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I was Talking with a friend of mine during a game recently, and he told me that the Eldar were the reason for the age of Strife, and that they attacked the Imperium first, leading to the current hatred between the two.
I have no idea if any of this is true, as far as I know, the IoM didnt seem to have conflicts with the Eldar until the Great Crusade when Mankind went Manifest Destiny accross the Galaxy.
I was wondering if anyone had access to prefall lore that might help me understand the beginnings of the Eldar-human rivalry. Thanks in advance.

Age of Strife is pre-Imperium.

And it’s an age there’s very little we know about.

We know the Eldar had long since started descending the steep staircase to Slaanesh. And we’re told part of that was due to a highly automated defence force of, let’s face it, most probably Magic Space Robots.

Which begs the question “how come they didn’t just annihilate Earth and it colonies”.

Ultimately we don’t know, with any certainty. But we are told their core worlds were centred on what became the Eye of Terror. Hence, when it all went horribly wrong? The Eye of Terror. Literal tear in realspace’s birth canal of Slaanesh.

But I also Chinny Reckon that by the time our frankly ridiculous species developed reliable inter-plantery travel? The Orks had long since wrecked the protective Automata, and headed off somewhere else they reckoned there was a decent punch up.

Yet so far down said Staircase? The Eldar were too busy getting themselves off to care, if they even noticed, outside of presumably stupendously well defended homeworlds.

So once again, humanity is the species of Impeccable Timing.

The Aeldari didn't wipe out humanity because they had no reason to.
They were fully insular and focusing on reaching excess at heights never before achieved.

Killing humanity would have been a massive chore and who wants to do chores when you can do drugs that make you see God?

They were easily capable of annihilating humanity in the year 2025, as they'd been dominant in the galaxy for unknown millions of years.

The only time humanity posed even a small threat was during the golden age of tech, which was a tiny miniscule blip on the timeline of the eldar empire.

They probably didn't even notice. Their descent into debauchery is not described as taking millions of years, or even hundreds of thousands, so they were in a position to destroy whatever they wanted at any time.

There was a comment back in ~4th ed around the war in heaven that implied the eldar actively didn't destroy upstart races because they had had enough of galactic destruction. Basically they looked at humans and said aw cute, and left them alone.

What WOULDN'T have left humans alone, is the orks.

The fact that the galaxy has ANY non eldar or ork species is entirely down to eldar dominion - they must have kept the orks at a very low level through their endless robot armies performing a million year long pest control action.

Without something keeping the ork population suppressed or busy, they would have overwhelmed the whole galaxy within a million years...

Also, the arrogance That Nothing Bad Can Ever Happen To Us.

The birth of Slaanesh ruined the Eldar, and ruined all they’d built.

And the Birth of Slaanesh blew out the Warp Storms that had isolated Terra and its former holding from one another.

So. When The Emperor had united the Sol System and cast his net further afield, no Eldar civilisation as in a good position to resist.

Doesn’t mean there weren’t attempts of course. Just that none of them even came close to a War against the nascent Imperium.

Don't forget Eldar can see into the Future - any threat that would be worth their attention would be something they'd already be aware of long before it would ever happen and thus be something they could destroy/eliminate with ease.


Besides birthing a Chaos God after having one almighty party!

The Eldar domination of the galaxy before the Fall was absolute, but just because one is dominant doesn't mean one has to go on a quest for omnicide. You may dominate your house and backyard, but does that mean you have to go on a quest to destroy every single last insect and living thing in your backyard to prove your dominance?

The Eldar empire was described in the 2nd edition Eldar Codex as being so secure against all outside threats that none, not even the most pessimistic among them, saw that state of affairs not continuing indefinitely. The whole story of the Eldar, like the story of Tolkien's Numenor or George Lucas's Galactic Republic, is that of a people so powerful and so secure against outside threats that they fell into decadence and rotted from within. That narrative does not work if there were real external threats.

Thanks for the answers everyone. Thought I was going crazy when I couldnt find anything on first contact. Seems like it is lost in the past for now.