House elves and some spoilers for Swordspoint WAS: realistic solutions

[Goddlefrood]

No: HPFGUIDX 180914

> SSSusan:
> > <snip> I will continue to say I sure wish JKR would have 
> > given us an alternate term/word/concept for this<SNIP>

> Magpie:
> <snip>
> > But I'm glad there isn't an alternate word or concept 
> > because I think it would just be a euphamism for slave 
> > owning. <snip>

> Carol:
> JKR may not have supplied an alternate term, but such a term 
> does exist in English: "servitude."
<SNIP>

Goddlefrood:

There is another, possibly even better, term that could be used, 
and as the books were certainly not a history lesson, allow me 
to give a short one.

As I'm sure everyone here knows England, and indeed other 
parts of the benighted isles, formerly operated under the 
feudal system. Remnants of this can still be ascertained 
quite easily - there's the great estates, the numerous 
villages that were originally tied to some manor or other, 
and where all of the local Lord's wrokers resided etc. These 
communities had, and to an extent still have, a very strict 
hierarchy. 

If the analogy is drawn, as I propose, between the feudal system 
and the WW, then your wizard to house-elf relationship becomes 
not one of master and slave, but one of master and vassal. I 
wonder if that would meet the case and allow us to move forward 
in this discussion without referring to the elves as slaves. 
They do, IMO, more closely resemble vassals than slaves, even 
if there are definitions of vassal around that aver to slave 
being a synonym of vassal. It most assuredly is not the same 
at all. My preferred definition would be this:

"a person holding a fief; a person who owes allegiance and
service to a feudal lord [syn: vassal, liege, liegeman, liege 
subject, feudatory]"

Taken from WordNet 2.1.

The parameters for the release of a vassal house-elf are set out 
in the books. In many ways the house-elf fears release from its 
vassalage as much as vassals have done. That because there were 
benefits of being a vassal, such as having the protection of 
one's lord, housing supplied and in many cases a reasonable 
stipend. The latter of these was not always the case, and 
obviously other than Dobby there are no paid elves at all 
in canon.

The above would be complementary to my earlier post on this 
matter, which equated elves to hobs.

Goddlefrood, offering a reasonable alternative word to use and 
anticipating none would use it ;-)