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Made this a little while ago, I'll be doing more when I have the spoons for it lol.
The Silmarillion as Vines
Character Thoughts - Elwing
I don’t think that Elwing throwing herself into the ocean had anything to do with possessiveness about the Silmaril. For me, it recalls two other scenes in Tolkien’s work.
One is Frodo’s defiance at the Ford of Bruinen: “By Elbereth and Lúthien the Fair, you shall have neither the Ring nor me!” A desperate defiance against evil when you’re at the end of your rope and the end of your strength (and retreat to water, and unexpected rescue).
And the other, even more strongly, is the Fall of Fingolfin. She’s just lost a desperate battle; she sees everything she knows and loves and has built falling into ruin and fire; she can’t stop any of it. But she can fight the people who did this to her, and she can hurt them, even if it kills her. She can’t outright duel Maedhros (he’s been probably the greatest swordsman in Beleriand for ten times longer than she’s been alive; that would quite possibly be a more unequal fight than the Duel of Fingolfin and Morgoth), but she still has a way to hurt him. You don’t get the Silmaril, and you don’t get to kill me. You don’t get to win.
The central thought underlying it is not ‘mine’; it is ‘fuck you’.
It is not about her keeping the Silmaril; it is about the Fëanorians not getting it.
I don’t think she knows just how well she’s succeeding at hurting them - everything in her life tells her the Fëanorians are monsters as bad as or worse than anything from Angband, not beings capable of remorse - but she knows she’s denying them the one thing they want. And Maedhros and Maglor are left knowing that the worst thing they’ve ever done was, as far as their goals are concerned, completely pointless.
She’s not ‘abandoning her children’. She’s already lost her children. She has no way to save them. She has no reason to believe they would be spared, whatever she did. The twins are of no use to the Fëanorians. The Fëanorians have already shown themselves willing to murder children, her brothers, that actually did have value as hostages. If Elwing handed over the Silmaril there’s no reason for her to believe they wouldn’t just kill her and her children for spite.
It can’t be emphasized enough that the Fëanorians are the monsters of Elwing’s life. Angband is a distant name and a threat. The murderers of Elwing’s father, her mother, her brothers, the twice-destroyers of her home, are the Fëanorians. They are her Morgoth.
You would think with certain revelations during these past few years, people would stop trying to vilify a native queen whose family (including twin brothers) and peoples were mass-murdered thrice over by invaders who steal her twin sons to keep as hostages against the surviving native population…
And yet, here we are. In 2021. Trying to browse Elwing’s tag and get a whole bunch of “shitty suicidal neglectful mom”-takes alongside “the genocidal mass-murdering kidnappers hostage takers that forced her to jump or be killed by them were their ~*REAL*~ parents uwu!”.
No. Elrond and Elros didn’t have any parents because the mass-murdering kidnappers killed their entire family! The closest thing they got were those few years before their real parents (and grandparents, and uncles, and great-grandparents and so on all the way back to Olwë’s people at the First Kinslaying, since Olwë was their great-great-granduncle) were killed by the mass-murderers you claim were better than their victims!
Maglor and Maedhros DID NOT create a found family FFS! Any rapport established between them and the twins were the twins trying desperately to survive being their hostages! It was not ~*uwu*~ sweet and lovely ~*uwu*~ it was likely fucking traumatic and Elrond and Elros were likely unable to deal with that trauma until their kidnappers disappeared and they felt safe again! Read up on Fawn in Fight, Flight, Freeze and Fawn reactions. Or any other related psychology!
Also, if Maglor and Maedhros actually took pity on orphaned elflings and not just valuable hostages, they would have adopted ALL the orphaned elflings; they had just burned a city and slaughtered lots of elves! Surely, unless they only slaughtered elflings, that means that there’s lots of orphans to go around! (This is why I say that the Silm is basically Noldorin propaganda; it’s not pity which moves Maglor, or there would have been a lot more adoptive brothers and sisters of the twins, but saying that it is pity makes Maglor and Maedhros look like better people than they actually are.)
EDIT: In this scenario, it is the same year as the cannonical third kinslaying; little Elrond and Elros are hanging out somewhere, probably eating weird things as six-year-olds are wont to do, and Eärendil is at sea.