Amazon series: reactions to news and rumours. (Spoiler alert!)

JJ48 said:
For that matter, if I met a family in real life with blonde parents and a dark-haired child, I probably still wouldn't think anything were out of the ordinary...
Click to expand...

Most people would assume the mother dyed her hair blonde. Or one of them wears a wig due to chemotherapy or other medical problems. Or they adopted the child. As such nobody would really ask them. But those would not be elves and as such would be able to have "modern circumstances".
 
We had that hair color thing a long time ago i believe... all we know is Arwen has dark hair and Elrond too.

Beren&Luthien: brown& black (thingol is silverhaired while Melian is dark so Luthien is a very uncommon mutation)
Dior: brown/black 50 vs 50% Nimloth we do not know but most likely either dark or silver
Elwing: could be black (25%), brown (50%),red (1%),strawberry (9%), blond(14)
Earendil:certainly blond! (Two blond parents)
Elrond:50% brown, 8% strawberry, 42% blond

There's few chance Arwen is anything but brownhaired, her mother is silverblond as her mothers parents are goldblond and silverblond.

Still... Luthien is the uncommon blackhaired child of a silver and darkhaired couple so we do not know how exactly silver works with elves...
 
Haerangil said:
Elrond:50% brown, 8% strawberry, 42% blond
There's few chance Arwen is anything but brownhaired, her mother is silverblond as her mothers parents are goldblond and silverblond.
Click to expand...
That is true, Elrond could have taken after his father more, but then Arwen could not have been dark.
(Each geneation losses something of its genetic heritage, as it is not additive, otherwise a person would burst.)
That is the whole point - for her to be able to be dark he has to be dark.
Were she not to be dark, he could be as blonde as he is in the Amazon series - given his ancestry.

[And given that the Dunedain are dark haired still even after several millenia makes me believe the "Melian's magic black" theory.]
 
Last edited:
The Dunedain could be many reasons, Beorians and Halethrim being darker in general... the faithful coming fromma specific region of Numenor where more darkhaired people were typical...

But i think theres a lot which speaks for magic black. However... it plainly could be that bith Elrond and Arwen are just brown-haired
 
Haerangil said:
The Dunedain could be many reasons, Beorians and Halethrim being darker in general... the faithful coming fromma specific region of Numenor where more darkhaired people were typical...
Click to expand...
Still they are mixed enough to have many recessive blonde genes masked = hidden, so a substantial percentage of their offspring should be fair-haired still - were no other factors at work.

Haerangil said:
But i think theres a lot which speaks for magic black. However... it plainly could be that bith Elrond and Arwen are just brown-haired
Click to expand...

Their hair is descibed as twilight-like and shadow-like, to me that more like very dark gray - not brown, more graphite. A very distinct colour.

Something like that:
 
Which then again would speak for Luthien's magical hair gene... as Arwen generally seems to be the very likeness of Luthien.

Anyway i would be okay with Elrond having brown hair then... darker or more light, both ok.

Graphite hair..
That makes me think of another type of siver hair than silver-blond too...

Then a dark haired Melian + a silver Thingol = a dusky silver-black Luthien? Ok!

Elrond still would most likely have brown hair... maybe dark brown, but not black, but his wife is silver so... hair magic!
 
"His hair was dark as the shadows of twilight" to me reads as a poetic way of saying "black". And Arwen is said to be the spit of him, so I imagine that means they have the same hair colour. And she's the image of Luthien, which again reinforces black on the lot of them.
 
Darren Grey said:
"His hair was dark as the shadows of twilight" to me reads as a poetic way of saying "black". And Arwen is said to be the spit of him, so I imagine that means they have the same hair colour. And she's the image of Luthien, which again reinforces black on the lot of them.
Click to expand...

[Yeah, she basically a female clon of her father, so that Aragorn has a worthy trophy wife to mary at the end of the book.] Still Tolkien describes Elrond's hair explicitly in a way he describes Luthien's. As long as Elrond had this kind of hair colour for me it might have been cut as short as Amazon wanted - he might be still mourning his brother and keeping his hair short as a sign of mourning.
 
Odola said:
[Yeah, she basically a female clon of her father, so that Aragorn has a worthy trophy wife to mary at the end of the book.] Still Tolkien describes Elrond's hair explicitly in a way he describes Luthien's. As long as Elrond had this kind of hair colour for me it might have been cut as short as Amazon wanted - he might be still mourning his brother and keeping his hair short as a sign of mourning.
Click to expand...
I read something similar of that rote with why Thorin Oakenshield from The Hobbit films had a short beard; it was a sign of mourning and had he lived to rule for more than a day or two, he would have grown it out.
 
I agree.Textual evidence Elrond should have black hair as should Arwen.Most likely.

Yet Elrond still has a blonde father, whose parents were both blonde and a mother who, more likely was not black-haired, though shestill could have been (having a black/brown and a dark/silverhaired parent).

I am ready to dish all these thoughs as "well allright, elf-genetics work obviously different from ours!"
Bit i am as well ready to overlook an Elrond who is not black-haired and a Gil-Galad who is not silverhaired....

Dang, revisiting photography... "shadows of twilight" can basically be ANYTHING from deep black to very dark grey to even brown.
 
Not necessarily...
Both races can have offspring and still have different weird rules on how hair colors or maybe leaf-shaped ears are inherited...
Not to talk about problems like ageing and immortality... i have to catch this train now, sorry! No internet on tour also ;)
 
MithLuin said:
Having a positive outlook isn't a bad thing, but I do take issue with some of his 'no textual evidence' assertions. I recognize that the intent was to encourage dismayed fans to take a step back and reconsider.
Click to expand...

