Lord of the Rings: The Animated Musical | Characters: Elanor Gardner Fairbairn

In past essays, I have given a lot of thought to Elanor Gardner Fairbairn, a minor character of great importance who would become a major character in the hypothetical musical. She first appeared during “Overview of Appendix A” with the mention of her birthdate, 25 March Third Age (T.A.) 3021 / Fourth Age (F.A.) 1 / Shire Reckoning (S.R.) 1421, which served not only as a symbol of rebirth after the worldwide War of the Ring but also as a demonstration on how tricky the calendars of Middle-earth can be. Her husband, Fastred of Greenholm, received a mention in “Appendix A, II The Kings of the Mark”, and a full explanation of her work as an editor of The Red Book of Westmarch was given in “Framing Device” just two weeks ago. Rather than reviewing her life and occupation as I have done previously, I now turn to physical appearance, especially personal clothing style.

While Tolkien was an expert in an incredibly wide range of fields, including linguistics, literature, Western history, Biblical studies, and ecology, he also had a solid grasp on landscape illustration, architecture, and costume design. My focus for this essay will be on the final category as I explore what Elanor might have worn if the Shire followed a similar fashion timeline to Western Europe and the United States. During my research process, I have seen many beautiful examples of costume design. I especially like the work of Russian artist Denis Gordeev when it comes to his illustrations of clothing because of his color palettes, rendering of cloth, and distinct style choices for each character, although the facial expressions and bowl cuts are not to my taste. However, I could not date the costumes to a specific time period even with the use of my new reference book, The Pictorial History of Costume. The clothing seemed to be an amalgamation of multiple time periods to create a unique fantasy style.

This technique is not unique to Gordeev, as other well-known Tolkien illustrators follow the same route, creating fun outfits inspired by history but without a specific style in mind. Adorable scratchboard illustrations drawn by Mikhail Belomlinsky show Bilbo in a post-medieval belted tunic and legs so hairy that he does not seem to have pants, while Gandalf has high-heeled shoes, and Beorn the Bear-Man wears a simple Greco-Roman style tunic with sandals. Haunting watercolor paintings by Anke Katrin Eißmann show hobbits in belted medieval tunics with Rococo embroidery and sporting colorful scarves with patterns requiring modern textile looms. Cheerful gouache paintings by Ted Nasmith show hobbit-lads in 17^th and 18^th century outfits sometimes crossed with traditional Swiss alpine attire, while hobbit-lasses wear modern skirt and blouse sets. All these works are expertly executed by people who have been at the craft for many years longer than me and their costume design is delightful, but the lack of historical consistency in the clothing gives me an anxiety that would not affect most people.

To determine what historical periods I would use for costume design, I look back to the most popular article on my blog to date, “Prologue, 3 On the Ordering of the Shire”. There, I determined that fashion during the main text from S.R. 1402 to S.R. 1421 would reflect the early 19^th century, a period known as the First Industrial Revolution. Since “Appendix B: The Tale of Years” noted the death of Rose Gardner in S.R. 1482, the framing device would occur about sixty years after the end of the main text. Mapping this to the timeline of periods in British history, S.R. 1402 becomes the 1810s or Regency era, S.R. 1419 becomes the 1830s or transition from the Regency era to the Victorian era, and S.R. 1482 becomes the 1890s or the late Victorian era. With this era in mind, I decided to focus on three main outfits that Elanor would wear throughout her screen time in the hypothetical musical: a mourning dress, a day dress, and a traveling outfit.

A Note on Elanor’s Appearance

Before I dive into clothing, I wanted to give a quick explanation on how I decided on Elanor’s physical appearance. In the original text, Elanor’s epithet “Fairbairn” or “The Fair” emphasized her unique appearance among Hobbits. She had unusual golden hair due to her father, Sam, spreading dust from Galadriel’s garden across the Shire (The Return of the King, 331). Sam described her as “beautiful” even as a newborn baby, taking after her mother Rose, although I imagine Sam was heavily biased. If she had any similarity in appearance to her father, she would have brown eyes and reddish-brown skin, although it was possible for her to have a lighter skin tone, especially if Rose had that complexion.

In my own renderings, which first appeared in “Races: Hobbits”, I created distinct looks for each of the three “breeds”. As a quick review, my assumption throughout this process is that the Gamgee/Gardner-Cotton clan had mostly Harfoot ancestry, denoted as being “browner” and “smaller and shorter” in “Prologue, I Concerning Hobbits”. Additionally, all Hobbits were implied to have rabbit-like or rodent-like traits, including pointed moving ears and large stamping feet. While not relying on the text, I have given my Hobbits protruding front teeth to match those found in rodents. The biggest change between the early prototype Hobbits and my current rendering of Elanor is the leg hair design. I think the current effect of shorter hairs on the legs and thicker hair on the feet combines the tendency of Russian and Ukrainian illustrators to give heavy hair to the entire leg while Western European and North American illustrators are more likely to put a tuft of hair solely on the top of the foot.

