swim through the fires to stay in this world

I would tend to blame the endless run of Tokien imitators even more than Tolkien himself here, at least if you consider his entire mythos; go through the Silmarillion and the various unfinished stories of the First Age, and you'll find no shortage of elves who are arrogant and hubristic and oh-so-far-from-perfect. Really, a lot of the crap that goes down in LOTR, in a long-term view much of what's happening is really the final acts of patterns that were set in motion by very bad decisions made by elves centuries or millenia before...