meh

I’m pretty apathetic re: the decision to withold the Silmaril after Maedhros’ letter being interpreted by others as ‘good’ or ‘bad’ or badly advised or understandable or what not because like, it’s open enough for various interpretations if you argue it well enough. But whatever way you look at it, the withholding is clearly a political act — ie, the people of Sirion and Elwing did not return the jewel because they saw it as having some kind of power that blessed their people and returned their ships to them (pretty standard belief system for seafaring/coastal communities), plus the text’s evocation of Beren and Lùthien signifying the other reason, ie, a ‘won and worn’ inheritance as well as potentially a symbol of the pointless carnage at Doriath. And again, judge its merits however you like, but they’re political reasonings, as clearly defined as the Fëanorian letter of ‘friendship and stern demand’, not exactly a ‘fuck them kids’ moment.

And consequently I view the act of flying across the sea and delivering the Silmaril to Eärendil, ie what Elwing does *after* the thwarted suicide attempt (because that’s what it was), as an equally political action. And imo it’s a decision that makes political and practical sense to me, though it’s clearly a devastating choice to make. The suicide attempt clearly happens after the children are kidnapped: there would be literally no other way for that news to reach Eärendil other than with Elwing, unless she was tailed by a bunch of messenger pigeons. There is also no canonical evidence that she ‘gave up’ or ‘left’ the children to be kidnapped in the first place: the only assumption I can even think to make is that she and they were separated, which is again pretty expected in a city sacking. So I read the sequence of events thus: children taken, Elwing pursued, suicide attempt, flight across the sea, decision to push ahead to the Valar. And I read the final two especially as two distinctly political actions that did ultimately end the war with Morgoth. 

My issue isn’t with whether or not those actions are interpreted as ‘correct’ or ‘wrong’, it’s with the fact that they’re viewed exclusively and vehemently through the prism of either ‘failed’ motherhood or as victimhood-without-agency, rather than as a political decision in its own right, one that—like many other political decisions in that war—had a devastating personal cost. 

I think the bad-parent-versus-total-victim paradigm fundamentally misreads what kind of narrative the Silmarillion is. It's not exactly domestic realism, it's a mythic legendarium where individual actors are ‘big fish’ embedded in + constituted by larger political and cosmic forces. These aren’t exactly middle class Hobbits in mayoral election season. As an in-universe text it’s interested most in how the decisions of leaders and inheritors shape the fate of peoples and Ages... Elwing matters in this narrative because she's the last heir of Doriath carrying a Silmaril in a war against Morgoth, not because the text is invested in her emotional experience of motherhood.

And so to read Elwing exclusively through a framework of maternal responsibility is to import a value system secondary to the text's primary concern and then insist it’s the only legible framework. Which is strange to me because generally speaking, fanwork absolutely is a place to trouble and work in and interpret these political structures through the lens of family/individual.

And I think there could be some really interesting work that could be done with reading the secondary against or alongside the primary, exploring political motherhood with Elwing (or Nerdanel) for instance, the damning cost, the impact on the children as they age and understand the historical and political implications of their traumatic orphaning… yet so much of the discourse around her revolves solely around motherhood (nothing but a good/bad mom) or victimhood-sans-agency (nothing but a Fëanorian victim).

I actually think the reception of Elwing ties into how we generally read female political actors even in mythic contexts. Because the move to see her through parenting alone is fundamentally about reducing her, a major political player despite her young age, to a domestic, privatised role in a narrative that treats familial decisions as public, world-altering acts… case in point, the Oath of Fëanor.

We offer so much more interpretive room in our fanworks to people like Fingolfin or Fëanor or even Thingol, whose decisions also absolutely do lead to harm for their own families, because we accept that they’re operating from a position where political ambition and familial bonds are inseparable and mutually destructive. But with Elwing, there seems to be some sort of insistence on separating her political role from her maternal one, and then judging the latter alone.

In fact I think the parenting lens actually erases the most radical thing about Elwing's narrative function… she's the one who completes the political project that the entire world had been collaborating on: the destruction of Morgoth. Lúthien and Beren's quest wasn't a straightforward attempt at starting a nuclear family: it was wresting a Silmaril from Morgoth as an act of political defiance against both Thingol's authority and Morgoth's power. And so the Silmaril, already politicised upon creation by their creator and doubly politicised by the Oath, now becomes a thrice-political object that moves through Doriath's fall, through Sirion, and finally to Valinor, and Elwing is the one who delivers it to the only power that can actually use it to end the war. And this isn’t me saying the Valar are innately good or whatever, imo they spend too much time catnapping, it’s just me saying that they are undoubtedly powerful agents and the Aman hosts directly contributed to the destruction of Morgoth. 

So the text gives Elwing agency in the mythic narrative of the Silmaril itself. She's not a supporting character in Eärendil's or Maedhros’ story, she's the heir who discharges the thrice-political destiny bound up in that jewel. But if we're busy adjudicating whether she made the "right choice" as a mother, we miss that she's functioning as the culmination of the political trajectory of the First Age and the Darkening, carrying forward both its trauma (Doriath, her parents' murders, the kinslayings) and its world-historical significance (the Silmaril, the line of Lúthien).

