[lindil]

The closest the Avari would have come to having a large city was probably mixed in with the Silvan and Sindarin Elves in Thranduil's realm.

JRRT in many and oft conflicting writings re: the Avari generally tends to depict them as wilder and less civilized, and in one scrap in HoM-E XI it mentions 8 or so clans.

here is an extraxt from discussion re: a now abandoned 'Complete Guide to Tolkien's Legendarium', consisting mostly of extracts from an article I currently have no link for by Michael Martinez:

from MM's wild, wild, wood-elves west article.


...Hence, it seems reasonable that the Tatyar who remained in Middle-earth were equally divisive, and Tolkien notes that they were more contentious with the Eldar than were the Nelyarin Avari. The Tatyarin Avari felt their Amanic cousins were too haughty. The Tatyarin Avari are thus good candidates for comprising the various "tribes" the Eldar documented in Beleriand and Eriador: the kindi, cuind, hwenti, windan, and kinn-lai. The penni settled in the Vales of Anduin, and they in fact spoke the "Wood-elven" language. They also were friendlier to the Eldar, especially the Sindar who eventually settled in the Vales of Anduin.

What became of the Tatyar? Some actually reached Beleriand and lived in the hills and great forests of the south where few if any of the Eldar ever ventured. Some also happened to merge with Nandor. In fact, Tolkien suggests at one point that some of the Green-Elves of Ossiriand (those Nandor who were led by Denethor, son of Lenwe, to Beleriand) were in fact Avari, Tatyarin Avari. After Denethor's death some of his people left Ossiriand and settled in Arthorien, the southeastern march of Doriath. These were called the Guest-elves, and some of them appear to have been Tatyarin Elves in origin.

Unfortunately Tolkien doesn't associate any of the names of Avarin clans with geographical regions. Perhaps a linguistic analysis might reveal some hints of who settled where, but that is all beyond me. It does appear, however, that the Tatyar who didn't settle in Beleriand ended up in Eriador. These clans may have merged with the few Nandor who remained in Eriador after Denethor's great migration to Beleriand. If that was the case, the Tatyarin Avari and Nandor must have become virtually indistinguishable, and they would have perhaps remained the largest population in Eriador until late in the First Age. Most of them were probably destroyed or driven to seek refuge in Lindon during the War of the Elves and Sauron.

But that leaves the Penni. They somehow got up the gumption to wander westward, too, and probably the entire nation of Nelyarin Avari became the Penni. That is not to say they couldn't have had a few drop off and put down roots here and there. For example, people have often wondered who the Dorwinions were. The name "Dorwinion" occurs in two sources: "Lay of the Children of Hurin", where a potent wine is brought from Dorwinion by the Dwarves of Nogrod to Doriath; and The Hobbit, where the Wood-elves of Mirkwood import wine from their kin in the south, in the land of Dorwinion (actually, it's not clear what the southern Elves exported to Mirkwood, since Tolkien writes "the wine, and other goods, were brought from far away, from their kinsfolk in the South, or from the vineyards of Men in distannt lands").

Tolkien told Pauline Baynes to place Dorwinion on the northwestern shores of the Sea of Rhun, and every cartographer to follow her has accordingly done the same, though the name doesn't appear in any of the canonical LOTR maps. Christopher Tolkien was puzzled by this placement, since "Lay of the Children of Hurin" speaks of the "heats of the South", but it does seem logical that -- if Dorwinion is an Elven land -- it be placed somewhere near the path followed by the Elves on their westward journeys. They all seem to have wandered along the northern shores of whatever sea lay in the region (the old sea, Helcar, vanished in the turmoils at the end of the First Age, and all that remained of it was the sea of Rhun).

Without a more double checking I am hesitant to say that all references above were really JRRT's last thoughts on any given point, but they at least collect together alot of the more obscure points of Elven history and geographical locations [at one time at least] of some of the Avari/Silvan Elves.

Dorwinion is another possible Elven center, though this is inconclusive. I do not have time at the moment but there was a year or so ago a very long discussion on it.