Elden Ring: What Are The Tarnished?
The Tarnished were banished from the Lands Between long before the events of Elden Ring, and we play as one of the returning Tarnished who is drawn home by grace.
"One of the main themes of the game is how the player, the Tarnished, approaches or treats this new-found grace and this return to the land that they were once banished from, how they interpret this and its meaning," Elden Ring creative director Hidetaka Miyazaki said in an interview.
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They're a lot like the Chosen Undead and the Hollows in Dark Souls. They're cursed to immortality, bound by a singular goal, and driven to a choice, working tirelessly to fix an apocalypse wrought by the gods who spurn them. The Tarnished are vilified outcasts, to put it simply, but there's a lot more to them than that.
The Erdtree and the Elden Ring granted grace to the people of the Lands Between, making it a near-paradise. Or so we're told. Its inhabitants were blessed by the grace, evidenced by a golden aura in their eyes.
But then some lost their connection to grace, their eyes losing their golden hue. Soon enough, they were painted as monsters, people to be feared, a threat to the Lands Between. So they were banished, becoming what we now know as the Tarnished.
The Tarnished are so vilified in fact that there are assassins who specifically target them. We meet one at the Smouldering Church: Anastasia, Tarnished-Eater. Her Butchering Knife's description reads,
Huge carving knife made to cleanly butcher the human body. Signature weapon of the Ogress Anastasia, known to have eaten countless Tarnished while diguised as a Finger Maiden.
But the Tarnished didn't stay banished. Eventually, the Elden Ring was shattered and grace subsided. The
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