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elf's
liam115
Member Posts: 63
do u think they will limet us to 1 or 2 elf chars because there are verry few elf's in lord of the rings and i think everyone will have a elf char i know i will
l (what makes them live so long hmmmmm i wonder if it is the ears)
Comments
The truth is is that elves can't be as powerfull as they are in the books, for then the other races would be useless. At this time, the devs don't have any racial advantages. But that is subject to change.
If they did change, it would probably make it so elves are faster, dwarves are stronger, hobbits are stealthier, etc.
Ok, first of all, IT'S ELVES - NOT ELFS!!!! Argh. That's enough to drive a Tolkien freak like myself nuts. In the word of Middle Earth when you use the plural, they are not Elfs, they are Elves. They are not Dwarfs, they are Dwarves.
Secondly, there are the elves of the Tower Hills, Imladris - Rivendell, The elves of Lorien, the elves are a plenty. If they would have stopped thinking about going home, and joined the fight against Sauron, they woulda kicked his butt five ways to Wednesday. The Moriquendi had barely started to leave, and Heck, there were still quite a few High Elves around.
(Before I begin, I'm not just a freak about Tolkien. More about languages. I study numerous languages, and am a bit geeky when it comes to all things literary. Be it Longfellow, Shakespeare, Tacitus, or Tolkien)
"Dwarves" with a "v" actually has an interesting story behind it. Tolkien was a professor of language at Oxford. Dwarf in the plural, in the English language, yes - is actually "Dwarfs" - not Dwarves. However, Tolkien wrote it as "Dwarves".
From the forwards of one of the editions of the LOTR volumes I have:
"The first volume, The Fellowship of the Ring, was published in Great
Britain by the London firm George Allen & Unwin on 29 July 1954; an
American edition followed on 21 October of the same year, published by
Houghton Mifflin Company of Boston. In the production of this first
volume. Tolkien experienced what became for him a continual problem:
printer's errors and compositor's mistakes, including well-intentioned
'corrections' of his sometimes idiosyncratic usage. These 'corrections' include the altering of dwarves to dwarfs, elvish to elfish, further to farther, nasturtians to nasturtiums, try and say to try to say and ('worst of all' to Tolkien) elven to elfin. In a work such as The Lord of the Rings, containing invented languages and delicately constructed nomenclatures, errors and inconsistencies impede both the understanding and the appreciation of serious readers - and Tolkien had many such reads from very early on"
He admitted that Dwarves was an interesting "piece of private bad grammer". However, many other words were intentionally spelled differently in Middle-Earth lore. Elves was not a mistake, it was supposed to be "Elves" and "Elvish". The reason being, Tolkien pointed out, was that
1) The elves and dwarves of middle-earth needed to be seperated from the notions of previous centuries and other mythologies. They were a totally different thing in the realm of Middle Earth. How does a professor of languages try to stress this? Through the language itself. Spelling.
2) The books were based on languages, not vice versa. The invented languages of Middle Earth came first, and then the stories. This is where Tolkien saved himself with "Dwarves". The form dwarrow appeared in the name for Moria - Dwarrowdelf. Dwarrows plurization in Tolkiens invented languages permits him to translate the plural of that race in our tongue as "Dwarves", not "Dwarfs". Thus, Tolkien intentionally, by the time of the Lord of the Rings, had his basis for writing it as "Dwarves", not "Dwarfs". He actually got into an argument with his publisher over the spelling, as he insisted that it be spelled a "new" way, because it lent to the story, in that the Dwarves were a new literary creation. As I mentioned, that was only one facet. He insisted that on a number of other variations of spelling that his publisher wanted to change.
So the long and the short of it? In Middle Earth lore, it is always "Elves", and "Dwarves". Never Elfs, nor dwarfs. So much has this taken hold, that it is now permissable in English, OUTSIDE the realm of Middle earth, to spell Dwarfs, Dwarves. He did the same with many other grammatical usages, which are incorrect in English, but work in the languages of Middle Earth.
(Information you probably didn't want, buy hey, whats a lifetime worth of reading if you can't share a little bit of information with studious folks eh?