As Corey noted on Twitter more recently,

Because that didn’t make it into one of the handful of sound bytes they pulled from our three-hour conversation and included in the video. If you’ve ever done an interview like that, you’ll understand how that happens sometimes.
Click to expand...

in response to the question

But why in the Youtube video did you make it seem as though Tolkien never mentioned Dwarf women have beards even once, and that the whole idea came from the LOTR movies?
Click to expand...
 
Yes, as I suspected, the qualifications were edited out, and the editor had a clear agenda of saying 'Amazon is doing an awesome job and the fans are wrong to complain.'

So, at the end of the day, I have disagreements with the content of that interview, but that does not mean that I necessarily disagree with Corey Olsen ;) If only 11% of what he was saying actually made it into the video 'interview'...naturally, his emphatic statements may be missing the parts where he walked it back or qualified things.


As for the genetics of elven hair color...if that is a topic you are interested in, I suggest you check out the paper Faelivrin and I presented at Mythmoot a few years ago. It may be a bit more than anyone is looking for, but hey, if you are going to bring up a topic, and I happen to have 20 page document on that topic to hand...Imma share it ;)

Mythmoot VI: The Genetics of Elven Hair Color


As for the topic at hand: Lúthien, Elrond, and Arwen all have the same black hair that is 'dark as shadow' that is inherited from Melian. The easiest way to achieve that outcome (especially with all of the other light-haired people in that family tree), is for Melian's dark hair to be a simple dominant trait that covers any other hair color genes present. That was why we called it 'Magic Black'. We did try to work out the inheritance patterns without that, but there is only a vanishingly small chance that Elrond and Arwen could end up with those hair colors without taking this as a very special case indeed.

We did try, very hard, to avoid that explanation of 'special Maiar genes'...but the only way to do so was to use the special case of Galadriel's hair [which we accounted for with 'roaning'] and make that a very common trait in Celeborn's family. So, it was already a special case/exception, and still only worked if you went with a 3% chance or less in multiple generations in a row to get the appropriate outcome. Possible? Yes. Likely? No. The 'Magic Black', being a simple dominant gene, had a 50% chance of being passed on to each offspring, and since we had no requirement that the trait skip a generation, nor even that all siblings in a family inherit it, it offers the simplest solution.

Incidentally, despite having two blond parents, Eärendil *could* have light brown hair (like Beren). Children having lighter (or darker) hair than their parents is possible, within a certain range. Also, while Tolkien described Eärendil as 'fair' on multiple occasions (in Fall of Gondolin), I am unaware of a passage where he explicitly stated that Eärendil is blond. Again, he can be blond. But I would not go so far as to say he *must* needs be blond.

Also, while it may seem clear to me that Elrond can only have dark hair if his mother Elwing also has dark hair, that does *not* mean that all artists have depicted Elwing with dark hair. (Tolkien never described her hair color.) Jenny Dolfen chose this shade for Elwing on account of Nimloth likely having silver hair.

Cy1uMZmWQAAqZbV


The assumption that gold + silver hair can give you dark hair does not work with humans...but humans do not naturally have silver hair as a normal hair color except as an effect of aging/damage, either. Saying that silver elven hair works differently than you might expect is not an invalid interpretation of a fantasy world.

(Saying that Elrond has blond hair, when Tolkien said he didn't, is another matter entirely :p )
 
Last edited:
MithLuin said:
The assumption that gold + silver hair can give you dark hair does not work with humans...but humans do not naturally have silver hair as a normal hair color except as an effect of aging/damage, either. Saying that silver elven hair works differently than you might expect is not an invalid interpretation of a fantasy world.

(Saying that Elrond has blond hair, when Tolkien said he didn't, is another matter entirely :p )
Click to expand...
We see in the books, that the Dunedain and Gondorians are expected to have dark hair still and show the elvish default combination of "dark hair and grey eyes".

We know Melian took the guise of an elf, but still I would expect due to her being Maia and the relationship between fea and hroa her traits would be more resistant to corruption than they usually are.

As such the "Magic Black" effect would be a much greater resistance to loss of function {or maybe even to an extent a restoration of the original function that was lost] - and significantly greater, as we see this effect even as far down the road like Boromir - "There was a tall man with a fair and noble face, dark-haired and grey-eyed, proud and stern of glance." As such the "incorruptibility" of the dark hair colour would be marker of Melin's/Luthien's line both among the humans and the elves.

[Jenny Dolfen herself painted Elwing as dark-haired also - e.g. in the context of this "family picture" (which could hang in Elrond's Last Homely House somewhere actually)

]
 
Last edited:
Earendil also has two blonde grandparents! One on each side...
Turgon was most likely darkhaired and Rian most likely brown, the likeliness of him having been anything but blonde is really small!

Even with a blonde dad, if Dior was deep black and Nimloth silverhaired... with a mother undefined Elrond still could have black hair... hmm...
 
Last edited:
Haerangil said:
Earendil also has two blonde grandparents! One on each side...
Turgon was most likely darkhaired and Rian most likely brown, the likeliness of him having been anything but blonde is really small!

Even with ablonde dad, if Dior was deep blaxk and Ni loth silverhaired... with a mother undefined Elrond still could have black hair... hmm...
Click to expand...
Not really. Dark is always manifested, fair can be masked. If silver were dominant over black, Luthien would have Thingol's hair colour, not Melian's. So as Dior carried masked fair genes from his father's side Elwing could have been fair but then she would have not inherited Melian's black at all - as we only inherit the half of genetic info from each parent, the other half we do not - as such she could not have passed black to her sons as that would have been a trait she herself would not have had inherited. Because black hair always manifests, if cannot be masked. Fair can be masked by dark and two mixed parents - dark themselves - can have fair-haired child, but not two fair-haired a dark-haired one. If they would have carried dark, they automatically would be dark themselves.
 
Last edited:
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top