My reading of HoME covers a period from perhaps the late 80s to late 90s (I specifically ordered the 1996 PoME, and it is the only volume I have in hardback), and my re-reading has been sporadic and specific, unlike with say UT. So much of HoME has descended into memory "mulch" for me (I'm always fascinated how you dig out you quotes all over the place ...). And that mulch "tells" me that Elves were the hardiest of all humanoid races. I'm fairly sure that they were unaffected by any of the plagues that decimated men, and don't recall any such thing ever having affected them. Perhaps I transferred that to poisons, but then some plagues involved poisons produced by the microbes (not a plague, but botulism toxin is the enormously deadly agent, not the critter itself, for example). I would assume we can agree that ethanol in sufficient quantities is poisonous to humans (and most likely Dwarves) - the dose making the poison is ancient knowledge. That is my chain of thinking why Legolas would be quite immune to the effects of the ale in PJ's drinking contest. (And I still smell a whiff of Tinker Bell in the background of the Elven King's butler in The Hobbit - or at the very least, JRRT's description of the Elves in The Hobbit has quite a few contradictions).

And as it's Friday evening here - prost!

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Your mulch here is correct about diseases: "they were not subject to diseases" [author's note 5, the commentary to the Conversation of Finrod and Andreth, Morgoth's Ring]. But unless I can locate something about poisons needing to be of a special potency or something, with respect to the Eldar, to my mind even two instances [one published by the author himself], and especially the Aredhel case, still draw a distinction between poison and plague.

To wander externally here: if I'm correct, maybe such a distinction reflects "literary concerns"; I mean, why take the intrigue of death-by-poison off the literary table!



:Elthir reads this twice then munches away a restorative cookie:

Compare this...

"... and from the grounds of Queen Mab's palace came the rub-a-dub of drums, showing that the royal guard had been called out. A regiment of Lancers came charging down the Broad Walk, armed with holly leaves, with which they jag the enemy horribly in passing (...) the timid creatures ran from him, [Peter] and even the Lancers, when he approached them up the Hump, turned swiftly into a side-walk, on the pretense that they saw him there." JM Barrie, Peter Pan in Kensington Gardens

... to this...

"The Elves were the first to charge. Their hatred for the goblins is cold and bitter. Their spears and swords shone in the gloom with a gleam of chill flame, so deadly was the wrath of the hands that held them." JRR Tolkien, The Hobbit, The Clouds Burst

Ahh... for some unabashed... erm... well, admittedly unfair cherry-picking, anyway

Maybe JRRT should have revised that part with the Elves of Rivendell singing utterly asinine songs when Thorin & Co. entered Rivendell. I may be a bit over-sensitive to that because some friends of mine who have given reading LoTR a try have told me they just couldn't stand Tom Bombadil's inane songs, fired FoTR into the corner and never got to the good parts.

And a minor note from the EEs, in the sense of life contradicting art, all of the crew, including Orlando Bloom himself, agreed that Orlando was by far the least ethanol-tolerant of the bunch.

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