"'...Christotan history begins in 967 with the formation of the Confederacy by the Treaty of Wesseldale. A frequent criticism levelled at Christotan scholasticism is that it pretends the entire history of the world, or at least the part of eastern Teraf now occupied by the Confederacy, also began on this date. The charge has some justification. Compared to the scrupulous care with which Christoté's 350 year existence has been recorded, there has been scant attention paid towards the epochs which preceded it, that of the seven independent feudal kingdoms and the Erish and Jurick Empires which separately conquered them. The few accounts which exist are invariably heavily biased, and function as little more than cautionary tales to frighten children into realising the advancements made under the Confederacy. This selective blindness is not merely caused by national vainglory, however. I would contend that a characteristic shared by all Terafan cultures is that there is a point beyond which they can not, or will not, see. That point is most commonly the year 1. This of course marks the start of the Terafan calendar, itself possibly a conscious attempt to nurture this myopia by suggesting that history itself did not exist hitherto. The year, however, marks an end as well as a beginning; the completion of humanity's conquest of Teraf.
"'Historians have not wholly ignored this year or the many which preceded it. Spurred on by Callar's bold assertions, the past two decades have witnessed a series of writers vigorously debating what the start of the new calendar truly commemorated. Vastac claims that 1 actually marks the First Partition, the treaty which carved the Terafan continent into nation-states; 77, the year commonly ascribed to the treaty, is erroneous. His evidence has some validity but the theory is itself only really an attempt to paint over the problem of the Eldar Race. More widely accepted is the belief that 1 was the year when the wars against the Eldar, masters of Teraf before humanity began to migrate from the land of Ellniss, were effectively over. Scattered bands of the creatures may have remained afterwards but virtually all of the continent lay in human hands. Callar goes one step further. According to his bleak account, the Terafan calendar was started when the very last Eldar was slaughtered. He portrays the human settlers as being driven by such pathological neurosis that they could not consider the continent truly theirs while a single one of their enemies still stood. Drawing on Mieric's ideas, he claims that building a civilisation requires denying existence to anything deemed to be in a state of 'otherness' to it. Before the Terafan civilisations could begin, the otherness which the Eldar represented had to be annihilated.
"'Callar's argument is supported by the totality with which the Eldar have vanished from Teraf. There is, to my knowledge, no record whatsoever of any living after the year 1. Furthermore, there is almost no evidence to say that they ever existed. Their societies have been obliterated, their houses and cities apparently razed to the ground. Beyond the basic fact that they built a great civilisation which we destroyed when taking Teraf from them, virtually nothing is even known. Again, it is only recently that anything seems to have wanted to be known. Various accounts of the Eldar have now started to appear, almost all entirely based on conjecture. The creatures are usually described as being physically similar to humans but most closely resembling Elves, highly intelligent and technologically very advanced. Most writers portray them as conveniently cruel and debased, although a few claim that it was their pacific nature which made them so ill-equipped to withstand humanity's onslaught. One fashionable academic game is also to determine their nature by projecting their alleged inspiration on human civilisations. Various roads supposedly follow ancient Eldar routes, and any building not obviously derivative of anything hitherto existing is invariably said to bear marks of their influence. (The fact that these 'influences' have been detected in structures as diverse as the Macronom in Ansell and Huwdone House in Jalkin tends to drain all credibility from such claims.) Another popular topic of debate is the reason for humanity's victory over such an apparently advanced race. The physical frailty of the Eldar, the decadence of their culture and the fragmented nature of their societies have all been variously cited. Caplan's novel hypothesis is that the Eldar simply contracted contagious human diseases which they had no immunity to and their destruction largely occurred through natural means.
