: : : Who says so?

I do, its a personal opinion.

You can speculate all you want about what the motivations of an immortal race, but at the end of the day, neither, I, Tolkien or anyone else really knows what their motivations would be (elves or not). But the Eldar were Tolkien's creation and therefore only have to obey and live within the story he set down.

: : : The paradoxs are there only if you look for them and only if you want them to be there.

: : : One could say Fantasy is all about the suspension of disbelief and therefore pointing out paradoxs is pretty futile.

: : Then why have boards like this? Why discuss anything? And if you have this attitude, why bother posting? Why does speculation irritate certain people...

: There are two types of speculation. One who might clearify matters, and one who will not. This one is of the last group.
: Speculation that doesn't do any good iritates some people, belive it or not.

: Meneldur

My original posting was not in the least speculative, it was critical. There is a distinction.

I for one do not treat Tolkien's work as sacred writ. I think criticism, even of something one likes, is a valid exercise. Tolkien's use of immortality for his elves (and I know all about them "Fading" like old soldiers) does raise difficulties in his portrayal of their society and history. Just to take one example, an immortal race which has little need to reproduce would be unlikely to have anything approaching a human type of sexual/romantic love, though this is central to the whole Beren-Luthien cycle. Sexual and romantic love exist in human society because of the need to form stable pair-bonding to give offspring which have a long dependency time a stable nurturing upbringing, this would seem to be redundant or at least not imperative for an immortal race. Following from this sexual jealousy would be unlikely, so out would go the whole Maeglin-Tuor thing - and the fall of Gondolin. This would make Tolkien rather boring reading admittedly, though would the converse, having Elves merely long-lived materially affect the quality of the stories?

Michael Moorcock (who I don't rate as highly as Tollers in general) created a race of vaguely elf-like beings called the Vadhagh, they had a lifespan of around 10 times that of man and their society was quite well differentiated from that of humans.