#the only middle-earth beard discourse i care about tbh
The NOME passage on Elf/part-Elf beardlessness is interesting in a lot of ways, honestly.
The thing is, you can quibble with Tolkien’s sweeping generalizations about how beardlessness works. He saysthatallElves are beardless, which is canonically not true; Círdan is bearded in LOTR. He says that the mortal descendants of Elves are beardless, such as Aragorn, Imrahil, Boromir, and Faramir, contrasting them with the bearded Théoden and Éomer … who are also descendants of an Elf (the same Elf as Imrahil’s ancestress, at that). So it’s easy to go, eh, not compatible with canon, whatever.
Of course, Tolkien elsewhere has a less sweeping explanation of Elvish beardlessness. Typically, only very old Elves can grow beards (with the occasional rare exception). Círdan’s beard is a mark of his age, not something characteristic of male Elves in general.
What’s less clear is how this more limited beardlessness manifests among the mortal descendants of Elves. Maybe they never live long enough to reach the beard-growing stage. Maybe the Númenóreans’ strange lifespans and aging are essentially a hybrid of Elvish cycles of life+mortality, so they can grow beards at their own equivalent of the late Elvish life-cycle. Tolkien isn’t really clear on how the clarification of Elvish beardlessness affects the beardlessness of Elvish descendants.
But it is very clear, IMO, that the statement that alldescendants of Elves are beardless is an over-generalization. For Tolkien, it seems that only some descendants of Elves “count” for these purposes. Théoden is the son of a Númenórean woman of the line of the Princes of Dol Amroth, but he’s so powerfully identified with his father’s culture and ethnicity that he’s basically never treated as Númenórean or part-Elvish in any way. UT attributes Éomer’s height to his Númenórean ancestry but nothing else.
However, Tolkien also suggests that Boromir’s and Faramir’s beardlessness is partly attributable to their descent from the Princes of Dol Amroth through their mother (as well as Denethor’s descent from Elros). So it’s not just some patrilineal take on genetics at work. And the beardlessness of the royal families of Gondor and Arnor goes back to a woman, anyway—Princess Silmariën, who herself inherited the Elvish blood of Idril, Nimloth, and Lúthien, all women. This can definitely be transmitted through the female line.
It’s maybe a bit uncharitable, but my suspicion is that Faramir and Boromir’s Dol Amroth heritage “counts” for Tolkien in a way that Théoden and Éomer’s doesn’t because it doesn’t reallychange anything. Faramir and Boromir are already part-Elvish Númenóreans on Denethor’s side, so Tolkien can tack on “and Finduilas was part-Elvish, too” to reinforce it, whereas Théoden and Éomer are so thoroughly identified with the Rohirrim that their function would be undermined by any signs of Elvishness.
In any case, it’s not that Tolkien is perfectly consistent here by any means, or that his preference for patrilineality doesn’t color a lot of how this works. But I do think it’s more complicated and intriguing than the “Círdan and Théoden have beards tho, checkmate” crowd allows.
