Anghraine

I managed to integrate a lot of tangents into last night's infodump on Númenórean pregnancy because it turned up so many interesting sort-of related things, but there were STILL MORE details that I couldn't work in but was delighted in various ways by. A list:

1. Tolkien struggled to make the Maeglin story work with the developmental scheme he was trying to mathematically pin down for Elves, given that Maeglin's history requires him to be born much later than most of the other Elves of his generation. Tolkien concluded that Maeglin had to be an adult, but that he would have been very young in Elvish terms, and this is part of the reason Idril was so unsettled by his interest in her. He wasn't a literal child but he was kind of a kid from Idril's POV.

2. SPEAKING of Maeglin's history, another idea Tolkien came up with to deal with the Maeglin problem was the idea that Maeglin actually isn't that much younger, but instead, Aredhel was either persuaded or trapped by Eöl before ever reaching Aman! In this case, the "Dark Elf" descriptor for Eöl would have no racial subtext whatsoever—Eöl would not be Avari or Sindarin at all, but another Noldo who refused to finish the journey to Valinor and thus never saw the light of the Two Trees. The implication of Noldorin Exiles calling him "Dark Elf" is less "Sinda" and more "loser."

3. Tolkien makes a couple of errors in trying to figure out the math. Some of those mistakes are the math, or at least numerical (Arwen's birth year gave him a lot of trouble, more on this further down), but he also does things like mixing up Elenwë and Anairë at one point. IDK, there's so much hagiography in Tolkien discourse that it's kind of endearing to see him making ordinary writerly mistakes.

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I still think about the translation of Elladan as “Elf-Númenórean.”

People always correct me about this, but it’s Tolkien’s translation, and … I mean, of course there’s its implication that Elrond considers his children Númenóreans in some capacity, and therefore himself, as Aragorn suggests in LOTR. That’s just !!!!!!!!!!!!!!! (seriously, Númenórean Elrond is everything).

But I also think the very thing that people correct me over is interesting—the translation of adan as “Númenórean” rather than “human” or even “related to the Edain.” There are absolutely Edainic peoples in the Third Age who aren’t Númenórean, like the Dunlendings (kin of the Haladin). But there are at least some contexts in which adan does not refer to them but exclusively to Númenóreans, because … ?????

We do know that Elrohir, at least, was named in a Númenórean dialect of Sindarin (it would be Elrochir in classical Sindarin). Tolkien pretty persistently associates that dialect with Gondor, which is also interesting, but the children are born early enough that it seems the linguistic evolution must have happened quite rapidly after the fall of Númenor (if it was a Gondorian shift).

Perhaps it reflected a perception among the Númenórean refugees that they were the last people to be Edain in any meaningful sense. Maybe it was something else! But at the least, the shift seems to indicate a strong association between Edainic and Númenórean identity in the eyes of the Dúnedain.

#like ... it's Problematic(TM) #but there is part of me that really enjoys how thoroughly the númenóreans align themselves with the edain #fandom tends to treat them as bargain elves or attribute everything about them to remote elvish ancestors #when they're distinguished as a people at all #but they're like EDAIN EDAIN EDAIN

Another regularly-scheduled reminder about names:

1. Elladan and Elrohir both refer to the family’s mixed Elvish-human heritage
2. Elrohir is in Dúnadan rather than Elvish Sindarin
3. Elladan specifically means “Elf-Númenórean”
4. Undómiel references the name of Elrond’s Númenórean niece, Tindómiel

I’m just saying

...in quotes!

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You might notice a certain ... er, emphasis in the details of the Middle-earth that exists in my head.

 

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