Personally, I hate the Elven sword and don't especially like the greatsword either. They just don't look right to me. I imagine Elven blades as slender and slightly curving, not the fat leaf-shaped things with a huge crossbar and tiny hilt. The Elven battleaxe's blade looks very Elven to me, but the swords look terrible.
Am I alone in this? Do other people like the way they look?
I think the elven greatsword is a very nice piece of kit, its got gorgeous detailing and looks so sharp! The thing i like about it the most is that it doesn't 'dwarf' female characters. (in the previous games if you made a female toon and then gave her a greatsword it would tower above her head final fantasy style)
But the elven war axe is my favourite, that is one cool looking weapon! And taking into account that elven weaponry is more damaging than dwarven or orcish makes it taste even sweeter!
We've been playing this game for so long that each one of us ends up with strange likes and dislikes. I pretty much don't like almost every set of vanilla weapons, except steel, ebony, falmer and draugh. Orcish weapons seem to frail; elven are too large and clumsy, dwarven are too unnecessarily shiny, and daedric have a baroque design that seems more amusing than frightful. Worst of all, I have to fight hard to look for a weapon that fits the apearence of my builds, since the vanilla sets are too different from my preconceptions about how they should be. Orc weaponry should be crude but effective; elven should be delicate and subtle; dwarven should be heavy and overpowering; daedric should be gothic and not baroque, and steel should have a lot of racial varieties. Most of the times, I just go for the maximun damage and forget about the way I had thought my character should appear.