XPost: rec.arts.books.tolkien   
   From: jon.lennart.beck.its.my.name@mail.its.in.danmark   
      
   "Stan Brown"  skrev i meddelelsen   
   news:MPG.29aad289d3f5612698d4fb@news.individual.net...   
      
   > I think "her line shall never fail" is just a bit of lovely poetry   
   > that Tolkien wrote because it sounded good, not because it actually   
   > means anything beyond "her memory will always live on in some of her   
   > descendants."   
      
      Could it be that "her line shall never fail" refers to the line   
   recognized as the rightful rulers - whether de facto rulers or not - of the   
   polities that are considered the rightful heirs to the polity of Númenor,   
   that drew some of its legitimacy from that of Doriath?  If a nobody like I   
   had lived in Gondor at Elessar's time I would very probably have Elros and   
   therefore Lúthien in my ancestry, though also very probably rather   
   dilutedly.  I would not be an even remotely serious contender for the   
   sceptre or the crown.  And unlike Aragorn, it is highly unlikely that I   
   would be able to name my ancestors, even a single line of them, all the way   
   back to Elros.   
      At that, if we look away from 23-chromosome-pair genetics with allele   
   crossovers and regard instead the more mythical "blood" as conveyor of   
   heredity, it fits with the inner workings of the mythology to have Lúthien's   
   blood run far purer in Elessar than in anyone else with equal proportion of   
   actual Lúthien alleles, as a modern geneticist would analyze it.   
      
   Hræfn.   
      
   --- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05   
    * Origin: you cannot sedate... all the things you hate (1:229/2)