Do Wood-Elves Know Every Other Wood-Elves?

[Otaku-sempai]

“Poor little blighter,” said William. He had already had as much supper as he could hold; also he had had lots of beer. “Poor little blighter! Let him go!”

“Not till he says what he means by lots and none at all,” said Bert. “I don’t want to have me throat cut in me sleep! Hold his toes in the fire, till he talks!”

I'm not holding out on you, if that's what you think. I'm just making some educated guesses based on what I've read from Tolkien and Tolkien scholars.

[atgxtg]

Considering how "Elf-Friend" seems to work as some sort of mark that is detectable by other elves I wonder if elves need much more than a casual encounter to know much about one another.

[aramis]

Given that the "woodland realm" (nothern 3rd of Mirkwood) is much overrun, and no longer habitable...

It's likely that almost all the Mirkwood Elves have retreated to or near Thranduil's hall.

The Raft-Elves might be the only ones left - they aren't mentioned in TOR itself, and I always assumed them just a worksite for Thranduil's Hall, not a separate settlement.

We have the designer's decision to make all of northern Mirkwood insanely dangerous - and the Elf-Road seldom travelled.

The other question to answer is "how many elves are there?"

At the Battle of 5 Armies, thranduil fielded somewhere between 2000 and 3000 persons; assuming the 1-in-5 maximum historical competent warriors, and you get some 10,000-15,000 elves under Thranduil.

Even if it's 2/3 of the elves there, that's still 3,000 to 5,000.

Then we double the monkeysphere... allowing an individual elf to know some 300 on average, and wequickly find, "No, it's not reasonable for every elf to know every other"...

[Otaku-sempai]

Given that the "woodland realm" (nothern 3rd of Mirkwood) is much overrun, and no longer habitable...

It's likely that almost all the Mirkwood Elves have retreated to or near Thranduil's hall.

The Raft-Elves might be the only ones left - they aren't mentioned in TOR itself, and I always assumed them just a worksite for Thranduil's Hall, not a separate settlement.

If anyone is interested in an official C7 answer, The Heart of the Wild tells us:

The Elvenking's realm claims all the forest from the north-eastern edge of Mirkwood to the Forest River. The northern part of his realm is a land of silent wooded hills and quiet valleys, where no man goes. Even the Elves rarely travel to this empty land save when they seek solitude or to listen to the night-speech of the trees.

And...

Virtually all the Elves of Mirkwood make their home here in the Woodland Realm. The rustic Wood-elves live in platforms in the branches, or else in small houses or even tents on the forest floor. Most live within three days' travel of the Elvenking's Halls, but they are a wandering people, passing at times into the north and west of the realm as whimsy takes them.

The tree-platforms would be what the Elves of Lórien would call a talan (plural telain?) or very similar to it.

The book does state that the Spiders have begun to invade the Wood-land Realm, using webs to span the Forest River. Presumably the Wood-elves kill them on sight.