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spacedhamlet · 30 days ago

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Elden Ring: A Finger Reading

What follows is a free exploration of the various finger imagery in Elden Ring and associated symbolism. Like any analysis of myth, it is not the aim of this inquiry to find definitive explanations, but instead to track correspondences and allow emergent meaning to add color to our experience of the game.

Feel free to skip around; each bolded header may be read as a standalone mini-essay.

The Lands Between The lands are “between” the player and what occurs. The images and events of the game world are between the player’s actions and the underlying code. All sorts of things can happen in this world, and what does happen is due to player input: this is what is “in between.” It is an alchemical melding of the substance that is being worked upon (the code of the game) and the will, attention, and interpretation of the player.

The Tarnished Individual in the Tarnished World When things are touched, they are “tarnished” in the sense that they are altered by what has touched them. The term evokes the idea of touching a polished metal and wearing away its patina, but obviously anything that a fleshy hand touches will leave as residue its oils and microorganisms and such.

In Dark Souls 1, the player-character is not tarnished, but branded, which is a similar idea. They are eternally marked with something. In either case the implication is that they are touched by an authoritative power beyond. What is this power?

In the Souls trilogy, the concept of spirit imposing itself on matter is thoroughly explored, starting with its creation myth, which evokes the premise that reality exists due to a collision, reaching, or intrusion from an ineffable realm into an unformed matrix. This creation myth of Souls is reminiscent of cosmogonies sourced from Gnosticism, Vedic tradition, Theosophy, and others. We can also see here a similarity to the catalyzing action of Elden Ring’s narrative: Marika’s act of shattering the Elden Ring that is simultaneously identified with Radagon’s act of repair upon the Elden Ring. The dispersion of the world into many parts is largely interpreted within the narrative to be a great tragedy, which the player must rectify. But Radagon’s action also indicates that this great scattering may already be serving an effect of restoration. The hammer is used in both acts, exemplifying the power of touch to destroy and create.

FROM has always excelled at tying the metaphysical conceits of their stories to the formal qualities of their medium (video games). Much is gained by keeping this in mind when interpreting their lore. In making a game, they are of course making a world; they are like Marika/Radagon in that way. The runes that fly everywhere are like the code that is extended to everything, making the world possible.

Whatever cosmology we decide to explore—Souls, Elden, Biblical, Vedic—we can find similar questions buried at the heart. One of these mysteries that FROM games seem to hold very close is the peculiar condition of the moral ambivalence of creation. The fact that the universe exists can seem like a horrific and arbitrary horror, a pointless and abjectly flawed extravagance; it can also seem like a profound grace, a boundlessly generative gift born out of infinite compassion. Does the world exist from an act of love or violence?

The private initiations we undergo in life can feel similarly paradoxical. To know the touch of God is at once graceful and horrible. A tarnished is apparently marked by their acquaintance to God. Vyke, the mascot of Elden Ring, visually represents some of these ideas with his “Fingerprint set” armor, particularly the helm which clearly shows a melting of metal due to the imprint of giant fingers. To have felt the touch of divine will marks you indelibly.

Fingers and Directives — Manipulation Fingers not only touch, they point. This use of fingers is shown gratuitously throughout Elden Ring, perhaps most commonly in the sites of grace which “point” to the next step in the critical path. In life, we point in order to direct others, and also to identify or make a distinction. (Fun fact: in many Buddhist traditions, it’s conventional to direct with an open palm rather than a pointed finger, in order to not separate the inquiry from the subject). Human-animal relationships show that animal species who understand pointing are relatively few; those who understand best are naturally closest to humans: dogs, simians, etc. To be close to humans is to be close to culture and spirit; pointing is near to the beginning of symbolic understanding.

Elden Ring throws players into an open world and “points them” via a variety of means. The sites of grace extend beams of light to point literally, but the camera will also frame through doorways and over vistas certain objects of interest, by no accident. There is also the slow, diegetic build-up of an indicated direction as a player’s objective is given definition through lore. Through conversations with NPCs, through item descriptions, and through the visual setpieces of the environment, a player comes to some sort of understanding of what’s going on and what they’re doing. In this way we discover arcane, hidden arrows.

The most thorough exploration of pointing as a means of control comes from the witch Ranni, who is of course in the body of a marionette, and includes marionettes among her subjects. To state the obvious: fingers invisibly control the movements of marionettes. Ranni is perfectly set up to feel secret and subversive; her questline is cryptic in its narrative and unobvious in its procedure. We get the sense that we are finding “an alternative path,” positioning ourselves in defiance of the game’s critical path. This is of course not true, Ranni’s quest is simply a parallel critical path in all but name—every detail is included to make the thing feel complete and intentional. But that is the twist: that here is a path which superficially seems subversive, but is in fact totally expected.

