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« on: May 22, 2015, 02:32:33 AM »
It's tough to know without knowing more about the setting.
Star Wars, as a setting, has a large, and theoretically limitless, number of planets that could be the source of a wide variety of intelligent species. Middle-Earth, on the other hand, is a single continent of an imagined pre-historic earth, with (nearly) each element* painstakingly accounted for.
Generally speaking, I think there's an inverse relationship between the scope of a setting and the number of intelligent species it can support without loosing cohesion. Tone matters a bit here, as well as how widespread these elements are.
*And it turns out there are a lot more of these than it appears at first glance. There's Men, Elves, Dwarves, Hobbits (maybe a sub-species of Men), and Orcs (ditto for Elves), but also Ents, Trolls, Dragons, Giants, Talking Eagles, Giant Spiders (maybe only one that can really be considered "intelligent"), whatever Tom Bombadil is . . .