And the thing that gets completely obscured when we frame this as a parenting choice instead of a political act is that if she had prioritised recovering Elrond and Elros above all else, if she'd tried to negotiate with the Fëanorians after the kinslaying or stayed in Sirion's ruins, or done anything other than what she did, the War of Wrath would not happen in the way it does. Morgoth isn't defeated. The grinding conflict that had already destroyed the continent simply continues, presumably until there are no refuges left and the thralldom of elves and men is total. So imo the question (and thus the primary preoccupation of my fic) isn't actually "did Elwing choose her children over her political responsibilities", it's "did Elwing choose her two children over every other child in Beleriand," over every family still hiding in the Mouths of Sirion or scattered in the wreckage of the Havens, over every future generation that would be born into Morgoth's dominion. This is the actual trolley problem embedded in her situation, one the text itself sets up by making the Silmaril-Doordash the necessary catalyst for Valinor's intervention. Like I do think that entire sequence of birds and ships and broski getting turned into a star is a full on fever dream that is wild even for the Silm, but it is, at the end of the day, canonical. 

And the ‘Silmaril as catalyst’ thing isn't hypothetical: we know what the conditions in Beleriand were. We know about the thralls in Angband, about populations being hunted and destroyed, about the Bragollach and the Nírnaeth and the calculated elimination of every major elven kingdom. Elwing has lived through the destruction of Doriath by the Fëanorians and survived to see Sirion, already populated by Gondolin refugees, become the last major refuge, now also destroyed. She knows exactly what the stakes are, what it means for Morgoth's war to continue indefinitely. The idea that she should have prioritised a private rescue mission for her own children in this context isn't just asking her to be a good mother and nothing else. It's asking her to choose the particular over the universal in a situation where she—having been granted flight by a Vala—is at that specific rupture point one of the very few people with any capacity to change the strategic reality at all.

But because we insist on reading her through the parenting paradigm alone, we end up with this framing where the "moral" choice would have been to either not fly oversea at all and start, idk, pecking out Maglor’s eyes, or not turn the ship to Valinor (not that it would even matter if they did because the assumption would understandably be that their sons are either dead or lost — going by historical precedent, because neither Elwing nor Eärendil actually know Maedhros or Maglor personally and all they know are the events of Doriath and the little princes) and instead let the war continue, to let Morgoth's dominion become permanent, because surely a good mother wouldn't "abandon" her children even though those children's only hope for a future worth living, along with everyone else's, depended on someone doing exactly what their parents did. 

Because all that giving the Silmaril to the sons of Fëanor would do is, well, give them a Silmaril. Maedhros and Maglor with one Silmaril would not be considered likely to change the course of the war or stop their Oathbound pursuit — the other two extant jewels on Morgoth’s crown pretty much guarantees postwar civil conflict even *if* Morgoth was defeated… which is exactly what happens. But using the Silmaril to navigate to (here I once again refer to the people of Sirion’s belief that the stone is what ‘protects’ or ‘guides’ their ships to safety) Aman and garner an audience with the Valar, is not even just a spur of the moment political act… gaining that audience was literally the reason Eärendil went oversea. 

And there's another layer: the parenting paradigm is ahistorical even within the text's own logic. Elrond and Elros aren't just "her children", they're the heirs of both Doriath and the Hador, part-Maia, their fates cosmically significant in ways that transcend the parent-child bond. The text tells us this by giving them the Choice, by making Elros the founder of Númenor and Elrond the keeper of Rivendell through multiple Ages. They're not random dudebros but inheritors of political and metaphysical legacies. Reducing Elwing's relationship to them to a question of maternal adequacy is in my eyes diminishing what the text explains their significance to be.

The published narrative, which is, I repeat, a historical text, isn't a treatise on whether Elwing was a good mother because it's not treating Elrond and Elros primarily as her children: it's treating them as the future of two peoples, and Elwing's role was to make the devastating, harmful, near impossible choice that ensures there is a future for them to inherit, a role unexpectedly complemented by Maglor’s decision to take them in and love them, which is another of the threads of my fic. IE, it required both Elwing’s flight and Maglor’s pity for Elrond to have achieved the greatness he did. 

And none of this is to say Elrond wouldn't have complicated, traumatic, even negative feelings about what happened and about his mother’s choice or that those interpretations are ‘wrong’—of course he might have such feelings, especially if raised by his kidnappers, and it’s a very interesting sandox to play in. 

Being left behind in a burning city and raised by your family's killers is traumatic whatever the strategic justifications, and that psychological cost is what makes this choice tragic rather than heroic. Nor am I saying all of Elwing's choices were politically astute, or that she isn't a Fëanorian victim… she obviously is, twice over. But what I wanted to trouble with the fic is how these have become the only lenses through which she's read: helpless victim or terrible mother. The dimension where she's a political actor who successfully executed the one strategy that ended the war of attrition is wholly consumed by those other frameworks. And that's a real loss imo, because we're not engaging with what she does in the text and what it achieves… we're just auditing her maternal adequacy and traumatic experiences, as if those are the only ways female political actors can be legibly read.

Finally, imo this only-motherhood reading is a fundamentally selfish ethics masquerading as morality, where the bonds of the nuclear family are treated as sacred obligations that override any responsibility to the wider community or political collective. And that's a modern, individualistic value system that the Silmarillion not only doesn't share but in many places actively refutes — “kidnap fam” is actually a good example of that, where “love grew between them”. The Silm shows us again and again that personal desires and familial bonds, when prioritised above the fate of peoples and the struggle against Morgoth, can lead to catastrophe— that's literally the story of the Oath, of Maeglin, of Thingol, and even of the Ring War.