Quote:
Originally Posted by Inziladun
The Teleri's hunting game is not out of the question, of course. It just seems odd they would have enough weaponry to actually give the Noldor a good fight, if they only used bows for hunting.
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I actually don't see any problem here. Hunting birds would actually be GREAT practice in archery, your basically working at shooting small moving targets. Get good at that (and in a society where part of your diet relyed on those birds, you probably would get pretty good, pretty fast, as a simple matter of survival). Compared to that, a Noldor warrior would actually be a pretty easy target, he's bigger, he's slower and he has one less plane to move around in. The armor might provide some trouble, but armor isn't really all that great and anti arrow work (especially since no qualified archer would be trying to directly shoot through it, he'd be doing the arc thing to add the force of gravity, or aiming for unarmored bits like the eyes (the elves are usually assumed on this forum to be on roughly anglo-saxon armor tech, so we're probably not talking about full plate with totally face covering helmets, so the eyes would be vulnerable.) And a good bowman can bring down something truly massive, remember Bard brought Smaug down with ONE arrow (yes he is shooting through a chink in Smaugs armor, but the arrow still has to get through layers of skin muscle fat possibly a rib etc. Smaug is HUGE by human standards. If they DID need to get through the armor, they probably would have gone to the spears/javelins. A well muscled man who is a good spear thrower would probably have little trouble, he'd be used to bringing down things like seals and deer which , while they don't wear armor are WAAY bigger than a person. And a person with an alatl is supposedly capable of throwing a spear with enough force it could bring down a mammoth (Alatls were used in Europe Neolithically, phasing out when the mammoths and such megafauna went extinct. In Valinor, where Oliphaunts still were present and comparable megafauna are still extant, they probably kept them.)