legolas's hair

[Galin]

Originally Posted by Jallanite

Yes, for the Appendix F description taken by itself. But Christopher Tolkien notes in The Book of Lost Tales, Part One (HoME 1), pages 43–44, and in The Peoples of Middle-earth (HoME 12), page 77, that earlier forms of this passage in earlier writings applied to the Noldor only and that it was originally in an aborted forward to The Lord of the Rings as given in The Peoples of Middle-earth (HoME 12), page 23, that Tolkien first modified this description so that it applied to all the Eldar.

But this 'but' merely refers to a rejected draft version, and considering that Christopher Tolkien also noted that his father carefully revised the passage to refer to the Eldar...

(...) This description published in The Lord of the Rings creates problems with all the Vanyar who would now also have dark locks and possibly with the silver-haired Celeborn. It is commonly understood to be an unintentional error by Tolken.

... looking at things another way maybe: the description published in The Silmarillion creates the 'problem' in my opinion. And even Christopher Tolkien is not wholly sure Tolkien had made an unintentional error when he wrote Appendix F. CJRT mused on the possibility that Tolkien had not, at this point, landed upon the idea that most of the Vanyar were imagined as golden-haired -- although admittedly he cites (but) one example that appears to pre-date the final form of Appendix F -- but even here we can't be sure that that idea was yet 'concrete' in the early 1950s.


There is, of course, nothing wrong with Appendix F as revised until one compares it to later, but never published (by the author himself), descriptions concerning the Vanyar.

Why not see the 'private' description as the error instead of The Lord of the Rings? I think Tolkien himself would arguably weight The Lord of the Rings, it being already published and never revised on this point, if he realized the problem and attempted to solve it. Either that or he could claim that he meant the Eldar of Middle-earth were dark-haired -- but the point is, no one really knows how Tolkien himself would have handled this.

The Vanyar were the smallest clan, living in Aman since before the Exile of the Noldor. If they too were mostly dark-haired, Middle-earth is not shaken to its foundations (hyperbole alert). And golden hair could even be said to be more rare among the Eldar, if so. It's not necessary that the Vanyar explain the House of Finarfin's golden locks, it's just part of the corpus that remained private, essentially draft text, until made public by Christopher Tolkien.

They don't even have to be called the Vanyar that I'm aware of, considering what it means according to Quendi And Eldar for example.

Anyway I'm just trying to raise a different perspective compared to saying that this author-published description is commonly understood as an (even unintentional) error. It's only so from a certain point of view in my opinion, even if Tolkien had forgotten about the Vanyar when he first wrote the passage (again if the idea was certain at the time), and even if he had again forgotten when he chose to revise Finrod to (ultimately) Finarfin* in the very same passage.

Did JRRT miss this twice? Maybe. It would seem so in that he never appears to address the matter. And even if Tolkien might have characterized Appendix F as the error here in general, it's not necessarily a given that the characterization would be: the mistake was that only the Noldor were meant...

... as according to later text, the Sindar themselves were mostly dark-haired too. Only the Vanyar needed explaining here according to CJRT -- again if considering the same sort of comparison that creates the 'problem' under discussion: comparing what had been published versus what had been written at a later point, but still remained private from Tolkien's perspective.

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*a revision itself that was hardly necessary, even if desired, incidentally.