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All Tolkien's known couples have the wife upstatus whenever possible
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Not necessarily: Denethor, Theoden, Faramir all married at best on the level and probably slightly downhill. Elrond? Judgment call: a half-Elf marring a full Elf, but on the other hand Elrond is the great-great-grandson of a Maia. The "superior wife" business seems to have been an especial First Age thing, and I suspect that to a certain extent, given how early those stories were their essentials, that they reflect the traditional "hero gets the princess" trope, although in the event Tolkien would much broaden and deepen the implications of these interspecies marriages (which only ever were permitted as "matters of high doom")