XPost: rec.arts.books.tolkien   
   From: steuard@slimy.com   
      
   Perhaps it's because I've now got a daughter of my own, but an odd   
   thought occurred to me not long ago: Did Elvish children typically   
   have other kids their age to play with growing up, or were they   
   generally raised entirely in communities of adults?   
      
   From "Laws and Customs Among the Eldar", we know that Elves typically   
   wedded soon after age 50 (except for, well, almost every specific Elf   
   Tolkien actually described getting married) and had relatively few   
   children (typically four or less). After that, "In mortal count there   
   was often a long interval between the wedding and the first   
   child-birth, and even longer between child and child." Elrond and   
   Celebrian waited almost 40 years before having Elladan and Elrohir,   
   and another 135 before having Arwen. And after that, Elven couples   
   stop having children altogether. But Elvish communities don't seem to   
   have been that different in size than human ones. So even granting   
   that Elves matured a little slower than human children (maybe by a   
   factor of two or three), how many other children under five would   
   there have been in the entire community when (say) Arwen was born? Was   
   the sight of groups of laughing, playing children entirely foreign to   
   the Elves when they first met the newly-awakened Men? And how would   
   that vastly different experience of childhood affect them, both while   
   growing up and while interacting with the few children they had?   
      
   						Steuard Jensen   
      
   --- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05   
    * Origin: you cannot sedate... all the things you hate (1:229/2)