Did Finwe have daughters?

[Galin]

(...) I honestly can't work out what happened to them– this is whether Tolkien himself later revised them out of existence, or if Christopher Tolkien made an editorial decision to leave them out of the published Silmarillion– which I guess puts them in the same kind of semi-canonical limbo as, say, Elboron or Argon.

Christopher Tolkien has provided the evidence that at least two daughters remained to Finwe according to text dated 1968 or later (The Shibboleth of Feanor): Findis, who did not go into Exile, while Irien Lalwende did.

The confusion concerns the 'third daughter', as Faniel existed in earlier text published in Morgoth's Ring, including the Elvish genealogies seemingly dating from 1959... and considering that Tolkien had the genealogies in front of him while he was working on the 1968 text -- in these tables there are still three daughters, while in the late description itself there are two, and the text specifically refers to four children, (not five as in Morgoth's Ring).

More confusion concerns the names, but I have chosen the forms that seem to go with the actual excursus (The Shibboleth) rather than the tables (Tolkien may have slipped in the text itself, as there he refers to one daughter with a name from the table, then later she is Irien rather).


So again, the later text refers to four children and two daughters, while the tables have three daughters -- and so one wonders why Tolkien did not correct the tables to agree with the text, since he was again using the 1959 tables at the time.