Topic: Do you have a favorite race among the denizens of middle earth? If so, which, and why? Do you identify with that race? Is there a race which you either dislike, or have no feeling for or don't feel you understand sufficiently? If you are a writer, which do you prefer to write (if any)?

OK, I'm just off the plane from San Francisco, red-eye flight, no sleep, straight to work. Don't expect coherence.

Until this weekend, my answer always would have been "Elves." For some reason, there's a large part of my brain that keeps trying to make me type "maia." Can't quite figure out why, but I keep getting this image of a gentleman dressed in white, wearing a panama hat and waving a very large Union Jack. Odd. Brain definitely not firing on all cylinders. And as if that's not bad enough, the calendar page on my LOTR calendar for July (which I just turned over) seems to be hobbits, with a certain Scots lad in the front. Must NOT get further distracted...

Ahem. So. 30 years ago when the books were probably the most important thing in my life, the elves were everything. I barely noticed the dwarves, the hobbits were too provincial for me, the ents were amusing but moved altogether too slowly, and none of the men particularly interested me. (Let's not even talk about Orcs...) My favorite characters were easily Elrond and Galadriel, and the elves were the only race for me. I adored elves in very nearly every incarnation--even those faerie folk of George MacDonald, who were more capricious and looked even less favorably on man than did Tolkien's elves. I'd have given nearly anything to be one of them, even the merest dryad. I'd love to, mind you--but I don't identify with them so much as *want* to be like them. If I'm anyone, I'm Pip--WHERE are we going?--minus the looks, the charm, and the lovely accent, of course.

In the movieverse, things haven't changed all that radically. My favorite character is a certain hobbit, but he's definitely got a large share of Elven blood. And there's that Elf B... I mean, Witch, whose agenda I do not trust to entirely coincide with mine. But on the whole, I still love the elves best. They take the long view, as befits ageless creatures, and that will not always look good to mortals in the short term, but it's usually for the best. They live in some truly beautiful places. And several of them (notably Legolas and Haldir) are incredibly hot. So there.

Don't hate any of the races, not even the Orcs (I love the squeak they make when Bob the Cave Troll smacks 'em with his hammer). Then again, I might make an exception for the Fighting Uruk Hai (what do you suppose their colors are? Blood red and brain matter grey?). The race I will probably never attempt to write is the dwarves, because they both don't interest me and I know so little about them--and the latter is probably a result of the former.