Thread:ARamirez 19/@comment-1618941-20120409023341/@comment-1009000-20120411014548

Allright you guys, you managed to get my grey matter going - First off, let me start by saying that I love this argument, but maybe that's just me. I noticed when you first got into it and I tried to keep out, because, frankly, I wasn't sure either way.

Now, having done a little research myself, I'm kind of sad to say: There is no definite answer to this. We're talking about fictional races from a fictional universe and I'm afraid that schoolbook grammar (which all prescriptive grammar ends up being) doesn't go into that much detail - if you find evidence to the contrary (and I do mean REAL evidence, not wiki articles), please let me know. But certainly, by applying schoolbook grammar to the letter, you can easily end up with warblade's conclusion - even though his sources also capitalize the Svartálfar on at least one occasion, but then again, there's another language barrier there and besides, these creatures were given names long before someone even brought up the idea of writing, let alone whether to capitalize certain letters or not.

I did, however, find that Tolkien capitalized his elves, apparently going by the argument that they were a nationality of sorts. The same argument could probably be made for the Jotuns, just as it could be made for the (Asgardian) Dwarves, as opposed to dwarves if we were talking about a race of short, beer drinking people that generally appear in works of fantasy fiction wielding axes. The question of whether they are named after the region or the region after them is not as important as the question of whether they would be racially and locally defined by their name - which, in my opinion, would be the case here, and which therefore would have me leaning towards capitalization.

On a funny side note: you guys brought up the argument of respect being one of the reasons for capitalizing people. I certainly wouldn't want to risk ticking off a race of giants just because we don't capitalize their racial name - then again, they probably can't read anyway. And, as we all know, Merry Marvel gets around this whole argument because they haven't discovered how to take the CapsLock key out in seventy years of making comics...

(oh, and adding to your argument below: there actually IS a policy that was decided on the forums a while back - character histories are in the past tense, issue summaries in the present. As for the rest, like powers and such, it's anyone's guess)