The trouble with Elves

Autumn Nightmares - Changeling the Lost

Before you read on, one word of warning: If you are an avid devotee to JRR Tolkien's work, you may find that this post will cause offence and you may be very unhappy about it. I would suggest that you do not read on. If, however, you are a devotee to Tolkien but can accept a different point of view, do read on.

The trouble with Elves started for me with "The Lord of the Rings". I first read the Hobbit when I was around 10. At 12, LotR followd. However, I had known Elves (Alben, Alfen) for several years prior to that. I had first encountered them in the Northern sagas of the Edda and in the Germanic legends. Later, at around age 11, I had come across the "Little People" or "The Gay People" as the Elves are called in the British Isles. They all had one thing in common: the Elves of European legend were deathless, ageless and terrible, yet quite often beautiful, perhaps soulless, but always enthralling to mortals. To meet them was potentially lethal or damaging. Many a boy or girl were taken away and either never returned or returned decades later, just to find their families and friends long dead and gone.
A subset of these Elves were the Fates and their sisters which you can find around Western mythology and faery tales, who either curse or bless humans (especially babies, hence "evil faery god mother"). All types of Elves have one thing in common, they are not of this world, unconcerned with it, solipsistic and yet, every now and again, their paths cross the paths of mortals and some form of interaction (sometimes beneficial to the human party) ensues. I have always liked these Elves, because to me, they embody the true spirit of immortals. They are not unlike the immortals from Greek and Roman mythology, with their self-centred attitude to life. This type of Elf can be found in the RPG Changeling: the Lost, where the Fae exactly these types of behaviours and traits.
Then came Tolkien (and I must say that I have read Tolkien widely, not only his works, but works about him and his sub-creation, so I am well-versed in his mythology, although it would never become my desert-island-pick). Tolkien also models his Elves as immortals, but they come to share the world with other, lesser races (lesser because they are mortal). The Elves are described as something like guardians of the world, they awaken in it, are called West by the gods, dwell some time in their great land and in the end many of them come back and colonize the world from the West and make it their own (and in the Silmarillion, the Elves are actual not really very different from human beings: they fight each other, quarrel, behave as petulantly and irrationally as children sometimes, kill and get killed, fall from grace, get thrown out of the garden, in one word: their story is quite a lot like the story of mankind from the very beginning of biblical creation to the expulsion from Eden, with the only exception that not all Elves were thrown out).
In the Silmarillion, Elves are like human beings, except that they can theoretically live until the world ends, are stunningly beautiful and really like trees. So, this first iteration of Elves, because they will be quite different in LotR, is essentially a group of beings that are human but without the one horrible flaw which all of us are cursed with and all of us (including and perhaps especially, devout Catholic and WWI veteran, JRR Tolkien) hate: mortality. So, they are us, only with no end-of-life date. They kind of resemble in some ways the Greek gods. They are a little closer to original Elves, except that they ally themselves with humans and co-exist with them and teach them.
In his second iteration, as we can see it in LotR, the Elves really become annoying. They turn into ever-grieving, miserable characters that only seem to lament the passing of their age and, in the face of the greatest danger, only basically sigh and look to the West as their road out and to the East as to the lands they once owned, but which are now going to pass to someone else. And it is this grief and this pain that does not work. Because in order to feel pain and grief, one must truly be mortal and live under the threat of annihilation (even Elves that have been killed are not gone, their spirits linger and are reborn, with all their memories intact). So, Elves can never really lose anything permanently. And as beings that are already thousands of years old, the changing of their environment should not come as a surprise nor should it make life miserable for them. Tolkien has fallen into the trap that everyone falls into who tries to turn an immortal being into something that can relate to human suffering. By definition, this is impossible, because the ultimate suffering cannot be experienced by someone who is not subject to death. (And some argue that the story of the coming of Christ was invented as a way to explain to people how the god of the Bible is able to understand human suffering, because he himself became human in his son and died. A very interesting and highly-sophisticated psychological tale.)
This problem is so great for me that LotR loses all its charms as soon as the Elves enter the story (Gildor in the Shire is still okay, because he only whines for 3 pages or so), but everything as of Rivendell is just plain annoying. Faced with the threat of utter destruction by ultimate Evil, mankind, dwarves and halflings rally to fight (and their possible results are: death and being annihilated, subjugation by Sauron if they lose, and, least likely: winning and surviving). The Elves, on the other hand, have decided to leave ("I will diminish and go into the West and remain Galadriel". I felt like saying: "Good for you, babe, don't let the door hit you on the way out, and thanks for nothing.")
As beings bound to this world, and no blissful eternity to go to, human beings by definition only have the choice to lie down and die or fight on, no matter what. That is the "human condition", and no deathless being can ever begin to grasp it. I believe Tolkien should have been able to see this due to his Catholic faith (see above). But he didn't and he therefore failed in making the Elves worthwhile in  his story.
I recently discovered an interview with Christopher Tolkien in which he explained that, towards the end of his life, his father was mainly interested in the metaphysical aspects of the Elves and what it means to put an immortal being into a mortal world. Unfortunately, Tolkien never came to any conclusions and these questions were never addressed. But this remark indicates to me that Tolkien understood the problems he had created with his Elves and they did not work as a race (especially not in LotR) and that they needed to be rewritten.
I, for one, would have been very grateful if he had managed to do it.