Are Mages A Race?

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MonstaMunch wrote:

I disagree, and I think you're interchanging the word species for race. Jews and some other groups consider themselves to have their own race, and yet they are still of the human race as well. Species and race don't mean the same thing. In a lot of fantasy lore, there is often something that separates people who can become a mage from people who can't, and it's not usually about species.

Nor, in my experience, is it usually about race - often it's down to the individual, and a person could have the capacity for magic without their parents having it, or at least without being from a distinct racial group within their species - be it because of the stars they were born under, the whims of the gods, random chance, proximity to leylines during conception, etc.

There's a lot of fantasy settings out there where there's nothing in particular that locks of anyone from becoming a mage - some might have more talent, but anyone could learn form study. There's also a bunch where only certain people could ever learn to use magic, but among such settings many of them that has little of nothing to do with ancestry, and the ones where they'd be considered a distinct race are not a huge percentage, in my experience. Even when the ability to use magic is passed down by blood, I've usually encountered that concept in settings where they aren't a distinct racial group, but simply certain members of the general poupulus who happen to have some common ancestry with some powerful wizard/dragon/etc sometime in the past.

Certainly, the situation as presented in the OP doesn't seem remotely standard, and I'd find it abnormal enough that I'd do a double-take and make sure I read it right - particularly since having Elves and Mages separately indicates that elves couldn't be mages, which flies right in the face of a common fantasy stereotype.

What species would these mages be, in this theoretical setting, given that the other "races" you've listed all sound like species? What do the other members of that race do, and why aren't they on the list?

What it comes down to is that Mages are commonly defined by something they do (use magic), which to some extent is where the comparison with real-world racial groups falls down. If a Jew spends his life in a profession that his ancestry and religion is irrelevant to (not opposed to, just that the two have no particular relation) - say, he becomes a blacksmith, and is really good at it, then he's still a Jew.
But if Mages are a 'race' in the same way, and this gives them the ability to use magic on some level, then that should mean that a mage who never learns how to use magic and chooses instead to become a blacksmith and earn a living by this mundane means, if he never casts a spell in his life - most people wouldn't consider that person to be a 'mage' because the common definition of the word is someone who uses magic, not someone from an ethnic group that has the potential to use magic, whether they do or not. But if Mage is a race, then that blacksmith who's never used magic is a mage, because what he does doesn't change what race he is.
You yourself show this when you say

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MonstaMunch wrote:

there is often something that separates people who can become a mage from people who can't

If "Mage" were a race, then it wouldn't make sense to talk about people "becoming" a mage - in that case "people who have the ability to become mages" might be a race, but "mage" itself clearly isn't.