Cat--you asked for lore on the elven cloaks.

I thumbed through my books last night to jot some notes on what
Tolkein said about them. In Fellowship of the Ring, Chapter 8 (when
they're leaving Lothlorian)

"For each they provided a hood and cloak . . ."

I found this interesting. In the medieval period, the hood and cloak
were often two separate garments, which could be worn separately or
together. I don't know if this is what Tolkein envisioned--for the
rest of the books he refers only to the cloaks.

"of the light but warm silken stuff that the Galadrim wove."

I was rather expecting the cloaks in the movie to have a more silken
look, rather than the look of rougher wool. But again--you have to
allow for the visual effect, and having the company in silk cloaks
hoofing it through the woods might have looked strange.

As for the color:

"It was hard to say what color they were: grey with the hue of
twilight . . . they seemed to be; and yet if they moved . . . they
were green as shadowed leaves, or brown as fallow fields . . .,
dusk-silver as water under the stars."

Later, when Sam was admiring the rope, it was described as "grey as
the elven-cloaks."

<warning of possible spoilers for people who haven't read the books>


In Chapter 2 of the Two Towers, Aragorn describes Merry and Pippin to
Eomer as "they would be small, but "clad in grey." There were
scattered other references through the books about "the grey cloaks
of Lorien."

So I'm pretty convinced that Tolkein envisioned them as grey ;-)

There are no physical descriptions of them, be we are given a hint of
the size of the hoods when Frodo and Sam are captured by Faramir's
men: "the two guards now bound up the hobbit's eyes, and drew their
hoods down almost to their mouths." This shows that the hoods would
have to be fairly deep.

The cloaks are pretty downplayed in the movie--an average movie-goer
who had not read the books would probably not have noticed that the
company was wearing different cloaks when they left Lothlorien. And
nothing was ever said about them. I think they are another cookie
that Jackson has tossed to Tolkein fans--we know what they are
without being told.

How would you show the awe and respect that was given to a cloak,
anyway?? Jackson had a hard enough time giving The Ring a sense of
presence.

I'll be posting my comments/observations on the movie cloaks next week.

--Ann