I (along with Orual) feel way out of my depth in this thread, but I think that there's another self-isolating community in Middle-Earth that hasn't at all been mentioned, that fits so many of the characteristics that have been mentioned, that I think it should be brought up. So, here goes...
The community of ents in Fangorn.
They embody the timelessness that has been discussed in connection with Tom & Golberry and Lothlorien. In fact, the image of a rock in a river, which someone already brought up, was a comparison I had made of the ents. The world changes, but the ents do not.
Tolkien suggests that they had fellowship with the elves at one point (their language is a ent-friendly form of Sindarin, correct?), but that ended long ago, now they are suspicious and hostile toward outsiders.
They do fail to send representatives into the world, they fail to produce what Bill Ferny describes as a mythic hero who will procure an elixir. And, like the other races, they fade in isolation and eventually are lost.
There was more on the subject of ents in my mind, but my train of though has been disrupted, so if it comes to me later on, I'll edit in.
I thought the idea put forward by Lily Bracegirdle was worth more consideration than it has gotten:
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I wonder if Tolkien didn't make the diffeent races so insular so that he could keep them culturally/linguistically distict when he wrote them. I don't believe he kept them apart because he thought different races *should* be separate. (Otherwise why would he have one of his major heroes marry a woman of a different species?) In other words, maybe when he set up the world he made separate languages for different cultures, and he didn't want to deal linguistically with cross-pollenation between cultures, so he made the different races physically separated.
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There is remarkably little "cross-pollenation" between Tolkien's languages, which is something which would have complicated his own linguistic project
immensely and this is partially due to the separation of the cultures from one another. While the elvish languages (notably Sindarin and Quenya) have grown from a common root and accommodated each other quite a lot, and other tongues have been influenced by these languages (ents' speech, most notably, also the Dunedain) There is remarkably little mixing between the elvish and the languages of men (except possibly Adunaic, though I think they stayed separate for the most part as well). And there was next to no linguistic influence on the dwarves, Khuzdul, since it was largely a secret language is probably pristine. Considering the great influence of language on Tolkien's mythology's development, I can't imagine it played no role in his decision to keep the cultures very separate.
Wow, that was longwinded for me. Apologies to the bored.
Sophia