Posted: December 09, 1999 at 16:04:29: by Telperion
: 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?>>Interesting thought. One problem is that you are basing the motivations of the beings on evolutionary drives (procreation, in this case). But Tolkien's Elves are not evolutionary beings. For that matter, neither are his Men - unless somebody wants to make an argument for evolutionary-creationism. The motivations, desires, needs, etc. of the Elves can be as completely like or unlike real-world humans as Tolkein wants them to be without creating any paradoxes. Bye the way, I'm not saying these beings don't "evolve" (i.e. change). I'm saying they didn't evolve in the sense that they came from a common mamalian ancestor. They were created by Eru.
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