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Is this the same Elrond we see in the LotR movies?!
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An equally 'praising' description is given in Many meetings, FotR:
"The face of Elrond was ageless, neither old nor young, though in it was written the memory of many things both glad and sorrowful. His hair was dark as the shadows of twilight, and upon it was set a circlet of silver; his eyes were grey as a clear evening, and in them was a light like the light of stars. Venerable he seemed as a king crowned with many winters, and yet hale as a tried warrior in the fulness of his strength. He was the Lord of Rivendell and mighty among both Elves and Men."
Concerning the elves, even in A short cut to Mushrooms they are described by Sam as both merry and sad. [He could also be significantly influenced by irish image of the elves, as resulting from his several refferences in The unwritten chapters, HoME V, to the Irish story Tuatha de danaan, the children of the goddess Danu; the influence of english-elves is also apparent in his "time travel" tale, the Notion Club Papers, HoME IX, where the character Lowdham states that "I didn't mean elf in any debased post-Shakespearean sort of sense. Something far more potent and majestic."; the more "majestic" elves would be those of germanic/northern tales, the ones we find in LotR.] Anyway, in 1955 letter to W. Auden, Tolkien makes the following remarks regarding the Hobbit:
"It was unhappily really meant, as far as I was conscious, as a 'children's story', and as I had not learned sense then, and my children were not quite old enough to correct me, it has some of the sillinesses of manner caught unthinkingly from the kind of stuff I had had served to me, as Chaucer may catch a minstrel tag. I deeply regret them. So do intelligent children."
And a question: Elrond, as master of the house, is reffered to as "elf-friend" - shouldn't the title actually be "man-friend"? Was it a slip of a pen or did Tolkien weigh in his Mannish lineage?