[Formendacil]

Originally Posted by Azrakhor Akallabeth

What an amazing mouthful of seriously time intensive questions. It would require writing a book (or 60) to answer properly at all.

The trouble I'm seeing is that they've already been written. And if I may be honest without honestly trying to dis you on the subject, this is like asking for a huge effort in order to give you a personal shortcut to hours upon hours of intensive (yet, thoroughly enjoyable) study.

This is why I believe you aren't receiving an overwhelming volume of response to these very relevant, and oh so interesting questions. But good luck finding them. The journey is worth the wait, I promise!

Actually, Azrakhor, I'm going to have to respectfully disagree that the answers are necessarily there to find. Paradus's questions seem to stem from a way of looking at fantasy worlds that is not particularly congruent with the way Middle-earth is written. At least to my mind, his questions seem to want to impose a scientific schema onto the various "magics" of Middle-earth. At best, this is comparable to the attempts of the Christians in late antiquity to explain their doctrines, which stemmed from a Semitic mindset, into the philosophical framework of Greek and Roman understanding. At worst, Paradus is trying to explain away the mysteries of Tolkien's mythology into a Dungeons-and-Dragonseseque rulebook.

However, even if Paradus *isn't* in danger of following Saruman's folly, that of breaking a thing in order to understand it, I would have to argue that the reason there is a dearth of responses here has less to do with the fact that "that they've already been written" as with the fact that they don't have an easy answer.

Of course, the answering of questions is greatly complicated by the fact that Paradus asks so many! Or rather, not the fact that he asks so many, since many threads could mean many interesting conversations, but rather the fact that he asks them all on the same thread. Several of these questions could have interesting discussions teased out, but lumped together in one thread, the prospective answerer either has to respond in a bullet-point list, or try to come up with a single unifying answer.

To focus on a single question, let's look at Question 1:

Originally Posted by Paradus

What powers did the elves have over men (Besides superior senses)?

Thus far, it has received one direct answer (Blantyr's answer, while comprehensive, deals with non-canonical sources. If Paradus is looking for a Dungeons-and-Dragons synthesis, I doubt he could do better than Blantyr, but if he is looking for a Tolkien-based exegesis to back it up, recourse to the Ambarquenta website isn't like to cut it):

Originally Posted by Galadriel55

Elves can reincarnate.

In her typically direct way, Galadriel55 cuts right to the heart of the difference between Elves and Men, but there are problems here.

Firstly, is reincarnation is a power that the Elves possess? Arguably, it is not. Although the Elves are bound to Arda and from their very nature are supposed to live from their birth* until the End of Time, re-embodiment is not something that is within their own power: only the Valar can redress the injustice of an Elf dying, and they can delay this re-embodiment as their just judgment sees fit (or, as in the case of Fëanor, withhold it permanently as just punishment).

Consequently, I would say that the distinction between Elves and Men is not that Elves can be re-embodied, but rather that Elves are not supposed to die in the first place, whereas death is explicitly Eru's Gift to Men. This raises the second question, however, of whether or not longevity co-terminal with the life of the world is a "power" the Elves have over Men. Tolkien's own terminology ("the Gift", he calls it) and his discussion of the envy the Elves and even the Valar will eventually feel for it suggests that it is not something "better" to never naturally die. In any case, it is a question of nature or essence, and I would say that powers derive from differences in nature, and are not the same as the differences themselves.

However, there ARE consequences from the different Elven and Mannish natures that might manifest as 'powers' (Paradus uses this term on another thread, as I recall, and seems to like it, but it's a term that seems metaphysically inept for Middle-earth, so I'm struggling to use it). Because Elven nature is bound to this world, they are in a much closer communion with it. Men, who are but visitors to Arda and leave it indeed when they die, are not bound to Arda's fate, while the Elves do not know if they will have a life after the final destruction of Arda, and if they do, they believe it will be in an Arda Remade. This union of natures between Elves and Arda means that the Elves have a much closer relationship with the material things of this world, including with the other living things in Yavanna's domain (plants and animals--what we call "nature"). My contention is that any "powers" the Elves possess are the direct result of this close relationship that is built right into their fëa.

These powers include the heightened perceptions that Paradus mentioned in his original question, and also includes what Sam calls "magic" in Lothlórien--the magic that Galadriel distinguishes as "art," distinct from the "deceits" of the enemy. A little bit of western art history may be appropriate here: until the "modern times" the point of art was to imitate nature. There were different schools about how to go about this, about whether one should be realistic (depicting things as they are) or idealistic (depicting things as they ought to be), but there was no disagreement that art should imitate nature. Given what I have already said about the Elves having a closer relationship to the nature of Arda than Men, I feel it should therefore be self-evident that the "Arts" of the Elves--their "magic"--is contingent on their very essence being tied so closely to that of Arda.

As actual effects of this "power," we can see the various things that the Elves produced: Celebrimbor's Rings (all but the One), the Elessar, the palantíri, Galadriel's mirror, the Phial of Galadriel, the cloaks of Lórien, and supreme above all else: the Silmarils.

As an aside: we know that the Númenóreans were the most "Elf-like" of Men, and also that they had the greatest "technology." Given that, in modern times, technology is the product of science, which may be considered "knowledge of how the world works"--aka, knowledge of nature, perhaps we could say that Elves were able to do "intuitively" what we have to do mechanically--and because they were bound together in their very essence with Arda, there were not the catastrophic environmental consequences that our separated Mannish natures have effected by pursuing the same effects through our science.

And that, is one very long answer to only one of Paradus's questions. I certainly don't want to discourage him from asking more... but if I may give some unsolicited advice, it might be better to give them separate threads...





*I was about to say "conception" but the similarity of the terminology to arguments about the morality of abortion stopped me... though I do think it would be interesting to know if miscarried Elven babies would be re-embodied in Valinor. Even if miscarriages are not typical of Elves, there are surely instances of pregnant Elven mothers dying in the sack of Nargothrond, Gondolin, or elsewhere that would provide a similar scenario.