We Inhabit a Village

puts this (from the lost road) next to this bit of the unfinished lay of eärendil:

‘what callest thou death? he did not return.’ death is very similar to someone going to a place you can’t get to. i am of course blasting this with my míriel beam. i am of course thinking about the early elves at cuiviénen. ***

anyway. @outofangband has a really good post about the fear and specifically fear of disappearance felt by the elves at cuiviénen. i wonder if those disappearances could have occupied a similar cultural position to death before death became known?

in that: elves are technically immortal, but they can die, and the mechanism of them returning involves (as far as we know??? luthien exception???) physically being in valinor, and i am not sure that before the elves at cuiviénen found out about valinor they could have known that they were technically immortal? and then there are also these people who disappear, and nobody knows where they go.

it is unclear to me whether any elves do actually die pre-valinor, and if they do whether it's of like. random accident, or having been abducted by morgoth. and if it's the latter, it's unclear whether the main group of elves at cuiviénen know that this is happening or not. do they know that they can die? do they know that if they do, they can come back? would the elves at cuiviénen have known themselves as eternally long-lived but permanently killable??? do those of them who go to valinor find out that ?souls exist? and everyone who has ever died can be reclothed (<- cloth. btw)??? do they feel grief for those who stayed in middle-earth and do not know this and will not to their knowledge be reunited with their dead loved ones??? is every one of the moriquendi who ever died an unwilling exile in valinor??????

alternatively. tolkien goes back and forth on whether míriel was the first elf to die, ever, or just the first elf to die in valinor. in HoME iirc there’s a bit where she is given the name ‘firiel’ ‘she who sighed’ because there literally is not a word for dying yet (and this seems unlikely and impractical. unless the early elves were all vegan and never even encountered animal death? or did they think animal death was a different process with its own vocabulary?) if we decide that she was, then are the early elves are uniquely similar to the edain in their relationship to knowledge of death? does this mean that everyone who disappeared at cuiviénen is still gone, and that means something has happened and is happening to them that isn’t death??? if míriel is the first to die ever, including out of all the elves in middle-earth, when do they discover that dying like, exists? when do they discover that it's not permanent? do they hear it from the exiled noldor? do they actually believe it? can anyone hear me?