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Old 10-13-2006, 09:32 AM   #6
Aiwendil
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Join Date: Mar 2001
Posts: 2,224
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Manwe wrote:
Quote:
"They were tall, fair of skin, and grey-eyed, though their locks were dark, save in the golden house of Finarfin..." - (Return of the King, Appendix F)

Using this quote we can surmise that the Teleri Elves, of whom the Silvan Elves are descendants, and of whom Legolas is born into, had dark hair.
Actually, it's not that simple. The quote you give is one of a few infamous "errors" that crept into LotR as published. In the first draft, this statement was intended to refer only to the "Gnomes" - the word Tolkien at one time used for the Noldor. At some point, he decided that "Gnome" in modern parlance inevitably conjured up images of diminutive garden creatures, so he set about excising the word "Gnome" from his writings, including LotR (this was before it was published). In removing the term from the passage regarding hair colour, he inadvertantly changed the subject of the statement from "Gnomes" (i.e. the Noldor specifically) to "Elves".

That this was a mistake is evident from the fact that in all the writings both preceding and following LotR, only the Noldor are portrayed as generally having dark hair. The Vanyar, in fact, are consistently given golden hair - in fact, Finarfin's golden hair is attributed to his Vanyarin blood (his mother was a Vanya). The Teleri seem to have a variety of hair colours; Thingol's was silver.

So there is actually nothing mysterious about Thranduil's golden hair, though of course that still leaves the colour of his son's hair a mystery.
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