Thread: Beardless
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Old 05-03-2007, 09:43 AM   #8
Morwen
Shade of Carn Dûm
 
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Well I did say that I couldn't explain it for charactes such as Cirdan and Gandalf. The characters of "less nobility" and "mixed blood" I was referring to was the common man, the people without Numenorean blood or Elvish blood.
But were Numenoreans beardless? I don't recall if Tolkien actually says that they were. He does make such a specific comment about Hobbits IIRC in The Hobbit, An Unexpected Party (though in the Prologue to LotR he only specfically says that the Harfoots are beardless). Unless there is a similar statement about the Numenoreans (and I do not say that there is not), why should we assume that as a race they were beardless?

That aside, there are number of very different characters described as having beards:Cirdan, Gandalf, Saruman, Theoden, Ghan-buri-Ghan (who is described as having a "scanty beard straggled on his lumpy chin as dry moss"), Beorn. I therefore don't think of beards as something Tolkien assigned to characters to indicate a lack of nobility; but that he simply visualised certain characters as bearded.
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