Wait a- hold on. Was Aredhel in an abusive relationship or did she love Eol? I read that elves married once and once only (save Finwe) but why would Aredhel want to leave with Maeglin?

Sadly, those two options are not mutually exclusive. Eol was definitely abusive, but that doesn’t necessarily mean that Aredhel didn’t love him, at least for a while. This site has a great list of warning signs for domestic abuse, and if you go down the list you’ll see a lot of similarities with Aredhel and…

Elves and Dwarves: Alliances

It’s not lore-breaking at all! There have been quite a few elves who developed good relations with dwarves in Middle Earth’s history! Sometimes the relationship was purely business, such as: Thingol hiring the dwarves of Nogrod and Belegost to build Menegroth (though the relationship soured in the end.) Finrod hiring the dwarves of Nogrod and…

Space Swords

So, Turin’s sword Gurthang originally went by the name Anglachel. The sword was given to Thingol by Eol, basically as rent for living in Nan Elmoth. Anglachel was unique, because it was “made of iron that fell from heaven asa blazing star; it would cleave all earth-delved iron” – the iron used to make it…

Concerning the “Sassy elves” post, I would like to ask if Curufin could be in this category as well. I remember how he had talked to Eol when the latter was searching for his wife, and son, and thus I wonder if Curufin’s words were sassy or rude.

You know, it’s hard to say – he’s sort of skirting that line between sass and rudeness, you know? I personally would say it leans more towards just being rude, mostly because the Silmarillion doesn’t really do a lot of humor.. but it’s really up to interpretation: Then Curufin said to Eol: ‘What errand have…

Just wondering if Eol killing (albeit inadvertently) Aredhel counted as a Kinslaying. It doesn’t seem like he meant to kill her specifically, but he did try and kill Maeglin, so would her death, as well his subsequent execution, count as Kinslaying to the Elves?

You bring up an excellent question, Anon. Even more so when you consider that Eol was then executed by Turgon – does that count as kinslaying as well? Tolkien often has events that stand apart more because of cultural significance than true historic accuracy. For example, he mentions a couple times Aragorn and Arwen was…

Multicultural Elvish Marriages

An interesting question! Difficult to answer, because our examples are few and often affected by strange circumstances. Below is a chart of cross-cultural marriages among the elves (let me know if I forgot one) (They’re color-coded by culture: red=Noldor, purple=Vanyar, blue=Teleri/Sindar, grey=Avari, green=multicultural) As you can see, in most of these relationships the wife goes…

What is the translation of Eol’s name? It doesn’t say in any of the books, from what I’ve seen, while it does have the translation of everyone else’s name, like Finrod’s, Feanor’s, and Legolas’s.

Tolkien never had a meaning for Eol’s name. In fact, he wrote in one note that: Another name from primitive FG – meaningless then and now. But it was not intended to have any meaning in Quenya or Sindarin. For Eol was said to be a ‘Dark Elf’, a term then applied to any Elves…