Sources about the lore

[Enkidoh]

Welcome to Eorzea!

Apart from the two Encylopedia Eorzeas, this very forum is a good place to find lore, as it's the main place where it's discussed and debated, although you might have to wade through some typical forum nonsense and trivial entries to get to the actual meat-and-five-vegetables of the lore.

Another good place to visit is the FF Wiki, despite being about the FF series in general, as FFXIV references and draws from the lore, settings, characters, elements and situations of the 13 titles that came before, the title that came after, and the numerous spins offs, sequels, prequels and tie-in titles that make up the FF series (as Elissar mentioned), this may come in handy understanding many of the finer aspects of the game's lore.

FFXIV specific wikis like Gamerescape's FFXIV page and the FFXIV Wiki also are very worth checking out as they usually have lore guides that can help fill in things. The FFXIV RP community page also has section dedicated to lore as well, although again the accuracy can vary wildly. (also it seems the later is shutting down, but was still active when I visited).

As for race lore, the official posts by the development team in this forum about naming traditions actually do provide a bit of backstory and history of the various races and their individual clans, so that's worth looking at too: naming traditions for the 'original' five races - hyur, elezen, lalafell, miqo'te and roegadyn, and retroactively, au ra, viera and hrothgar. (There is also a naming tradition thread for the beastmen (or 'tribes' as SE are now referring to them), and two official threads dedicated to the dragon language, giving a bit of a background into their unique (and extraetheirysal) culture (because, after all, culture starts with language), as J.R.R Toilken famously noted).