The Founding of the Crownbough Courts

Overview

The canopy Elves of the Crownboughs gather into the Crownbough Courts.

It follows The Rising of the Crownboughs and comes before the rivalries and embassies of later ages, when a branch's taste for height and splendour becomes a realm of great households.

The Great Households

The Courts are no sudden break with the older Elves. They grow when the canopy world of the Crownboughs can no longer pass as a lofty corner of the old Rootcrown Concord.

Splendour and Rivalry

The Crownbough founding turns beauty into power. A household proves its right to rule by what it can raise: a hall that sings in the wind, a garden-walk across a ravine of air, a ceremony no rival can match.

Splendour breeds rivalry. Households feud over the best trees, over singers lured from one house to another, over slights given at ceremony, and the feuds are fought with duels on the boughways and with shaping turned against a rival's hall. When hall canker breaks out where two houses' boughways meet, each accuses the other's knife, and some of the longest feuds begin there. Court toasts of these ages honour duellists who fought on a single bough above the forest floor, and the court jest still told against a proud house is of the household that won a quarrel and lost a hall to the next storm. Darker tales tell of shapers who sang a rival's hall shut with the family inside, and of a feud ended only when both houses' heirs fell together from the same broken walk.

Historical Significance

With the Courts, the High Elves stand among the peoples whose lines became named realms, as told in The Founding of the Rootcrown Concord, The Founding of the Thornbound Circles, The Founding of the Ironspine Holds, The Founding of the Stonewake Compact, The Founding of the Confluence Marches, and The Founding of the Serathic League.

Because the Courts are already built around being seen to be great, every later meeting with Humans and Dwarves becomes a contest of pride. The first of those meetings with the Ironspine are told in The First Crownbough-Ironspine Contacts.