The puppet symbolism continues into the DLC, found again amidst finger symbolism in the Cathedral of Manus Metyr. Like with Ranni, Count Ymir’s servants appear to be humans, but are really puppets. And like Ranni, he gives the player mysterious but clear directives, manipulating where they choose to go. The description on the Finger Ruins of Rhia map he gives reads, “I only wish to be of service.”

Runes The ubiquitous use of runes in the game is very telling. Something that the act of inscribing runes make plain compared to other acts of writing—a quill on paper, a finger on a keyboard, even the clay stylus of cuneiform—is the impact of transcription. To some extent, all writing is a physical meeting, an act of touch. But rune-carving, more than any other, amplifies the intensity and violence of this encounter. For a rune to be carved, the knife (for wood) or chisel (for stone), has to be forced in, and shapes the material despite physical resistance.

Language acts upon our bodies. The inscriptions of society affect our conduct. Spirit attempts to be realized in form, and acts through whatever material instruments are available to it; crystals, amoebas, trees, wolves, human beings—all aggregates of matter with differing capacities to act upon the world when manipulated.

The Furled Finger Some people have suggested that the furled fingers refer to what the player’s hand does when they play Souls games with the “claw grip,” holding down the O button with the index finger. That’s an interesting comparison, but I suspect the furled fingers may also simply represent the normal, default hand position on a controller. Playing a Souls game the expected way, your left and right index fingers will be slightly furled around the shoulder buttons, and will furl further when pressed.

The Shape of the Lands Many have pointed out that the shape of the Lands Between resembles a curled finger, with its tip at Caelid. To give a cursory visual symbolism to the areas, we can see how the Mountaintops of the Giants resembles the metacarpal knuckle, the knuckle which is quite pronounced on the index and middle finger, jutting up from the back of the hand like a mountain. Leyendell is situated as the proximal phalanx, the first and longest finger bone. While Liurnia is then in place as the next fingerbone, the intermediate phalanx, we will see its symbolism has much to do with the interphalangeal joints (the other places our fingers bend) in particular. Then Limgrave is perhaps the latter interphalangeal joint, or maybe just the distal phalanx (the little finger bone at the end). But Caelid is decidedly the finger tip, perhaps the skin, or at least the place where contact happens. Let’s explore these in depth now, in reverse order.

Caelid exemplifies, in many ways “the point,” of the finger, because Caelid is the lands where the contact happens. Impact is shown in many ways, in Radahn and his meteor imagery; in the craters and pockmarks and scars of these lands; in the tactile imagery of slime and heat. It is the fingertip that is doing the most touching; it is subject to all that it touches: bugs, dirt, and rot. This is the price that the tip of the finger pays for being the most directly involved in the action of life.

When something is touched, it has been touched. And when a button is pressed, it has been pressed. Actions have been executed on the land of Caelid. The fate of the forces vying for power was decided there (the battle between Malenia and Radhan). Will was instantiated there. In more distant lands the will is read and interpreted, but “what ends up happening,” happens in Caelid. It is where the will meets the world and determines it. This is shown by Radhan’s suspension of the stars; it shows us that things do not move in the desert of immanence—it is always now. The determination of the moment is like an impact, like a meteor, whether that is the action of the finger to press a button on a controller and execute a command, or spirit moving through the complexity of the form to determine something in the material world. Once it is done, it is done.

Limgrave is the introductory world, representing the idealization of the process of pointing and touching, of having an experience; the imaginary fingertip without the reality of Caelid’s direct contact. It’s worth pointing out that Limgrave and Caelid are more directly contiguous; there is no boss or grand lift that separates them. This is the land of pointing without indoctrination: “try this, try that.” Varre is maybe a little aggressive in his suggesting, but still here all gestures are made without much pressure or pretense about their meaning.

When we get to Liurnia, we get to the land of scholars and astrologers. What astrologers do is use the stars to interpret fate. In this way they are “articulating” the mandate of will, and this theme of articulation has much to do with the intermediate phalanx and the surrounding joints. It is the proximal interphalangeal joint (the middle joint of a finger) in particular that does most of the work when actually pressing the shoulder and trigger buttons. At this point I invite you to mime a controller in your hands and see how your finger moves when you press an imaginary R1, for instance.

Joints are evoked by the emphasis on the mechanical in Liurnia: the war machines, automata, and elaborate elevators of the civilization there. In the finger, the joint can neither claim closest proximity to the world or to will; it is the intermediary. But at the same time, the quality of the input, the question of skill, is mostly determined by the functioning of the joint. This is why Liurnia is a land of craft, technique, and intelligence. “It’s all in the wrist,” so to speak. It is the task of the astrologers and sorceries to play interlocutor, to make the bridge from spirit to nature. As will comes to the world, it is technique which predominantly bestows character to the outcome. This is why Liurnia culturally emphasizes distinction and lineage, celebrating each of their great sorcerers for particular reasons.

