Cryptic Clues

[Pervinca Took]

Originally Posted by Morsul the Dark

What in the.....

I'm having flashback to Saucepanman...

Mutates could indicate an anagram...
I wonder if "Although surrounded by nothing" could be the straight clue working from that it could be an island or the void... something to that effect...

1. You're right about "mutates."
2. "Surrounded by nothing" isn't the straight clue.

Yes, the pedant in me feels that celebrity like personality is something one may have rather than be..ans in retrospect I realised that it may have been harder for those who, pronounce elvish correctly ...and while I know it is keleb I still mentally read seleb a lot of the time...

It wasn't that. It just didn't occur to me that it might be a name used together with the original name. Names like Turambar, Serinde, Celebrindal and Felagund I kind of think of almost as non-hereditary surnames, although of course they're not. I was looking for a name you only ever see on its own - like Galadriel, who is never called Nerwen Galadriel.

And I meant that stars of the twinkling in the sky variety feature so much in Tolkien - linguistically, literally, in heraldry, in terms of there being names for individual ones, etc - that I went looking in all those places and it didn't occur to me to think of that particular meaning of star.

That's why I'm not very good at cryptic crosswords, even though I like them so much.