First, if the story and characters are compelling, all other rules can be overlooked. If you can invoke the genre's tropes successfully, and prevent them from being clichés, your story will prosper. Of course, that's for the reader to judge, and therein lies your peril.
My unsolicited advice - instead of elves and dwarves, invent your own races. There's no sense of discovery for readers to see these people, and imho fantasy is all about discovery (see Tolkein's essay On Fairy Stories). This has nothing to do with you and everything to do with readers limitations, many of which are self-imposed.
As a reader of Tolkein since I was 5 or 6, I will confide that I do not read fantasy that has elves for many reasons. I am bored with attempts to recreate Tolkein's elves, and no other elves come close - because I won't let them. I am bored with people trying to re-invent elves and dwarves because, using the same terms, because for me, it's not re-invention, it's either perversion (unwelcome change) or repetition. Author R. Scott Bakker wrote an essay explaining this better than I can (or will).
Using him as an example, he created a race that is immortal and "high", but now fallen. They embody madness and greatness and perversion and memory so deep that they literally have become mad, their perversion driven by their attempt to remember and keep themselves whole in the face of all the centuries. He is a controversial writer, and I do not point to him as a model of any kind for the purposes of this discussion beyond his success as deploying standard genre tropes (conan-like warrior, sorcerors, immortals, etc.) in a new and interesting way.
There is a maxim in Michal Greene's 48 Laws of Power that states "Never follow a great man", meaning, never step into a role that was previously held by an amazing person - no matter how well you do, even if you're better, you will be seen as different, and in the shadow of the excellent, "different" always means worse.
I feel your pain and longing for a return to Middle Earth. I advise you to take the notions that make that experience and goal worthwhile, and create a new world, with new people, and new problems, and take us there.
My two cents, offered with encouragement and humility - Gem Cutter