Great topic, Dwarin!
It is worth remembering that Tolkien wrote about elves in part to correct what he saw as a sad diminution placed upon them over the years, such that they were no longer like the Tuatha de danaan of Celtic legend but had become little butterfly-winged, antenna'd buttercup-sized sprites, more akin to leprechauns and household hobgoblins and such.
Tolkien wrote about elves the way that they had been characterized long ago, as beings of power who were of Faerie, very much connected to the land, able to affect births and deaths of humans, able to mate with humans, and so forth. And inextricably tied to THIS world as opposed to the hereafter.
Others in this thread have said that elves' primary characteristics were immortality and connectedness to Arda. Still others have said that the wonder a human would have of elves has largely to do with the span of years that they are understood to have lived before the said human was born. Samwise Gamgee's desire to see Elves comes to mind. To say that the uniqueness of elves is limited to these things, is a mistake precisely because Tolkien's original purpose was to bring back the wonder of Faerie primarily through the elves. In "The Music of the Ainur", Tolkien compares the sounds the two races make. After the two new themes are introduced by Iluvatar, that of the elves is described as "deep and wide and beautiful, but slow and blended with an immeasurable sorrow, from which its beauty chiefly came. The other had now achieved a unity of its own; but it was loud, and vain, and endlessly repeated; and it had little harmony, but rather a clamorous unison as of many trumpets braying upon a few notes. And it essayed to drown the other music by the violence of its voice, but it seemed that its most triumphant notes were taken by the other and woven into its own solemn pattern."
Wow! I'm amazed all over again by the beauty of Tolkien's descriptions. Anyway, as this shows, it was Iluvatar's will from the beginning that not only Melkor's rebellion, but the sorrow of the Eldar and the triumphs, however vain, of the Edain serve to reveal that "no theme may be played that hath not its uttermost source in [Iluvatar], nor can any alter the music in [his] despite."
So the sorrow of the Eldar (the combination of their immortality and many tragedies and defeats, such as fighting the long defeat) IS, in fact, that from which their beauty is derived. And the greatest triumphs of the Edain occur when they work WITH the Eldar instead of independently of them or against them, and that the Eldar actually ENNOBLE the Edain in their greatest triumphs, as can be most eloquently seen in Aragorn.
To summarize what I'm trying to say by all this:
1) the immortality of the Eldar may APPEAR to have been their bane, but was ever intended by Eru as part of their greatest beauty.
2) the Eldar are intended to be not only characteristically, but qualitatively different than the Edain, akin to the first theme, that of the gods, as Tolkien describes it in The Music of the Ainur.
phew!
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