[Child of the 7th Age]

Interesting thoughts Joy, and good to see you.

Whoops! I have to admit that green is my favorite color. I'm not quite sure what that says about me.

I have always thought of green as the color that most closely represents "life". I truly don't think of it as the color of death and dying, but associate it with living things: green, leafy trees; lovely flowers with strong green stems; the placid green waters of a lake, etc. I've always thought that was why the Hobbits favored green and yellow clothes: the color of the earth and the color of the sun mixed together. But then, perhaps the social scientists never applied their tests to Hobbits, since they obviously didn't dislike these colors!

Since life has two sides --good and bad, perhaps that duality also applies to the color green as well.

Interesting, Saucepan Man that you would pick out blue as a color that carries naturally "good" connotations. The minute you said "blue", a variety of negative images and words flicked through my mind: "blue" babies, a person turning blue as he gasps for air, and someone with chattering teeth in the dead of winter who is so cold that he looks blue! Perhaps I am unusual in this regard. Then again color associations may be a very personal thing, and no one can predict how someone will react to a particular color. (Quite often, as others have noted, it is the shade of the color that provokes a response, rather than the color itself.)

The thing that's always struck me about Tolkien is that he does not use one color as always good and another as always bad, which we sometimes see in other works and films. This is very true in his usage of black and white, colors that are often represented in a one-sided manner.