In the book
The Discarded Image, chapter
The Longaevi or Longlivers, CS Lewis remarks about stature...
'As I then said, the visual imagination of medieval and earlier writers never for long worked to scale. Indeed I cannot think of any book before Gulliver that makes any serious attempt to do so. What are the relative sizes of Thor and the Giants in the Prose Edda? There is no answer. In cap. XLV a giant's glove seems to the three gods a great hall, and the thumb of it a side-chamber which two of them use as a bedroom. This would make a god to a giant as a small fly to a man. But in the very next chapter Thor is dining with the giants and can lift up -- though for a special reason cannot drain -- the drinking horn they hand him. When it was possible to write like that we can expect no coherent account of the elve's stature.' CS Lewis, The Discarded Image
Lewis also points out a passage from Milton, and that Shakespeare, Drayton, and William Browne made literary uses of it, and
'from their use descend the minute and almost insectal fairies of the debased modern convention with their antennae and guazy wings' Adding that Richard Bovet in his Pandemonium (1684) speaks of the fairies '
appearing like men and women of a stature generally near the smaller size of man...'Adding this along with plenty of other things. Interesting book and chapter
It's also interesting to look at a description concerning the stature of the Noldoli according to Tolkien's early Fall of Gondolin in
The Book of Lost Tales, or the description in draft notes for the early version of the awakening of Men. Originally Tolkien's Elves appear to be taller than the popular conception of the 'Elves' of his day, but not so tall as they would ultimately be imagined.
Another interesting 'point' is that Tolkien actually notes in Appendix F that the Elves were not winged! Although I'm not sure he expected his readers to think so, but probably just added this as a comparison to a modern notion.
