Silmaril Addiction

[rocky41_7]

Tumblr post here.

Anonymous said:

Does it ever exhaust you that despite the little information on mama bird, somehow the gist they got from Elwing is that she is (implied to be) an addict/junkie for the stones (which gives way for her to be written as a neglectful/abusive mom? which also gives way for the eventual questionable fam that I am not touching) when the first thing she did after saying 'fuck you' to her murderers was to give the stones to her husband? So weird.

I said:

Yeah the idea that Elwing was like “addicted” to the Silmarils is a take that I don’t care for, because there’s no evidence for it and it’s generally used in my experience as just a slightly more sympathetic way of saying “good thing Elrond and Elros were taken away from her.”

The people of Sirion believed the Silmarils were protecting them and Earendil on his quest. That’s why they wanted to keep them. And because they didn’t want to bargain with the people who had tried to destroy them before. It’s right there in the text.

Elwing willingly, voluntarily, and without fanfare giving Earendil the Silmaril to me shows us that it was never that she wanted to keep it for herself. It was about a) what the Silmaril was doing for them (she believed); and b) specifically not wanting to give it to the Feanorians.

That said, I think you could do an interesting exploration of “what if she was hooked on the Silmaril” or smth, but even when it’s not being used as a justification for why Maglor was right to kidnap her children, it’s just not a take I’m personally interested in.