Leyendell corresponds to the proximal phalanx, the finger segment near to the palm. But let’s just take that term as a pun, “proximal phalanx,” since it sounds like it’s describing a military formation that is nearby. Nearby to what? To the tree, obviously. This is the place which claims closest knowledge of the Greater Will and is most observant of it. In real life it the longest bone, and kind of resembles the lances which are so emblematic of this place. But really it is about this place being the object of identification of the finger. This is where the finger starts, this is where we begin to identify “this is the appendage I’m using to play the game.”

The Mountaintops of the Giants evokes the metacarpal knuckle, which juts out of the back of the hand like a mountain. There is some good bone and joint imagery here, in the chains connecting cliffs and mountains together, serving as a poetic description of a mountain range. This is the main area behind the tree, behind the nerves, and it is cold and desolate because the metacarpal joint is not really obviously active in our experience of play. We move the proximal joint and its phalanxes much more: those are the parts of our finger we are most aware of during play. However, if a player is using their index finger for both bumper and trigger, then the metacarpal knuckle joint does move quite visibly—in an orthogonal direction. It actually moves in this slightly clumsy, lumbering way, and also makes visible the extensor indicis tendon. This tendon submerges into the forearm, implying a world far beyond itself: the rest of the body, the world at large, the depths of history, and all the events tucked away in these distant lands. But this area—along with the Consecrated Snowfields, the Haligtree, and Farum Azula—is forbidden. These areas are “beyond” the Erdtree, beyond the site of order and control. The Mountaintops reveal that the finger is only isolated as the appendage involved in the act of gaming as a matter of perceptual convenience. Really the vast entirety of the body is present in our play experience. The Erdtree is the beacon of consciousness, showing us how the finger becomes the locus of somatic attention when throwing ourselves into this virtual world. Yet there is so much more behind it.

Grafting The association of tree branches to human extremities has been with us from time immemorial. Tree “limbs” remind us of human limbs, and the twiggy extent of a branch can often appear handlike or fingerlike.

In horticulture, grafting is when you take a limb from one plant and attach it to another, merging those bodies. Godrick the Grafted does this with his own body, adding limbs and fingers and heads to himself. He is the first Lord boss of the game, while the first mandatory boss is one his underlings, the “grafted scion,” so the game really goes out of its way to draw our attention to this theme right away. Not to mention that Marika, the world creator-preserver-sustainer, has as her rune the image of a grafting cut.

The first association that occurs to me is that the player is likely to see the grafting bosses more than any others, on subsequent playthroughs and New Game+s. In the latter case, what you are doing is adding to yourself. Your build is going to develop new capacities, and you will obtain new weapons and techniques, when you continue to play the game--resembling by metaphor Godrick or the scions, with your many options and inventory.

Any playthrough also follows a “plot tree,” a flowchart of progression, and a player can’t follow every branch to its furthest point in a single game. So in that way, a subsequent playthrough also “grafts” something onto the world, onto your experience of the narrative of the lands between.

These are interesting concepts to explore, and grafting provides crucial amplifications for anyone wishing to engage with the alchemical motifs of the game, but I only bring it up as tangentially related to this review of finger symbolism. If fingers are shown to be instruments of will, then whenever we see an abundance of fingers, it implies a multiplicity of wills. This is helpful context for some of the following subjects.

Finger Creepers At first encounter, a player might assume the finger creepers have been grafted, or otherwise designed by the academy. We have been introduced to both the grafting culture of Stormveil, and the mechanical engineering of Raya Lucaria. But no, the fingers were apparently born fully formed from the Mother of Fingers, as revealed in the DLC.

The fingers amble in a way that resembles typing, or manipulating a puppet in fast-motion. The act of typing conjures associations of the developers, and the connection between designing a world and manipulating a player’s sense of agency through subtle guidance has already been made in our brief look at Ranni’s questline. Indeed, it is just beyond the (expected) first introduction of the finger creepers, Caria Manor, that the player finds Ranni’s abode.

The fingers are monstrous, in fact they visually echo the Monstrosities of Sin, the handlike hippos in the Profaned Capital from Dark Souls 3. The design and movement of both these creatures seem to convey a desperate grasping. They are haggard, worn hands, with too many fingers, and are eager to grab. These games tend to portray the attitude of grasping, of seeking to know the unknowable, as greedy and ultimately deforming.

The Creepers’ use of gravity magic supports this: they want to draw things close to themselves. It thematically connects them to the limits of knowledge (physics), and to the great archetypal principle of matter.

