Fair vs Fair: A Meta by

Oh I enjoyed this. I once got shouted down for maintaining he meant 'damn pretty' so I feel vindicated.

very interesting, i took a screenshot :) 

fair analysis... 'fair' is an overworked word, like 'mind'. it can also mean 'accurate' or 'just' or 'mediocre' or 'sunny'... Sauron the mediocre, Turin the sunny, Fëanor the just...

re Numenor, the House of Hador were blond, and they had input into the population of Numenor, so there’s a strain of blond in the family tree. 

re the children of the redhaired Nerdanel, my grandad was a redhead, he had three kids, a brunette, a redhead and a strawberry blond (blond with a reddish hint) so in humans at least, it can be a lucky dip.

nice work, thanks for that :)

I am so happy you did this. I always wished I had the energy and I never did and never would have either. I love to use "fair" in my fanfic vocabulary because it is so very Tolkienesque. I was also one of those who allowed myself to be drawn into discussions of Celegorm's hair color back in the olden days. I had my cake and ate it too! I picked blond for purely aesthetic reasons and nothing to do with vocabulary and chose to think he had a remarkable pretty face even among the Feanorian brothers! I loved the idea that the one who was the least delicate little flower in his personal habits might be the one who had the maiden of Tirion swooning, "Look at that face!" 

It's great to have the numbers if ever I should need them! Thanks!

oh, nobody gets my jokes when i write them down. i thought 'Turin the sunny' would have been the giveaway, but then i thought Sauron the mediocre was too...

of course you're right, he generally did mean pretty or blond. or both...

Turin the sunny... heheheh 

I like this a lot! Kudos to you for running the numbers.

I confess I favor silver-haired or albino Celegorm just for variety, but it's nice to know that canon truly gives no solid indication one way or the other.

Good meta essay. Interesting that Sauron is most ofte discr as fair... makes my headcannon Of him being blond slightly more legitimate.

Just to say, again, that I was really interested in your results. Thank you for taking the trouble to do the research and for sharing it with us!

As I said on DW, the only certainty is that the word doesn't refer to Celegorm's mindset! *g* Again, thank you for looking up all these references - it's useful to see them in numbers, whatever one decides to do with the information. In Tolkien's writing as in history, the true meaning of a word sometimes remains mysterious and open to interpretation... which is part of the fun, even if we as readers sometimes wish he'd given us a more definitive description.