Reply To: The Taproom

Well that’s taller than Mrs B – she’s only 4ft 9in (1.45m; that’ll be because of her half-Hobbit ancestry).

Regarding heights, I’ve now found a note I penned some years ago when I was putting together an article on the armies of Middle-earth for a wargaming magazine (which I never got round to completing – too many bars to sweep, barrels to shift, etc). In it I wrote:

“Tolkien tells us the Gondorians were the tallest Men found anywhere in Middle-earth during the Third Age, being descended from the famously tall Men of Númenór. Elendil, the first Númenórean high king of Gondor and Arnor, and the tallest Númenórean on record, had stood at nearly 8 ft, but this was unusual enough to earn him the epithet ‘Elendil the Tall’. By the middle of the Third Age intermarriage with other races of Men meant that most Gondorians probably averaged about 7 ft, and by the War of the Ring 6 ft 4 ins seems to have been generally considered ‘man-high’.”

From memory much of the info for this observation came from Unfinished Tales and The Peoples of Middle-earth, though I concede that my memory isn’t entirely clear on that score.