Metyr The mother of the finger creepers is even more grotesque. She is perhaps the most direct figurative representation of the principle of matter the game gives us. She uses gravity magic, and is close with an outer god (an unknowable mystery). She holds her “microcosm” which resembles a black hole, and from which she receives messages—she is the ideal agent to be acted upon by will. Her “fixed gaze” symbolizes the fixedness of matter; the conatus of inertia. The monstrous fingers come out of her fully formed; like matter, she is hyper-fertile. The Great Mother is always disturbing to behold, for reasons psychological as well as existential, but her freakish depiction here also seems to speak to her own striving: to know the will of the outer god—she looks like grasping, an image we reviewed through the fingers—and her strange growths could also represent a struggle to account for everything that is asked of her.

She is the “first of the meteorites to fall in the Lands Between,” which indicates that she is the first principle—the first extension of the pleroma. In building a world or building a game, first you must have the medium, the lattice to hang forms upon.

One of her weapons has an art called “Kowtower’s Resentment,” whose description compares the act of furling a finger to bowing. As we have seen in other section, spirit’s actions upon matter can often be seen as an invasion and subjugation. When will enters the picture, something must bend to that will: whether it is your own finger that moves because of your will, or the environment that is then “bent” (affected) by your touch. Will is shaping the world, causing it to bow. It is surrendering to spiritual principles—which will always involve lamentation if there is an inadequate relationship to will, an impoverished understanding. “Why is this happening to me?” “How could I have done this?” Kowtowing is an act of joyful devotion only if the subject of worship is understood (Metyr is stated to be now oblivious to the messages of her “lord”).

And then, her most famous children represent two attitudes that the primal yin principle might adopt in response to the movement and intensity of the yang principle. Let’s examine them now.

The Two Fingers and the Three Fingers We shall just consider the numbers first. Two suggests a dichotomy, a dynamic at the heart of countless ontologies across the entirety of human history. Dark Souls and Elden Ring also centralize dichotomy in their cosmologies, of course. The Two Fingers are announced to us in an official, dignified setting in the hubworld, and they are named by others as an authority. Three, by contrast, is madness. It is not 1 and it is not 2. It thwarts the dialectic through radical otherness, but in so doing, subjects itself to the aporetic condition it seeks to disrupt; in other words, it becomes other to the concept of duality, thus forming a duality.

It is a bit of a fractal relationship between these two, therefore, since this dynamic will recur at every level. The dialectic will contain something which escapes the dialectic while constituting a new dialectic. Yet, when you put two fingers with three fingers, you get… a hand! A completion.

Is there a thumb on the Three Fingers? It kind of looks like it sometimes. In the game, your thumbs control movement, camera, and items: a matrix of input that is far more variable than the mere pressing of a button or not, the role of our “primary two fingers” when playing the game. So the two-fingers basically makes one kind of decision in time: instantiating a confirmation or negation (most of the time: choosing to attack). There is a much greater breadth in what the thumbs do, driving the character around the map on one hand, and changing perspective on the other. So the capacities of the three fingers to influence are more profound.

And in a narrative sense, the Three Fingers literally do change the player’s direction, and change the player’s perspective. The meeting with the Two Fingers is obvious, ordained, nearly necessary. The discovery of the Three Fingers is far more obscure; obscure to the point where it is basically unreasonable to expect a normal player to stumble upon it naturally. To meet these fingers, a character must go to a hidden area and remove their clothing. Finding the area itself is not unlikely for an inquisitive player, but knowing to remove one’s clothes is never clearly suggested by the game. There is only one line of dialogue that provides this clue: if the player follows Hyetta’s questline, she will suggest that a player visit the door and “divest themselves of their possessions.” This relatively ambiguous hint is the best we get, so an audience with the Three Fingers therefore demands one of three things: cleverness (the player completes Hyetta’s quest and experiments with her clue), metatextual inquiry (the player looks it up online), or randomness (the player encounters the door while already naked for goofs or for speedrunning). The latter causes are thematically relevant to the fingers, as they disrupt the integrity of the gameworld: a player who looks it up online is going outside the boundary of he game, and the player who is naked is not invested in the practice of diegetic immersion (the character, who nonetheless continues to exist, is not convinced by the world, they are more purely instrumentalized by the player’s will).

Finally, as another way of looking at which fingers these fingers are, we can imagine that the Two Fingers belong to the mouse, and the Three Fingers belong to the keyboard. Few Elden players are using this control set-up, but the developers are. This also implies that, for most people, the Two Fingers represent the right hand, and the Three Fingers represent the left hand, which is clearly consistent with traditional chiral symbolism (right is order, left is chaos).

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