XPost: rec.arts.books.tolkien   
   From: jon.lennart.beck.its.my.name@mail.its.in.danmark   
      
   "Steuard Jensen"  skrev i meddelelsen   
   news:slrnjg7034.8bn.steuard@steuard.local...   
      
   > 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?   
      
      It may be said that there is a price to be paid for everything.  The   
   Eldar had long lives.  Few children, as a proportion of the population at   
   most given times, may well have been part of the price for that.  Men with   
   more sense of community than of self would likely argue that Atani had it as   
   good as Eldar, since the sum of life in a Mannish community would be the   
   same as in an Elvish one, just with more endings as well as more beginnings.   
      
      We know that human children need each other very much to learn social   
   skills.  Parents and other elders are not enough.  So was the psychology of   
   Elf children different?  Did the efforts of their elders suffice to rear   
   them successfully, partly because of the greater control that their fëar had   
   over their hroar?   
      Another possibility - the two are of course not mutually exclusive - is   
   that in a community of Elves young couples would synchronize childbirths to   
   come in waves.  For Elves, with their greater control over their bodies,   
   this would of course be entirely possible.   
      
   Korax.   
      
   --- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05   
    * Origin: you cannot sedate... all the things you hate (1:229/2)