This wasn't a choice or Iluvatar problem, this was an anomaly. The Mouth of Sauron was just a man and Sauron probably augmented his lifespan with some magics, but who calls that living. Anyway, he was only a minor bit player and Tolkien never gave him more than those few lines in the RotK and didn't have an inkling that we fans would be wasting our time worrying about the Mouth's biography. If he had, I'm sure he would have deleted a few words or added a few more in order to not keep us awake in the wee small hours worrying about this non-problem.

Join the club!

I thought of a new nomination for longest living man, if you could call him a man...

Smeagol/Gollum, true he was really a hobbit and he had help from the ring, but he was still technically mortal. He found the ring TA 2463 and he perished TA 3019. The Encyclopedia of Arda says Smeagol was around the age of 25 when he came across the ring and give him a birth date of TA 2440. Which means he was about 579 years old! give or take a couple years at the most.

I'm starting to wonder how we can consider the Mouth of Sauron one of the longest living men, since there is no actual record, or even a remote record, of his birth. It says...

Which was TA 2951 only 68 years prior to the defeat of Sauron. I couldn't find any more information concerning MOuth of Sauron prior to that date.

It's not the fact that woman can out live men, it all comes down to that we just want peace and quite and give up life before 'our better halfs'.

Sorry Leelee, i usually agree with what you post but not this time. Whenever i see cases of poisoning (documented) it is the female doing the poisoning. Men usually use physical force and women use a more subtle approach to wacking someone, such as poison.

Even watching TV this past week i saw a documented case of an elderly lady poisoning her own elderly sister, with arsenic.

Actually, one must have their time-machine's CPU book-marked to the period a day or two after they bought it in order to have a source for spare parts, and to have a subroutine running at all times that will have returned one to this time period just prior to the failure of that next part.

If one fails to implement the above, one might end up being the longest lived person trapped in a period where personal communicators are still thought to be the cat's meow, instead of mere blips on the road to the total vanquishment of personal privacy.

I broke into a nervous sweat of terror just reading your words.I guess I shall just let you do the time travel thing and report back to us. Of course I will appreciate it if you NEVER tell us when you are going. I will be a wreck waiting for you to come back to us.
On second thought, perhaps some kind elves with particularly big muscles can find your place and using a sledge hammer, put it to sleep, thus keeping you safe and on familiar terra firma.
Yes, yes that is best I think.

Hey Clover I'm glad you could fill that information in, because I was almost sure that women tended to poison more often than men. Is alkaloiod coniine the main active constituent in Poison Ivy too?

In the Fellowship of the Ring, at the council in Rivendell when Elrond is speaking he says how he remembers well the splendour of the banners of Gil-galad and Elendil and Frodo is freaked out as he begins to contemplate how old Lord Elrond must be. Elrond explains that his memory reaches back to the Elder days and explains his geneology; later he goes on to say: Time was when a squirrel could go from tree to tree from what is now the Shire to Dunland west of Isengard. In those lands I journeyed once, and many things wild and strange I knew. But I had forgotten Bombadil, if indeed this is still the same that walked the woods and hills long ago, and even then he was older than the old.. That was not then his name. Iarwain Ben-adar we called him, oldest and fatherless. .......
So my vote is with dear old Tom.

Are you saying that those like the Maiar are without sex, neither men nor women? Do y ou mean then mortal, just someone who is on this side of the music? If so well then would not the most powerful of the 'gods' of all of those made be the longest living one as well? It would not seem logical to make the first and then the second and then so on and suddenly a newer being is the most powerful. Rather the 'first' born of them all would you not think?

In furtherance of Virumor's excellent answer above, I'll add we can not rule out the possibility that there may have been some Granny who buried many a husband and lived to an extremely ripe old age, outliving all the other known men and women of Mankind. She just happened to be another in the long list of females that Tolkien didn't feel compelled to include to his epic tale of Middle-earth.

The Countess seems to have slipped under my radar, do you have a source for her existance or am I right in asuming you are having us on, like pulling our legs?

Tom Bombadil obviously