Another stange gift of the elves or lost contacts?
 

I was reading through a bloopers page and one of them is It is corrected by someone saying that elves' eyes turn brown when they are distressed. [img]smilies/eek.gif[/img]
I have never heard this before and was also under the impression that elves could have eyes of any (normal) colour. Is there any one who knows any more about this?

You do know this should be in the movie forum right?Not to be harsh but i would think it would be more for that topic area.
[img]smilies/smile.gif[/img]

Even though the question arises from the Movies, it's answer [if there is any, which i doubt very seriously] will have to come from the Books, so imho Silmarien was right to put it here.

However, that correct choice may not get you any closer to an answer! [img]smilies/smile.gif[/img]

But maybe there is some footnote somewhere I have misssed. The onlything I have heard about elvish eyes are that Aegnor's shown like fire when he was in battle or full of wrath. And that all of the Noldor eyes were peircingly bright, such that few could endure them at all [witness Galaldriel and the fellowship].

Fingolfin's eyes shore like a Valar as he rode off on Rochallor his great horse to challange Morgoth to single combat,so much so that all fled that beheld his onset for they feared Orome himself had returned.
But lets be real here,PJ didnt mean for a second to have something that cool in his movies,someone just messed up on the contact lens for Legolas. [img]smilies/rolleyes.gif[/img]

Somewhere in the appendicies in LOTR it states that most elves have dark hair and if not most then every single last one of them has grey eyes (not much for variety are they?). But then agan, I could have read this wrong.

Finwe had blue-grey eyes.

Thats a reference to the Noldor and Sindar, who were mainly dark of hair. The Vanyar, for example were mainly goldenhaired.

[ April 22, 2003: Message edited by: Inderjit Sanghera ]

Where did it state that it referred only to the Sindar and the Noldor?

The Vanyar were mainly Golden Haired so it cannot apply to them,. I suupose it could apply to the Valinorean Teleri too...

If that is true than I have never heard of it and must have missed it while reading the books. I don't think that sounds right though.

btw, the Dúnedain are also described as dark-haired and grey-eyed. Obviously Tolkien's ideal of beauty...

Thanks for all the replies. Yes I put this in the books because this site seemed to think it's information was based on the books so it was that sort of info I was looking for. I now no longer hesitate to believe that Orlando Bloom forgot his contacts and this is not a strange gift. Thanks again.

Digging through the Silm for references to elf eyes, I was only able to ascertain the following:

also:

Couldn't find any other references, but based on this and the other comments here, I think it's safe to say that most elves would have grey eyes.

On an unrelated, but interesting, note, Tolkien does at one point mention Manwe's eyes:

So not all the powerful beings in Arda had grey eyes. Just some food for thought.

EDIT: Oops. She's a Maiar. Sorry.

[ May 16, 2003: Message edited by: Lindril Arvilya ]

It may be much more mundane than this... If you watch the extended DVD special stuff, they do a short session on (let's call it) digital magic. They would change entire scenes from daylight to evening, or morning to afternoon, or whatever, by altering the Red-Green-Blue ratios.

They showed an example of this, and it happened to be Elijah in the picture. As they darken the day-photographed scene into late evening, Elijah's eyes went from sky-blue to something rather resembling purple... (oops.) As the whole scene darkened, so did his eyes-- it was just that the rest of the scene looked natural, but his eyes didn't.

If the scene-enhancement turned Elijah's eyes purplish, might they have turned Legolas' eyes brownish?

Alas, my post at least does belong in the Movie forums...

[ May 18, 2003: Message edited by: mark12_30 ]

As far as I know there is absolutely nothing in the books about elves changing eye color.

(Appendix F)

Come on, surely, you should all remember this fact. The eye-changing of Legolas in the movie can, I think, be attributed to what is described in the following paragraph, from the same source.

umm...Gwaihir? Could you explain that last quote? I'm kind of confused.

Tolkien is describing the fairytale-ising of the Elf as we once knew it, i.e. attributing magical and untrue properties to 'elfs' -- the true Elda has been lost and forgotten through the millenia that we have been out of touch with their race.

Actually, the reason that Orlando Bloom's normally blue contacts looked brown in the armory, was because they had orange lights in the room while filming. If you look closely at his skin, you can tell that it looks slightly more orange than normal. The orange lighting also fiddled with his eyes a bit.

Is that the case with the bookmarks too? His eyes are also brown-looking in those

I assume so. It must have been the lighting in the studio where they took that picture, or if it is a screen capture, then it must have been the lighting that they were using when they filmed the scene.