"'The theories I consider most interesting are those which claim the annihilation of the Eldar was justified or even accidental. I believe it is part of the same process as the earlier attempts to forget the race entirely. It could be countered that those best placed to chronicle Eldar society, the humans living during Teraf's first centuries, scarcely had the leisure or the methods for sound historical research. However, history was not simply neglected during this period. It was recorded through the medium of folk songs and stories, long-established receptacles for storing the collective consciousness. There are a significantly larger number of folk songs detailing the creatures which supposedly drove humans from Ellniss than there are about the Eldar Race. Children still sing of Yuzgo the Orc Lord, the Snakemen tribes of the Alchiss Desert and the Centaur brothers Equiepa and Loja. Virtually no legends about the Eldar survive. The name itself appears to have been given grudgingly, a barely worthwhile corruption of the word 'elder.' This in itself is surprising, not least because the Eldar were our more recent foes. The conquest of Teraf is estimated to have lasted around 150 years in total. As several generations were in their entirety engaged in the wars, if the normal process applied then the struggle would surely be seared on the human memory.
"'I do not believe that the normal process was applied, however. It was distorted by the same factor which shapes contemporary theories about the Eldar. This factor is guilt. As mentioned, most accounts of the Eldar agree that they were physically similar to ourselves. One, expressed by Anarti, even states that they were merely a Terafan race of humans. And our ancestors stole an entire continent from this human-like species and exterminated it in the process. The excuse most commonly offered is that humanity had no other option. Life on Ellniss at the start of the migrations to Teraf appeared to have grown unsustainable. The settlers were merely doing to a more vulnerable race what creatures on Ellniss were attempting to do to them. It is scarcely an adequate defence, especially in light of recent challenges to the common explanation of the colonisation of Teraf. Anarti and Callar have both questioned the precariousness of humanity's position on Ellniss, arguing not against the existence of Orcs and their ilk but against the severity of the threat they actually posed. Both point to the survival of human civilisation on Ellniss to this day, when the depletion caused by the Terafan migrations would surely have hastened its destruction if a war of survival was really underway. The migrations, Callar argues, were caused by nothing more than the eternal human instinct for fresh conquests. The land of Teraf was rich, fertile and relatively unguarded; and so we took it. He claims that the same process is currently being repeated with the gradual colonisation of Sh'rlathia, the continent lying to the east of Teraf. For Callar these two traits, land lust and suppressed guilt, have been key components in the development of all Terafan societies. They combine to create what he sees as the central paradox of human existence; irrepressible greed and an inability to accept the consequences of it.
"'Elsewhere I will discuss Callar's tendency to assume a universal human condition only when it happens to support his arguments. Also questionable is his account of the destruction of the Eldar. There is no reason why popular opinion on this particular issue should be automatically accepted. Virtually no conflict has ever been resolved with absolute victory for one side, and it is more likely that the year 1 did after all only mark the decisive moment in an ongoing war. The Eldar civilisation was clearly destroyed but, given the poor empirical records of the period, we cannot take it on trust that not one Eldar survived. It is very possible that some remained on the margins of the continent, which was not fully colonised until several centuries later, for some considerable time. If we believe in their physical similarity to humans, the two races could even have interbred and the eventual 'destruction' of the Eldar may simply have been a matter of genetic dilution.
"'Yet what is significant, and what gives Callar's theories a lasting relevance, is that the more apocalyptic version has entered the general consciousness. Callar is also correct in stating that this act is viewed not with racial vainglory but with guilt. The consequence is that our founding fathers can never be viewed without the shadow of genocide lingering over their shoulders. Mieric argues that both individual and social progress will always be flawed if a belief in the perfection of ancestors is in any way compromised. It is a burden which the continent of Teraf has always carried. It could be claimed that this uncertainty has made its development both more sustained and more diverse. The absence of the belief in a single omnipotent god, for example, has enabled pluralistic societies with relative tolerance for different creeds to prevail in Teraf. In Christoté even our single greatest founding father, Tars Tukas, is not above criticism, and our nation has become the most progressive in the world. Yet the reverse side of the dichotomy is uncertainty and, ultimately, fear. This is because the past which we try to anchor our future around is never entirely secure.'
(from The Innocents)