The Wild, Wild, Wood-elf West: Wow, good stuff (as usual)

» sepdet - Wow, good stuff (as usual)

I seem always to be following in your footsteps, and really need to read everything you've done before I bother with any more research! Not that it's surprising so much study of the elves' obscure histories has already been done. One thing that didn't quite jive with what I'd thought: that the Wood-elves should be the most numerous. I think yes and no. How quickly do elves rebuild their numbers after great loss? Thranduil led only a third of the Wood-elves back to Mirkwood at the end of the Second Age; they were completely creamed. So was Amdir's army. (I tend to think that the creepy elf Frodo sees in the Dead Marshes in the movie must be poor Amdir, whose army got driven into the marsh). Now, I suppose that "third" would've been adult males— or would it? Tolkien makes some unconscious attempts to shake gender-stereotypes, saying somewhere or other that elf-women were as formidable and strong as elf-men and could fight. But I see no evidence of him actually acting on this. So it's debatable whether Mirkwood lost a third of its TOTAL population, or just the blokes, but at any rate I have a feeling it took a long time to get over that war.

Green-elves and Wood-elves need to be Quakers. They just don't do well in war!

Oh, one other thing: what's the reference for Oropher first settling in Amon Lanc? I thought I'd scoured the Galadriel and Celeborn chapter 50 times over, since I've been trying to piece together the history of Mirkwood and Lórien, and that looks like a new jigsaw puzzle piece I need to examine.

-- posted by sepdet