(Psi)SeveredHead said:
Errr... not quite to you to. He wasn't saying that high elves were standard elves in Tolkien, he was saying that high elves in D&D are (sorta) equivalent to standard Tolkien elves.
There are no high elves on Middle Earth. Not a one. The last High Elf stepped on Middle Earth at the end of the First Age and left. They were apparently ridiculously powerful but it doesn't matter since they're not there.
You need to read
The Hobbit and
Fellowship of the Ring again. Sure there are. I think what you mean is that there are no Vanyar in Middle-earth, but even that's complicated, as Galadriel was half-Vanyar. By "high" elf, what Tolkien meant was an elf that had been to Valinor. And nobody (except the ignorant) ever tried to claim that the Vanyar were "ridiculously powerful"; they actually seemed to be less competent on a lot of fronts than the Noldor.
Noldor: there were three named Noldor on Middle Earth at the end of the First Age: Galadriel, Gil-galad and Maglor (or maybe it was Maedhros). Of the three, Galadriel is a queen, Gil-galad is dead and the last is either insane or dead. Glorfindel may be a Noldor as well... Tolkien accidentally reincarnated him (you have to be a real Tolkien nerd to know about that). The vast majority of the rest of the Noldor went back to Valinor. The rest of the Noldor were slain in battle with Sauron during the early Second Age or interbred with the Sindar and vanished as a race and culture.
Uh, absolutely wrong. There was an entire kingdom of the Noldor in Hollin (Eregion) in the second age, and it
very clearly states that many of the elves of Rivendell were Noldor, including Glorfindel and Gildor, two other named elves from Fellowship. Your history of Glorfindel is a bit wrong as well; Tolkien didn't "accidentally" reincarnate him, there's a long discussion on Glorfindel and why he "came back" after his death, and how an elf could even do that anyway. And you have to be a
real Tolkien nerd to know that; it's in the
War of the Jewels (I believe) which are almost unreadable to casual readers. A casual Tolkien fan will note that the name Glorfindel was reused in the
Silmarillion and
Fellowship of the Ring.
All other elves on Middle Earth are Teleri who haven't been to Valinor. (Thingol Greycloak was the exception, but he died during the First Age.) The Teleri are divided into cultural groups - several groups of "wild elves" (often called Nandor - they became uncivilized when their king died during the First Age and they refused to take another) and "grey" elves (named after Thingol Greycloak). Legolas is descended from both groups, but in game terms this means precisely nothing.
In game terms there should be a big difference between Sindar and Nandor, actually.
If you were to run a D20 Middle Earth game, all elven PCs would be Sindar. Period. No exceptions.
What types of elves are playable would depend on the region and time period, but at absolutely no point in the entire history of Middle-earth would that be true.
Elrond's ancestry is ... complicated. Both of his parents are half-elves. One was half-Noldor, one was half-Sindar. I think.
Melian (the Maia) and Thingol Greycloak (the king of the Sindar, but also technically a high elf since he went to Valinor) were the parents of Luthien, who married Beren, a man of the house of Beor. Their son, Dior, was married to Nimloth, a Sindarin elf-maid, and their daughter was Elwing, mother of Elrond. So, it's a bit more complicated on that side of the family tree. On his father's side, it's a bit more straightforward; Tuor, son of Huor, of the House of Hador, a Man, married Idril, the daughter of the Noldor king of Gondolin (drawing a blank, but I think it was Turgon, brother of Galadriel) who bore Earendil, Elrond's father.
