Posted: July 13, 1999 at 13:04:14: by Michael Martinez
: I hadn't realised Thranduil was described as blond. Then again
: his son Legolas is dark, as was the doyen of Sindarin beauty
: Luthien. I can't help feeling that, as Tolkien based Luthien's
: colouring on that of his wife, he would have disapproved of her
: people being summarily "bleached." In The Silmarillion the
: impression given is that the only blond Elves were the Vanyar
: or those with Vanyar ancestry. Another point is - have the
: MERP people any basis for making Silvan Elves red-haired?I cannot think of any explicit reason. I suppose they could have extrapolated something. Not knowing when the material was written, I can't say much. :) : A mixture would be fine, but to state that all Beornings must
: be blond in the face of the only evidence available is nothing
: short of perverse. There is also the shape changing aspect to
: consider - a large dark hairy man is somewhat suggestive of a
: bear, but is the same true of a blond man? After all there are
: Black Bears and Brown Bears but not Golden Bears - outside the
: realms of children's toys. Maybe this is older material. Over the last few years I've had communications with writers who were very displeased with the earlier MERP stuff, but then, a lot of MERP modules were written before most of the HISTORY OF MIDDLE-EARTH books came out. Now the writers have to stay close to the "MERP canon", as it were, and yet still hope to introduce a greater degree of faithfulness to the full corpus.
------------------
Parma Endorion: Essays on Middle-earth, Revised Edition
|
