In Letter 27,
Tolkien, describing what
Hobbits look like, writes:
A round, jovial face; ears only slightly pointed and ‘elvish’ ....
Now in this letter, written to his American publisher in 1938, the word
elvish would have to refer to the common image of pointed Elvish ears for its reader to understand it. That is, it is possible that Tolkien meant ‘elvish’
only as in popular images, not meaning the Elvish folk in his legendarium.
That would be why Tolkien put single quotation marks around the word.
On the other end, it would be somewhat odd to imagine Hobbits to have pointed ears that Tolkien would call “elvish”, while his
elves would not.
A more convincing passage appears in
The Lost Road (HoME 5), “The Etymologies”:
LAS¹- *lassē leaf; Q lasse, N lhass; Q lasselanta leaf-fall, autumn, N lhasbelin (*lassekwelēne), cf. Q Narqelion [KWEL]. Lhasgalen Greenleaf, Gnome name of Laurelin. (Some think this is related to the next and *lassē ‘ear’. The Quendian ears were more pointed and leaf-shaped than [?human].)
The words “the next” refer to the following entry
LAS²- meaning ‘listen’.
Some argue that this passage is ambiguous.
Firstly, the last word was not clear to Christopher Tolkien. He thought it might be “human”, but it might be something else.
But whatever that word might be, still the Quendian ears are more pointed and leaf-shaped than something or other.
Some dispute the meaning of “leaf-shaped”, indicating oak leaves and maple leaves and leaves of
books and tables and such.
Well, I don’t find any dictionary entry for
leaf-shaped on the web, but you can use Google or another good search engine to find texts containing the word
leaf-shaped and see that
leaf-shaped is used in practice to refer to things shaped like a pointed oval or like a valentine heart or to some intermediate shape.
It is very common usage.
Some claim the passge proves only that Tolkien thought Elves had pointed ears at one particular time.
Well, that is all it
proves.
Pointed ears do bother some people, probably because they aren’t mentioned in folklore accounts of faërie folk and such but seem to have become part of the general public picture of Elves in the last two centuries through book illustrations.
The ears in book illustrations probably derive from the pointed, goatish ears often found on pictures of devils, fauns and satyrs which have been not unreasonably applied by
artists to faërie folk.
To some pointed ears seem part of the degraded and pretty picture of faërie folk which Tolkien rejected. Therefore it seems to them that Tolkien ought to have rejected the pointed ears as well.
I sympathize with that point of view, and it is always
possible that Tolkien changed his mind at some later point, on this and other things.
But such speculation aside, Tolkien did at least once, as indicated by this reference, envision his Elves with pointed ears.
He may have always done so.