Eldarin kingship and succession

[William Cloud Hicklin]

On linguistic changes: have you read Quendi and Eldar, and The Shibboleth of Feanor? Tolkien commented that the Elves delighted in change, including changes in language; they altered their tongues often not because they had to but because they chose to. (Extreme consrrvatism seems to have been a trait of the "fallen" Elves of the later ages, engaged in a sort of cultural taxidermy.)

-----------------------

[William Cloud Hicklin]

We all know that Galadriel really wore the pants, but at the same time she was careful to observe the polite fiction that her hubby was the senior. Note how to the Company she is always talking about "the Lord of the Galadrim" being and doing this and that, even though it's obvious she's in charge.

[William Cloud Hicklin]

Instead, the Eldar (and perhaps all the Quendi) have a specialty of their own. They are immortal and even if slain they never leave the circles of the world. A royal succession makes little for them and is actually a contradictory concept which only makes (some) sense under the special circumstances of Arda Marred (in the sense that a dead king in Middle-earth cannot really return to his people so that for pragmatic another king has to take his place).

Therefore it makes sense to grant administrative rights of the king to still living successors, especially in war-time. But the *true king* of, say, the Noldor would always remain Finwe, regardless where the hell his fea was hanging out right now,

And we know that the kingship can be given to the heirs of a king, usually a son or otherwise close descendant, if a king is actually slain.

That in fact raises a very interesting issue, one which indicates that sometimes Tolkien allowed his sense of drama to outweigh strict adherence to the internal consistency of his subcreation: why did Feanor and Fingolfin nearly come to blows over who was Finwe's heir? In Valinor it simply didn't matter: nobody ever died there (Morgoth's intervention being completely unanticipated). "Heirship" generally would have been utterly meaningless among the Amanyar.

Yet when Tolkien added this massive expansion to The Silmarillion circa 1958 it added the driving force necessary to propel the story forward from the rather tedious history text the 1937/51 version was.