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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There’s a line in LOTR about how the people in Minas Tirith stare at Legolas because they’ve never seen anyone so beautiful, and—

Well, it presumably predates Tolkien’s later idea that Númenóreans are barely distinguishable from Elves in appearance; modern Gondorians might look different these days, but at least some of them are said to look like ancient Númenóreans.

And, after all, some of the Edain also were virtually indistinguishable from Elves. Tolkien’s later work tends to treat the human-Elvish difference of appearance as more of a spectrum than a hard line. It seems a little continuity break, if a very minor one.

… But “Elvish” there is doing a lot of heavy lifting. Elves don’t all look alike! And the Edain who look like Elves specifically look like Eldar, so perhaps when Tolkien says Númenóreans looked like Elves, he means Eldarin Elves in particular.

Headcanon conclusion: Legolas looks Silvan, and Gondorians just think Silvan Elves are super hot.

Tagged: #i'm really entertained by the idea that gondorians think noldor et al look 'like us but More' but silvan elves are where it's really at #deep blogging #truly the deepest #also i appreciate that this is apparently reciprocal to some extent? at least legolas thought boromir was notably pretty