Here is the passage from the
Athrabeth does for me denie an early contact of ELves or Aniur with Men:
Quote:
'This lore takes no account of you,' said Andreth, 'for we knew nothing of the Eldar. We considered only dying and not-dying. Of life as long as the world but no longer we had not heard; indeed not until now has it entered my mind.'
'To speak truly,' said Finrod, 'I had thought that this belief of yours, that ye too were not made for death, was but a dream of your pride, bred in envy of the Quendi, to equal or surpass them. Not so, you will say. Yet long ere ye came to this land, ye met other folk of the Quendi, and by some were befriended. Were ye not then already mortal? And did ye never speak with them concerning life and death? Though without any words they would soon discover your mortality, and ere long you would perceive that they did not die.'
'"Not so" I say indeed,' answered Andreth. 'We may have been mortal when first we met the Elves far away, or maybe we were not: our lore does not say, or at least none that I have learned. But already we had our lore, and needed none from the Elves: we knew that in our beginning we had been born never to die. And by that, my lord, we meant: born to life everlasting, without any shadow of any end.'
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Andreth speaks here was a sureness not shown in many passages: When Men first meet Elves they had already gained 'their lore' about thier true nature in thier beginning. To develop such a 'lore' you need speech. Therefore Nuin as father of speech is impossible.
Anyhow, to take Nuin as one of the messangers sent by Eru himself from the
NoME text would in itself deny that he would wake Ermon and Elmir before the appointed time.
To take anything from Gilfanos Tale is a stretch in itself. I think we have gone that way as far as we can.
Respectfully
Findegil