[Alfirin]

Originally Posted by alatar

Getting back to the somewhat original issue, I may have figured out how Legolas successfully walked over the snow without leaving a print.

What if the souls of his slippers weren't as small as we tend to think? Someone in the Fellowship noted that Legolas wore slippers. To me, these are light duty shoes that barely cover the feet. The area of these shoes would be no larger than anyone would think odd.

So we've been working diligently trying to figure out how to decrease the pressure Legolas exerts on the snow, where pressure = weight (force)/area, and thinking that the shoes were normal size, tried to reduce the elf's weight.

But what if the slippers had an area three to five times that which is expected? Think snowshoes. The pressure on the snow would decrease linearly as the area increased. If Leggy weighed in at 150 pounds, increasing the area of his slippers 3-5 fold drops his virtual weight to 50-30 pounds.

But you're saying, "Come on, alatar, the Fellowship may have been snowblind, but they weren't totally blind. Surely someone would have noticed that large slippers..."

Would they? What if Legolas (and all other elves) carried snowshoes made of Aerogel? Would anyone see what Legolas had on his feet in the snow? If the soles were given some type of pattern that looked natural, would even a tracker know that an elf walked that way?

We truly live in a magical world, and this is only 2007. What wonders will our children see?

Another point to consider is that we may be thinking from a somewhat too modern persepective with regard to what "slippers" is defined as. If we assume that ME clothing technology is roughly Dark/Middle Ages, then the slippers would not be all that similar to any sort of shoe we were familiar with. Back then slippers were heel-less, in fact in a certain sense they were usually sole-less (that is they often had no seperate piece of material added onto the bottom to thicken and re-enforce it) Slippers at that time would have been less like shoes as we understand them, but more along the lines of thick cloth/leather socks or foot gloves, whose "sole" was often created by he wearer, out of whatever dirt and junk they would walk on as they wore them (this is why slippers were usually inside wear for the well off, the comparitively smooth stone and wood floors were pretty much the only place you could wear slippers and not shred them to bits) so Legolas's steps would be less like those of someone walking on snow in boots and more like someone walking on snow in socks/barefoot. Usually your bare foot is a lot better at weight distribution than your shod one since the hard rigid sole usually confines the force to a smaller area (it's sort of a lesser version of the same force equasions that explain why a woman wearing stilletto heels can suddenly start leaving hammer holes in a wood floor whereever she walks if she is not careful) This would not explain all of it (even a barefoot person would leave tracks in the snow) but it might explain some of it.