Well, I'm glad to see my initial response wasn't taken as too off topic and I thank
Legate and
Morthoron for their replies to my query.
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Originally Posted by Legate
(and by the way, as for species or race or whatever word you use, I don't see difference here... it will be playing with words, what we simply mean by it here is Elves, Dwarves, Men... everyone knows what it means
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Well, certainly we all know what/who
Elmo was referring to, but I was thinking of the old nurture/nature argument that swung back and forth throughout the last century and so on that ground I was thinking that someone like
alatar would be very good at some scientific precision in our naming of things, because while it is true that a rose by any other name would smell as sweet, sometimes the naming of things determines the direction of thought.
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Originally Posted by Morthoron
Yes, I suppose you could say there is a genus (Children of Illuvatar) separated into species and subspecies (Men, Elves, Orc, etc.); whereas race would identify specific differentiations within a given species (Easterlings, Numenoreans, Dunlendings, Rohirrim, Haradrim, etc.). But doesn't all that taxonomic biology get a bit tedious, particularly with Tolkien's penchant for vaguery and backpedaling (Orcs -- did they arise from Men or Elves?)?
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Tolkien's vaguery was exactly what I was thinking of too, how he sets up these very different branches of the children--good point there that they are all called Illuvatar's children, even Aule's dwarves--but then through Frodo and Sam's heroism and Legolas and Gimli's friendship and I suppose Arwen and Aragorn's love goes to some effort to counter the separatism or isolation of the races. These cross racial highlights are what made me wonder if, ultimately, it would be counterproductive to make comparisons across the races.
But to get back closer to the topic, does Arwen's choice tell us anything about the difference between elven and human willingness to sacrifice one's life? After all, the Appendix suggests that it was not until Aragorn's death that Arwen came really to understand what this gift was all about. So, were any other elves really able to comprehend death as humans understood it? And if not, then bravery might not be something to apply to them.
Well, enough rambling.