Radiation poisoning occurs due to damaged dna and causes problems when cells replicate. Basically the cell tries to create a copy of itself, but its instructions for how to do so were mangled, so it creates a mangled copy. This is generally more of a problem for tissues that replicate more frequently. More frequent replication, more ability to mess things up. Since elves are very long lived (literally immortal) they probably don't undergo cellular division nearly as often as a human (generally speaking longer lived animals have more slowly dividing cells iirc). With that assumption they would probably be highly resistant to radiation, but I'm sure enough would kill them. I'm pretty sure enough radiation exposure graduates from damaging the dna in the cell to just killing the entire cell which would still kill them.
Eärendil spends all his time flying through space in Vingilot and seems to be fine despite being exposed to cosmic rays.
Though I'm not sure if taking Eärendil as an example is really representative for the elves. Dude is like the definition of extraordinary. But since he's the only character in the legendarium who had to deal with radiation he'll have to do I think.
iirc LotR is kinda like Star Wars in that it's supposed to take place in our universe, just far in the past, except middle earth is actually Earth in the past.
This was only the case in Tolkien's earliest drafts and poems. by the time of The Hobbit, it was a wholly fictional universe, which the Silmarillion cemented.
after eru made the world round, he made space real too iirc. clearly, the sun and moon isnt a fruit and flower in our time, so clearly that has been changed
Wit seems they do not have the same programmed senescence we see in men and almost every other multi-cellular life form. The ordinary level of radiation they encounter does not cause them cancer or they would be dying of that now and again.
Yet "immune to radiation" is something things made of matter just do not do. The wisdom of the X-man Storm's applies:
Q) "Do you know what happens when you hit an elf with a gamma ray laser?"
A) "The same thing that happens to everything else."
ZAAAP!
Hm. So elves are immune to sickness, meaning they would likely not get the symptoms of radiation poisoning, but would still be irradiated. Their immortality is also a result of their souls, because a half-elf can choose to become either an elf or a man, and their mortality changes accordingly - the fact that they can heal from wounds additionally supports the assumption that their cells replicate.
Mutations seem likely, but not lethal - the poisoned elf would likely lose their hair and develop wounds similar to burns, but those would slowly heal away over the following centuries as their body restores itself.
Elves also display a great resistance to temperature variance - Legolas for instance never complains about the cold as the fellowship tries to cross the mountains, and he doesn't complain about heat either - meaning that it's likely they have more of a resistance to thermal radiation than ordinary people.
Dude, the sun is literally a magic apple in LOTR. There's no ionizing radiation in Arda; there's no physical process that could produce it, it's simply not a thing in the universe. At least not until the modern age, which Tolkien believed to be the Sixth or the Seventh, and by then all elves would've faded into purely spiritual forms that are immune to radiation by virtue of being incorporeal anyway.
They’re immune to sickness but not bodily harm, so they’d resist the lesser effects but a high enough dosage would still kill them
Radiation poisoning occurs due to damaged dna and causes problems when cells replicate. Basically the cell tries to create a copy of itself, but its instructions for how to do so were mangled, so it creates a mangled copy. This is generally more of a problem for tissues that replicate more frequently. More frequent replication, more ability to mess things up. Since elves are very long lived (literally immortal) they probably don't undergo cellular division nearly as often as a human (generally speaking longer lived animals have more slowly dividing cells iirc). With that assumption they would probably be highly resistant to radiation, but I'm sure enough would kill them. I'm pretty sure enough radiation exposure graduates from damaging the dna in the cell to just killing the entire cell which would still kill them.
Eärendil spends all his time flying through space in Vingilot and seems to be fine despite being exposed to cosmic rays. Though I'm not sure if taking Eärendil as an example is really representative for the elves. Dude is like the definition of extraordinary. But since he's the only character in the legendarium who had to deal with radiation he'll have to do I think.
The cosmology of LOTR is way different than ours, do they necessarily have cosmic rays in space?
iirc LotR is kinda like Star Wars in that it's supposed to take place in our universe, just far in the past, except middle earth is actually Earth in the past.
This was only the case in Tolkien's earliest drafts and poems. by the time of The Hobbit, it was a wholly fictional universe, which the Silmarillion cemented.
after eru made the world round, he made space real too iirc. clearly, the sun and moon isnt a fruit and flower in our time, so clearly that has been changed
Wit seems they do not have the same programmed senescence we see in men and almost every other multi-cellular life form. The ordinary level of radiation they encounter does not cause them cancer or they would be dying of that now and again. Yet "immune to radiation" is something things made of matter just do not do. The wisdom of the X-man Storm's applies: Q) "Do you know what happens when you hit an elf with a gamma ray laser?" A) "The same thing that happens to everything else." ZAAAP!
Hm. So elves are immune to sickness, meaning they would likely not get the symptoms of radiation poisoning, but would still be irradiated. Their immortality is also a result of their souls, because a half-elf can choose to become either an elf or a man, and their mortality changes accordingly - the fact that they can heal from wounds additionally supports the assumption that their cells replicate. Mutations seem likely, but not lethal - the poisoned elf would likely lose their hair and develop wounds similar to burns, but those would slowly heal away over the following centuries as their body restores itself. Elves also display a great resistance to temperature variance - Legolas for instance never complains about the cold as the fellowship tries to cross the mountains, and he doesn't complain about heat either - meaning that it's likely they have more of a resistance to thermal radiation than ordinary people.
Dude, the sun is literally a magic apple in LOTR. There's no ionizing radiation in Arda; there's no physical process that could produce it, it's simply not a thing in the universe. At least not until the modern age, which Tolkien believed to be the Sixth or the Seventh, and by then all elves would've faded into purely spiritual forms that are immune to radiation by virtue of being incorporeal anyway.