LotR -- Book 2 - Chapter 06 - Lothlórien

[The Saucepan Man]

Originally Posted by Firefoot

Elves cannot fully understand Men, just as Men cannot fully understand Elves.

And yet Tolkien is, in effect, asking his human readers to understand and, to a degree, sympathise with this entirely different race. But I think that Aiwendil makes an important point here, when he says:

I rather share their malady - nostalgia and the desire to preserve things unchanged are perhaps two of my chief features.

I suspect that we all share this Elvish trait, to one degree or another. I certainly do. In Elves, therefore, Tolkien was portraying an aspect of our own nature, one which can have both a positive and a negative side (creation and preservation of beauty and security v inflexibility and resistance to change). I believe that Tolkien said in one of his Letters that the different races in Middle-earth were intended to reflect different aspects of human (ie our) nature, although I do not have the Letters to hand and so cannot alas provide the exact quote.

What really irks me about the Elves, however, is the attitude that some display of indifference to other races combined with an air of superiority over them. In LotR, this is most apparent in Lindir's comment about sheep all looking alike to mortals (which I regard as verging on the racist), but this attitude is also suggested by some of Haldir's comments here (his disinterest in the Shire, for example). Then again, these too are aspects of human nature (albeit, in this case I think, wholly negative ones).