Quote:
Originally Posted by Johnny1A.2
But it has its own issues, of course. Most of the Dunedain were not descended from Elves, after all. The royal family (and eventually through them some of the nobility and probably a few commoners) had Elvish and Ainurin blood, but most of the commoners were of pure Mannish descent.
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The mathematics of genealogical collapse are rather surprising, and by the time of the War of the Ring the Dunedain had had over thirty generations in Middle-Earth. They were probably all descended from Elendil, in the same way that everyone with European descent is descended from Charlemagne. And given the small initial population of Númenor the three thousand years that they lived there were probably enough to make the Númenoreans all descendants of Elros, and therefore of Idril and Elwing. Certainly many of the Númenoreans who survived the destruction of the Land of Gift (whether in ships or in Middle-earth) will have been descendants of Elros.
They won't have had much Elvish ancestry, with only one part-Elvish ancestor in their initial gene-pool, but they would likely have had about the same proportion at every level of society. And by the time of the War of the Ring there will be a substantial proportion of the human population of the West and South who are descended from Faithful or Black Númenoreans, and therefore of Elros, and therefore of Elvish royalty.