Star Lineage

[rocky41_7]

Lowkey obsessed with the naming tradition of the line of Elwe/Thingol.

It just fascinates me how Thingol did not create the “El-” prefix naming tradition despite being the origin of it. Luthien’s given name bears no resemblance to either of her parents’ and neither does the name of her son, Dior. Yet Dior named himself Eluchil and took up the lordship of Doriath (something Luthien impliedly rejected when she and Beren chose to make their home elsewhere) and called his children Elured, Elurin, Elwing, and in their refugee’s home, cut off from her family and her heritage, Elwing named her own sons Elrond and Elros. 

And then, that thousands of years later, as lord of his own realm, in the safety of Rivendell, lifetimes since he last saw either of his parents or lived among the Doriathrim, Elrond names his sons Elrohir and Elladan.

It feels especially important as a claim on Iathrim heritage considering Doriath’s destruction. It was in the wake of the ruinous war with Nogrod, when Dior stepped in to try to rebuild, that he chose to name his children after a grandfather he never met, the legendary Elu Thingol, once called Elwe. It’s after the total obliteration of Doriath as a kingdom at the hands of fellow Elves that Elwing claims this tradition in naming her own children. And for Elrond, who never saw Doriath, who was deprived of the chance to know his mother or be raised among the Iathrim in Sirion (or the Gondolindrim, but that’s another issue), when he names his firstborn children, he reaches for that heritage in Doriath, that connection and in doing so declares himself of the line of Thingol and of Elwing, and his children also. He marks them as the next generation of this bloodline, he recollects the life and death of Doriath and its people, keeping alive that memory, faint as it might be.

crossposted from tumblr