Well, Tolkien gives us quite a lot of detail about Caras Galadhon, the Elvish city in the heart of the forest: its central citadel is three thousand yards across (more than a mile and a half), and the road that runs round its outer fortifications is dozens of miles long. That sounds like a pretty major settlement to me. You’re right, I agree, that the elves pursue what we would, in the language of international relations, call an “isolationist” foreign policy. My point in the blogpost is that they figure both as a political entity in the realpolitik of Middle Earth and as something much stranger, something that goes back to pre-disenchanted pre-Modernity, when sensibilities were (in Taylor’s terms) porous rather than buffered, and humans lived in fear and awe of the strange, uncanny, magical creatures that haunted the woods.