To aid me in viewing the face from multiple angles, I constructed a 3D model of Elanor using MakeHuman, a free and open-source software. For the benefit of my nudity-shy American audience, I kept the model in what I call “Barbie mode” instead of using a more realistic nudity setting. While the model did not allow me to perfectly match how I wanted Elanor to appear, it will serve as a reference in future 2D renderings.

Mourning Dress

Elanor’s mourning dress is modeled after one worn by Queen Victoria, now held in the Costume Institute at The MET and first seen in a photograph dating from 1894. The time of the photo and the social status of the queen made this the perfect example. The queen entered a state of mourning after Prince Albert, her husband and the father of her nine children, died in 1861 and continued to mourn for the rest of her life, a period of forty years. The Victorian era’s overlap with the Industrial Revolution meant that people had a strong interest in standardization and regulation. During this time, people determined standards for how to mourn. The longest time of full mourning, which meant wearing all black, was up to thirty months, or two-and-a-half years. After that, people could include white and purple in their outfits as they eased out of mourning.

Although the dress may look long and heavy to modern viewers, it is actually a summer dress with light silk. Since Rose Gardner died on Mid-Summer’s Day, I thought the material was seasonally relevant. I made a few changes between the original dress of the queen and the dress of Elanor. The original dress had extensive embroidery in the front, around the end of the sleeves, at the hem of the skirt, and on the pocket. Elanor’s dress is plainer in that aspect, the in-universe reason being that Elanor was more practical and physically active than the queen, and the real-world reason being that consistently animating an embroidery pattern was going to be too difficult. The other obvious difference is the color of the dress, with the original being an appropriately solemn black, and Elanor’s dress being dark green, as Hobbits clad themselves in “chiefly green and yellow” (The Hobbit, 2).

Day Dress

Elanor’s day dress, what she would typically wear when not in mourning, was inspired by a French or Italian dress made between 1892 and 1894, which now resides in the Victorian & Albert Museum. The original silhouette of this dress is different than what appears on Elanor. Described as having a “fitted bodice, with a pointed waist”, this dress accentuated the hourglass or “wasp waist” figure of its wearer. Women of this time period wore corsets, which acted more like modern shapewear than the torture devices appearing in Hollywood movies. Because of its importance as an undergarment, women of all sizes wore corsets for support and decency; the practice of tightlacing to create an unnaturally small waist tended to be a fad among upper class girls at boarding schools. Since Elanor, like most Hobbits, has a healthily full figure, her variation of the dress has a less noticeable waist.

An aspect of the original dress retained in Elanor’s version included gigot or leg-of-mutton sleeves, so called because the puffy fabric resembled the leg of a sheep. Fans of Anne of Green Gables by Lucy Maud Montgomery, which took place in Prince Edward Island, Canada during the 1890s, may recall the titular character’s obsession with puffed sleeves until her foster father Matthew bought her a fancy dress as a Christmas gift. The sleeves were derided as impractical, since women wearing puffed sleeves had difficulty navigating through narrow doors and could not wear coats outside.

Other aspects of note in this outfit are a fashionable hat and matching parasol. Women wanted to protect themselves from the harmful rays of the sun but not for the same reasons as modern people. Scientists began learning about skin cancer throughout the 19^th and early 20^th century, gradually realizing that radiation from the sun could cause irreparable damage, even cancer. However, the average person was more concerned with skin tone, as lighter skin was considered “civilized, virtuous and beautiful”. Besides covering up with long sleeves, hats, and parasols, some women turned to skin bleaching using arsenic, a known poison at the time, to give themselves a “fashionable pallor”. This was no new concept; their predecessors had used white lead. The Shire Hobbits did seem to have a skin tone-based hierarchy, with fair-skinned Fallohides at the top and brown-skinned Harfoots at the bottom, and a plethora of “mixed breed” Hobbits in the middle, but there is no textual evidence that they engaged in using cosmetics to change their appearance.

Outside of its use as sun protection, hats were the ultimate fashion statement in the 1890s. Hats could be made with a range of material, from simple straw to elegant silk; were dyed to match the wearer’s outfit; and might sport faux flowers, feathers, and even small stuffed animals. The use of feathers in hats became such an environmental issue in the United States that Congress passed the Migratory Bird Treaty Act of 1918 to stop the slaughter of these birds. The Hobbits being a more eco-friendly bunch would likely used dyed chicken feathers and dried flowers on their hats.

