Drow

Most people who know the word met it in a game. The drow of Dungeons & Dragons are black-skinned elves who live in a vast underworld, worship a spider goddess, and forge weapons no surface smith can match. They have been in print since 1977 and they are one of the most successful invented peoples in fantasy.

The folklore behind the name is a much smaller and much stranger thing, and it starts with a disappointment: there is no such creature as a drow. There is only a second way of saying trow.

What the dictionaries actually say

Three lexical authorities record the word, and none of them gives it an entry of its own worth the name.

Jakob Jakobsen collected Norn, the dead Norse speech of Shetland, in the field between 1893 and 1895. His Etymological Dictionary of the Norn Language in Shetland gives the whole of it in two lines: “drow, sb., one of the ‘Good People’; drows, pl., gnomes; trolls. Parallel form to the syn. and more usual trow, sb., poss. by blending with O.N. draugr (dead man, ghost).” In Orkney, he adds, “drow, trow” was used for the devil. He marks the headword with a dagger, his sign for a word that had already gone out of use by the time he came looking for it.

The Scottish National Dictionary entry for DROW, published in 1952, is shorter still: “A goblin, one of the ‘little people’; the devil (Ork.).” Then, in square brackets, the whole verdict: “A variant form of Trow.” The entry carries exactly one quotation in its entire length, and it is Walter Scott in 1830, who says drows “may, in most other respects, be identified with the Caledonian fairies.”

Then compare the same dictionary’s entry for TROW, published in 1974. It runs to several hundred lines. Quotations from 1701 to 1998. Hill-trows, land-trows and sea-trows. Trowie knowes, trowie girse, trowie cairds. A trowist, meaning a person who knew how to undo their work. Trows stealing infants, souring animals, thirsting after music. That is where the folklore lives. All of it, under the other spelling.

So where did the metalworkers come from?

Here is the thing worth the visit. Search the Jakobsen entry, or either dictionary entry, for mining, forging, smithcraft or metal, and you will find nothing. The trows of the Northern Isles are many things and none of them is smiths.

The metalworking drow appears to come from a dictionary, and a fairly ordinary one. Abridged editions of Funk & Wagnall’s Standard Dictionary of the English Language carry a line defining drow as “one of a race of underground elves represented as skillful workers in metal,” with a cross-reference to TROLL.

Gary Gygax, who created the game drow, gave two accounts of where he got them. In the earlier one he thought the name came from Thomas Keightley’s The Fairy Mythology, adding that he could not check and that it hardly mattered. Later he was more definite: he said he took it from a listing in a Funk & Wagnall’s dictionary “and no other source at all,” and that he used the phrase “dark elves” he found there to build the race. Nobody has produced a Funk & Wagnall’s edition with the exact title he named, and the quoted definition above is unattributed, so treat the chain as likely rather than proven. What is certain is that the dictionary line and the game race say the same unusual thing, and the islands say nothing of the kind.

An honest note about this page

Until today this entry described the drow as a distinct being that was “wholly bad,” a “tiny miner and metalworker,” kin to the Norse dark elves, who stole cattle and lured fiddlers underground. Every one of those details is either a trow story wearing the wrong spelling or a piece of the dictionary-and-game strand described above. None of it is sourced to the folklore record. It has been removed rather than softened.

What survives is a smaller claim, and a better one. Drow is a word that fell out of use in Shetland before 1895, meaning what trow means. A dictionary gave it a definition nobody in the islands would have recognised. A game took that definition and built a civilisation on it. And the invented version is now so much louder than the original that the original had to be looked up to be defended.

Frequently Asked Questions

Is the drow a real creature from folklore?

Not as a separate creature. Drow is a variant form of trow, the fairy of Shetland and Orkney folklore, and both Jakobsen’s Norn dictionary and the Scottish National Dictionary treat it that way. The being is real in folklore; the distinction between drow and trow is not.

Are drow and trow the same thing?

Yes. Jakobsen calls drow a “parallel form to the syn. and more usual trow,” and the Scottish National Dictionary’s whole etymology for DROW reads “A variant form of Trow.” The idea that the drow is a darker or more evil version is not in either source.

Where does the idea of drow as underground metalworkers come from?

From a dictionary rather than from the islands. Abridged editions of Funk & Wagnall’s Standard Dictionary define drow as underground elves who are skilful workers in metal. No Shetland or Orkney source describes trows as smiths, and neither Jakobsen nor the Scottish National Dictionary mentions metalwork at all.

Did Gary Gygax invent the drow?

He invented almost everything the name now carries. Gygax took the word from an existing reference, first saying it was Keightley’s The Fairy Mythology and later that it was a Funk & Wagnall’s dictionary listing and nothing else. The spider goddess, the Underdark and the black-skinned elven society are his.

What did people in Shetland and Orkney actually believe about drows?

What they believed about trows. Walter Scott recorded in 1830 that islanders credited them with supernatural wisdom and otherwise identified them with the fairies. Jakobsen glosses them as one of the “Good People,” and notes that in Orkney the same word could mean the devil.

Related Entries

Trow, Nuckelavee, Finfolk, Selkie, Kelpie, Dökkálfar, Svartálfar, Draugr, Dwarf, Troll, Elf, Nisse, Knocker, Kobold, Changeling