It all comes down to a point.

Hey, that was actually a rather clever post title, eh?

First off, in order to set the mood, let me explain a few things. I love J.R.R. Tolkien's work. I've read the Lord of the Rings, The Hobbit, Unfinished Tales and the Silmarillion more times than I can count. (Granted if I actually had started counting this might seem more impressive) I just love it. The Lord of the Rings is truly my favorite novel. I just finished reading it again last month, and it was, I think, the best time I had ever read it. I was in such an awed state of mind after that I almost cried with the desire to live in Middle-earth. I don't read the books, I drink it in, I absorb it. The depth of the world, more than the characters, is what really gets me in. To me, Middle-earth is so real that I really do believe it happened many ages ago.

That being said, I absolutely HATE the movies. Well, to be more specific, as a part of J.R.R. Tolkien's legacy, I hate, hate the movies. As works of cinema, I think the movies are some of the best. But as an extension of J.R.R. Tolkien's work, they suck worse than the entire vacuum of the universe. Okay, breath deep, eee.....aaa......eee....aaa.

So you have a vague idea on my standing on J.R.R. Tolkien's works, right? Now for the point of this rant. J.R.R. Tolkien's elves do not, repeat, do not have pointed ears. I am, I deeply, deeply fear, one of the few people to take this stance. By the way, the reason I am even writing this is because of a conversation had in the Classic Castle Chat. I felt misunderstood and alone. So anyway, elves don't have pointed ears.

The reason I think this view was started was by watching the old animated movie from way back when. In it, I never saw the elves as having pointed ears. I don't know actually if they drew the characters like that or not. But in my mind, I saw elves without pointed ears. This mentality stayed with me until it was fully engraved in my mind. I got this mentality I think because I hadn't yet been exposed to the World of Warcraft/anime/ninjaish/modernish view on elves. My limited contact was on the older, medieval Christian style, as it were. My elves live in proper castles sometimes, have real houses (not glorified arches) and always, always have straight swords. Okay, not MY elves, per-say, but my vision of J.R.R. Tolkien's elves.

Here comes my evidence. So basically you have the older medivalish straight sword version of elves, and then you have the modern, curvy, World of Warcraft (at least I think WoW is at some level a medivalish game) slim, trim, pointy eared and hot elves. The latter style wasn't really even around when J.R.R. Tolkien wrote his works. So you tell me, which do you think inspired him more?

I've always felt that J.R.R. Tolkien didn't intend the distinction between elves and men to be so tangible. To strictly take physical features into account, I imagine the two races to be more or less identical. Elves are a fairer race. Not necessarily meaning their physical beauty, though J.R.R. Tolkien does seem to imply that elves are on average more attractive than men. Their fairness though is more than that. Like I said, not so tangible. Rather, an air, a sense about them. A man couldn't always tell an elf right off the bat, or at least so I gather from the Silmarillion, but to those with keen sight, one could tell an elf by the sense of age and wisdom of another era about them. At least, the men of the first three or four ages could.

I fear though that man is not how he was all those ages ago. If you or I were to come across an elf today, we would pass him by, as just another person, and not because he chopped his ears off. We might though look at him as someone to be respected, even though we don't know why. That’s how I envision elves as. A race with intangible differences from man.