Alienage being humanized - shemlen clothing, following a shemlen god, and knowing quite little about elven culture (which is echoed by the developers who say the same). As David Gaider said at the old Dragon Central board:
The Dalish know some of the language. Their mastery of it is far from complete, but most Keepers will encourage their clans to use it as much as they can, but even they will mix it with the King's Tongue when they must. Many Dalish, in fact, will only use the most common phrases because that's all they know. City elves, meanwhile, use some of the words like "shemlen" or "vhenadahl" because that's become part of their lexicon -- but ask the average elf what those words actually mean and they probably wouldn't be able to tell you. "Shemlen" is "human" to them, but not "quick children".
It's also why the Dalish say they would like to tell their brethren from the Alienage what they've forgotten about elven history and lore once they have a new kingdom again.
I'm clearly being a bit cynical here but there is nothing really to suggest that what the Dalish claim is their preserved culture actually has anything much to do with the ancient elves or even for that matter how elves lived within the Dales. Did Shartan believe in the Creators or the Maker or neither?
Gaider actually addressed this in another thread:
As for the elves, their understanding of their own religion is incomplete. The whole truth was lost along with Arlathan and their immortality -- much of their lore was kept by a tradition of apprenticeship, handed down from the knowledgeable to the young, and this relied on the fact that the knowledgeable were eternal. Slaves also had less opportunity to spread their lore, so the sudden aging of the knowledgeable meant that much of this information was simply gone after several generations. This, of course, is their belief: the ancient Imperium maintained that the elves were never immortal to begin with, and that their lore was lost simply because the Imperium forbade its teaching.
Even so, the ancient elves did write things down, and so some scraps have been recovered. Thus the Dalish have slowly reassembled a religion from those pieces of lore, though how complete it is cannot be known. Even so, a few things are factual. For one, the original elven religion predates the cult of the Old Gods by a long time. Could the Old Gods have been based on the elven gods? Possibly, but there's nothing to suggest the elven gods were ever dragons, and certainly the contempt the Imperium held for elven culture makes it unlikely that they would think elven gods were worth worshipping. Consider also that it was the Old Gods that taught humanity its magic and encouraged them to destroy Arlathan -- why would elven gods do this? One could point to the Forgotten Ones (look at the codex entry on Fen'Harel for their mention) and suggest that they had reason for vengeance, though that would probably be against Fen'Harel and their good brethren and not against the elven people themselves, no? Still, all of that depends on how much of the knowledge given by Dalish tales is complete.
As for Shartan, the Dalish never clarify whether or not they believe he followed the elven pantheon, and there is conflicting information between the Dalish and the Chantry on a number of subjects concerning the elves (including what caused the war between the humans and the elves that lead to the fall of the Dales). I would like to think that the elven Inquisitor might be in the vicinity of the peace meeting because of an interest in the apparition of Shartan, in the trials that predate entry into the chamber with the Urn.
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