Traveling Outfit

Called a bicycle suit or bloomer suit in its original iteration, the athletic wear on which Elanor’s outfit is modeled now lives at the Kyoto Costume Institute in Japan. This outfit took its name from Amelia Jenks Bloomer, a women’s rights activist in the United States who thought women ought to dress more practically and came up with the concept in the 1850s. Unfortunately for her, many leading activist women at the time were content with their dresses; biographer Dorothy Sterling noted that Abby Kelley Foster tried out bloomers while working on her farm but soon returned to skirts (Ahead of Her Time, 298) Bloomer did not come up with the concept on her own. These baggy pants bore strong resemblance to “Turkish trousers” or şalvar, which I used as traditional costume for Harfoots, Men of Near Harad, and Dwarves.

Here in the Real World, bloomers gradually became a socially acceptable outfit for athletic women. This marked a time of great social change after the advent of the bicycle in the late 19^th century. This time was also known as the Progressive Era, as the first wave of feminism entered its final generation. Bicycles allowed women to travel without hitching up a horse or worrying about the cost of a ticket. Plus, this was a great way to exercise and become both physically and mentally strong, which proved important for protests and political lobbying. By 1920, women in the United States theoretically gained the right to vote via the 19^th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, although members of the working class and people of color continued to face discrimination. In the United Kingdom, women over 30 gained the right to vote through the Representation of the People Act 1918, and women over 21 could vote after the Equal Franchise Act 1928.

Since I do not picture Hobbits as being the type to bicycle, Elanor would instead wear her outfit to travel between her birthplace at Bag End and her own home at the Under-towers, possibly on foot while humming hobbit-songs. If the political climate mirrored that of the Real World, then the outfit represented the increase in power and independence of hobbit-lasses during this time period, and it referenced the traditional costume of her ancestors whose language had been forgotten.

Conclusion

Between these three outfits, I have achieved enough variation to cover Elanor’s entire wardrobe. While certainly not as extensive as the “whole rooms devoted to clothes” maintained by Bilbo (The Hobbit, 1), a woman of means with connections to multiple royal families would have owned more pieces than the typical person. Changing the color of these outfits and varying a few accessories would create the effect of a full closet without need for major redesign. In fact, a similar technique was implemented to real clothing in the years before fast fashion, as recutting or redyeing was a common practice. Many pieces on display in museums have notes on its origin and when it was restyled into its current form.

I will be using these same techniques while filling the closets of other characters who appear throughout the hypothetical musical. By combining what I can glean from the original text on clothing and character appearance with a 3D body reference and preserved costumes from the Real World, the outfits will balance realism and fantasy in a way that I hope viewers will find consistent, visually pleasing, and historically accurate. In any case, this method greatly relieves my clothing-induced anxiety.

Abby Epplett’s Rating System

Experience: 9/10

Accessibility: 6/10

Read past installments of Lord of the Rings: The Animated Musical

• New Project Announcement
• Introduction by Peter S. Beagle
• Foreword by J.R.R. Tolkien
• Introduction to the History of Animation
• Prologue, 1 Concerning Hobbits
• Introduction to Maps
• Races: Hobbits
• Perspectives on the Sea
• Prologue, 2 Concerning Pipe-weed
• Prologue, 3 On the Ordering of the Shire
• Prologue, 4 Of the Finding of the Ring
• Prologue, Note on the Shire Record
• Introduction to the History of Musical Theater
• Introduction to the History of Documentaries
• Introduction to the History of Conlangs
• Introduction to the Appendixes
• Overview of Appendix A “Annals of the Kings and Rulers”
• Appendix A, I The Númenórean Kings, (i) Númenor
• Appendix A, I The Númenórean Kings, (ii) The Realms in Exile
• Appendix A, I The Númenórean Kings, (iii) Eriador, Arnor, and the Heirs of Isildur
• Appendix A, I The Númenórean Kings, (iv) Gondor and the Heirs of Anárion
• Appendix A, I The Númenórean Kings, (v) The Tale of Aragorn and Arwen
• Lord of the Rings: The Animated Musical | Races: Elves
• Appendix A, II The House of Eorl
• Appendix A, II The Kings of the Mark
• Races: Men, Part 1
• Races: Men, Part 2
• Appendix A, III Durin’s Folk
• Races: Dwarves
• Appendix B: The Tale of Years
• Races: Orcs
• Appendix C: Family Trees
• Appendix D: Shire Calendar
• Appendix E, I Pronunciation
• Appendix E, II Writing
• Races: Maiar, Wizards & Balrogs
• Races: Maiar, Environment & Craft
• Appendix F, I The Languages & Peoples of the Third Age
• Appendix F, II On Translation
• Christopher Tolkien Centenary Conference
• Races: Valar, Part 1
• Races: Valar, Part 2
• Races: Valar, Part 3
• Framing Device
• Architecture: Bag End