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Originally Posted by Pitchwife
What do you expect from an author whose own mother died when he was twelve?
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This occurred to me too... but I'm hesitant about how to read it. After all, Tolkien's mother
left his father in South Africa to bring the boys to England, and Arthur Tolkien died there. His own mother, in contrast to Rían, devoted herself to raising her sons (though the parallel of doing so without the support of the broader family is there), and although she died
early, it was not out of anything that we would normally construe as grief for her husband.
That being said, though... I think Tuor as a parallel for Tolkien is a valid possibility, intentional parallels aside. Certainly, he "reads" to me like a Tolkien-persona more than many characters, and "feels" like Faramir (the one character Tolkien mentioned as identifying with) and ends up with the same fate as Beren (whose name Tolkien had placed on his tombstone): marrying an Elf-lady. Tuor's story is even happier than Beren's, though--or seems to be, in its final version. Unfortunately, the Tale of Eärendil was never written and the Tale of Gondolin was never retold in full after the BoLT era... as reconstructed in the Silm, it seems quite possible that Tuor's immortality with Idril (as the counter-fate to Lúthien sharing Beren's fate) bodes a happy ending for them, individually, though it came through the wrack of Gondolin, but the HoME-recorded jottings surrounding their fate in the midst of the Tale of Eärendil are not always so certain...
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Originally Posted by Pitchwife
I concur. Running with the comparison/juxtaposition of Tuor and Turin, Voronwë is Tuor's Beleg - an elf who risked everything for the sake of his friendship with a mortal; and unlike his counterpart in the other tale, his friendship and trust was vindicated and rewarded. (Didn't he, back in the old BoLT, survive to sire the same Ilfiniol son of Bronweg who told some of the Tales to Eriol?)
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One and the same--and Voronwë's survival through the fall of Gondolin to become one of Eärendil's companions seems , at least to me--I have no textual evidence on hand to cite--like a strand that was never lost, even if any mention of Ilfiniol was necessarily lost with the loss of the Cottage of Lost Play.