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The words of S, ‘in the early days Eldar and Men were of nearly equal stature and power of body’, are echoed in The Silmarillion: ‘Elves and Men were of like stature and strength of body’; for statements on this matter in earlier writings see II. 326.

The ‘higher culture’ that my father came to ascribe to the Elves of Doriath (or more widely to the Grey-elves of Beleriand) is now established (‘Only in the realm of Doriath … did the Ilkorins equal the Koreldar’); contrast the description of the Ilkorins of Tinwelint’s following in the old Tale of Tinúviel (‘eerie they were and strange beings, knowing little of light or loveliness or of musics …’), concerning which I noted that Tinwelint’s people are there described in terms applicable rather to the wild Avari of The Silmarillion (see II. 9, 64). It is however said in this passage of the tale that ‘Different indeed did they become when the Sun arose.’

The ideas expressed here concerning the nature of the immortality of the Elves go back largely to the Lost Tales; cf. the description of the hall of Mandos in The Coming of the Valar (I. 76):

Thither in after days fared the Elves of all the clans who were by illhap slain with weapons or did die of grief for those that were slain – and only so might the Eldar die, and then it was only for a while. There Mandos spake their doom, and there they waited in the darkness, dreaming of their past deeds, until such time as he appointed when they might again be born into their children, and go forth to laugh and sing again.

Similarly in The Music of the Ainur (I. 59) it is said that ‘the Eldar dwell till the Great End unless they be slain or waste in grief (for to both of these deaths are they subject)’, and ‘dying they are reborn in their children, so that their number minishes not, nor grows’. But in the early texts death by sickness is not mentioned, and this appears for the first time in S: where by emendation there is a modification of the idea, from freedom from all sickness to freedom from death by sickness. Moreover in the early texts rebirth in their own children seems to be represented as the universal fate of the Eldar who die; whereas in S they are said to return from Mandos ‘to free life’. Rebirth is mentioned in S very briefly and only in a later interpolation.