Elves pregnancy

[Immortal298]

I'm working on a fantasy novel at the moment and i need some advice.  One of my characters, an elf, is pregnant and i'm trying to decide how long the gestation period should be.  The standard nine months is one option, but i also have other problems.  the elves live for hundreds of years; does that mean they should have a shorter or longer gestation period?  also, their bodies are really slight and child-bearing will be really hard on them.  will evolution have made the gestation period shorter becuase of this?  gimme opinions guys!

[flashpig]

How about planiting them as seeds, and having them grow like cress?

Or on trees like apples.

[Buster Brown]

Three years -- very slow growing, with very small but with limbs like adult elves, perfectly proportioned.

[jno]

humans are born comparatively early (think how much more quickly other animals attain maturity) because of their big heads, which mean there won't be any room for them to get out if they wait longer than 9 months. This in turn is because of their brain size. So if your elves have little brains they could gestate longer but be born ready-grown-up. Or they could all have caesareans. Or they could grow externally in glass dishes, as some people do these days; I imagine elves are beyond such vulgar human desires as lust, and prefer to spend their evenings on AB.

[pixi]

oh bless immortal298, this is how it happens, mr and mrs elf go to see the fairy queen, she performs a wonderful  magical ceremony and presents them with a special egg, they then go home and place egg carefully on a satin cushion and gaze adoringly  at it day by day whispering words of encouragement and love, after 2 weeks the egg becomes translucent and inside you can see the baby elf wriggling and kicking, after a further 2 weeks, the baby elf is fully formed and sometime over the next 24 hours the egg dissolves and the baby elf is born.  They then need extreme protection from mr and mrs elf for anything between 1 and 3 hours (the length of time it takes for their wings to dry out)  They are then fully capable of flight and go to the elf nursery with all the other baby elves until they are old enough to be given the tasks they will do for life (usually making instruments, composing music, writing stories etc) elves are the most creative of the little folk. Hope this helps, obviously I cannot tell you what happens at the secret ceremony, and please dont mention me in your books thank you list as the fairy queen would be extremely annoyed at me and ground me in the fairy forest for at least a week

[ursula62]

Elves wish on a star for a baby on a full moon night.

A while later a beautiful flower grows outside their house. When the petals open the baby is in the middle of the flower, smiling at its new parents.

[Kingaroo]

It would make sense to me that the gestation period would be longer, roughly proportional to the longer lifespan. If humans live 70 years and elves live 700, then gestation should be something like 90 months (7.5 years) -- but make it a magical meaningful number of months. And if it messes up your plot -- like something has to happen to the elf during her pregnancy, or she has to have the baby before X happens, then make it whatever length you like. Just make sure to give the units in moons, not months, and use a number that relates to seasons or stars or something.

[brachiopod]

Pixi, I am so disappointed. I read the whole of your post; seeing the Fairy Queen....magic ceremonies....satin cushions... drying wings... and I was waiting for the expalnation that they both go home and sh*g eachother stupid like everyone else.

Then again, functional morphology of the phylum Littlepeopleodia (including the classes elfidia and pixilia) was never a strong point of mine.

[pixi]

ahem brachiopod, that is exactly what happens really but immortal298 did stipulate that he was working on a Fantasy novel

[Immortal298]

a) i'm a she, not a he.  b) if any of these ideas where mentioned to the elves in my book you'd be beheaded in a second.  they dont have wings, they are fully functional humanoid characters who have sex in the normal way.  in fact, the sex and conception is actually a pretty major plot point.

[mycatis]

Oh Immortal298  please tell me you're gonna have real fairie folk not disneyfied fairies??  I have my own vision of real fairies and get really annoyed when folk think I mean the "bottom of the garden" type (well when I say annoyed you should understand that I dont get out much lol)

[Immortal298]

there arent really any faerie folk in my book.  the elves are just one of the races i have.  the other being men.  they're a little like the ones in LOTR. 

[TWINKYGIRL76]

I would think that, if the elf lives for hundreds of years then, the gestation period should be longer than a normal pregnancy.

As for the problem of pregnancy being really hard on such slight beings, maybe they could give birth to the spirit of the child, like a kind of transparent form of a baby and as the body grows with the aging process, the body becomes real flesh, bone and blood.
Sorry if this sounds like a really stupid suggestion.

[Peter Pedant]

gestation period is dependent on adult mass -heffalumps -2 yrs, horses a little less, dogs longer than ferrets, and littel meeces quite short.

It may be a 5/4 power law - I am not sure. Brachiopod may know.

ergo....once you know the average adult mass of an elf, the gestation period - supposing they are mammals is roughly defined.

[TWINKYGIRL76]

And that should have been ageing...

[verong]

The gestation period should be shorter because of their small frames but perhaps it might be quite hard for them to conceive, shorter and fewer fertility periods?

[jno]

they have midwives on the National Elf Service?