With 50 years to complete puberty, 100 before full adulthood and millennia before a few managed to grow beards, JRR Tolkien’s immortal elves had world enough, and time. Their long childhoods allowed them to enjoy, with wonder and innocence, the bounty of an Earth imagined as more vital in its mythical youth. In the same mythos, men were fated to a more ephemeral worldly existence, further shortened and made miserable after a quasi-biblical Fall known through vague fables. They began to age prematurely, and were subjected to the ravages of disease and world-weariness.
In a later age of the world, as Tolkien would have it, science has found that in one sense, humans do enjoy an extended adolescence. A study based on brain scans of more than 4,000 people, published in Nature Communications, has identified five “eras” of brain development by tracing the evolution of neural connections: Childhood up to roughly the age of nine, followed by adolescence until around the age of 32, then adulthood until 66, “early ageing” up to 83 and “late ageing” after that. These classifications are only to do with the pattern of change in the brain’s “wiring” — as one researcher, quoted in The Guardian, was at pains to point out. It doesn’t mean that “people in their late 20s are going to be acting like teenagers”.
Nevertheless, it’s a reminder that definitions of adulthood are not always in accord with common assumptions. In popular perception, there was a time when the transition from childhood was much quicker than it is now; today, in contrast, millennials are often accused of enjoying an extended adolescence into their 20s and 30s. But perhaps this need not be a matter of shame, or sign of irresponsibility. Perhaps one can simply enjoy the world, and being young, like a nonagenarian elf.
