Quote:
Originally Posted by Agemegos
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.
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But the vast majority of them, including the royals, probably inherited no genes whatsoever from that ancestor. And a gene rendering you beardless doesn't seem like a great candidate for one that increases your reproductive success enough to competitively fix in a population either.
Not that I expect Tolkien would have thought of that. The genetics of "race mixing" were certainly a hot topic during his life, and one he cared about enough to write some fairly angry letters about the Nazi delusions on it, but almost everything about it in the popular consciousness was (and for the most part still is) nonsense.