#peredhel

“mine brother was an hairy man, but i am an smooth man” but it’s elrond talking about elros is this anything

the conversation about the significance of the peredhel and their parents/progenitors as heroes within the narrative requires, i think, a simultaneous discussion of the (many!) ways in which the legendarium is constructed pretty explicitly against race-mixing, as well as the language and tropes used to frame those "acceptable" inter-ethnic couples, and how these situations in themselves are inseparable from 19th- and 20th-century ideas and neuroses about miscegenation and ethno-racial purity vs. degeneration from which tolkien was absolutely not exempt

something so interesting about dior and nimloth choosing to send elwing away with the silmaril rather than their sons in a society that seems to operate primarily by primogeniture (drawing from what we see of the valinorean elves and the early masculinist/patriarchal impulses of imin/tata/enel at cuiviénen). the setting up of a sort of oppositional matrilineality—melian’s protection of doriath, the arrival of the silmaril via lúthien, its removal and preservation via elwing—to contrast with the attitude of the sons of fëanor, whose claim on the silmarils hinges on a model of exclusive, indisputable ownership based on the passage of creations from father to son. there’s something really compelling in how the doriathrin royal family and their descendants engage with heredity: it’s almost always ‘the line of lúthien’ with an addendum about melian as the root of the family tree rather than beren or thingol, who are almost never granted the same centrality in terms of the movement of power (often supernatural) down the line. it’s thus explicitly acknowledged that although the family includes great male heroes, the capabilities that set them apart are conveyed primarily from and through women (and likewise there’s much to be said about the association of ‘magic’ with femininity, both for good and ill; ursula k. le guin in particular has some great writing about the literary-cultural alignment of mysticism and inchoate power with femininity as a counterpoint to the ‘enlightened magic’ of men). it’s also necessary to acknowledge the calculus that’s going on about elwing’s reproductive capacity as opposed to that of her brothers’—her presumed future ability to have children, and the physical emergence of those children from her body, deal heavily with a certain variety of nationalism or proto-nationalism that positions women as a kind of litmus test for genealogical purity (even as their families and lines of descent are in the control of men), thus securing heirs to the silmaril whose birthright exists within a similar (but also subverted) framework of heredity to that used by the sons of fëanor, as well as ensuring that the future of the doriathrin line lies very squarely within the provenance of the melian-lúthien inheritance paradigm