legolas's hair

[jallanite]

Originally Posted by William Cloud Hicklin

I agree with regard to Lorien and Avari; IIRC Tolkien somewhere wrote that by the end of the Third Age there were no Avari to be found in the West (if they ever got so far, being by definition those who refused to leave Cuivienen).

I don’t recall the passage you mentioned claiming that no Avari were to be found in the West. But from The War of the Jewels (HoME 11), page 381:

For in contrast the Lindarin elements in the western Avari were friendly to the Eldar, and willing to learn from them; and so close was the feeling of kinship between the remnants of the Sindar, the Nandor, and the Lindarin Avari, that later in Eriador and the Vales of Anduin they often merged together.

This very strongly suggests that Avari were included among the Elves of Lórien, at least in Tolkien’s thought at one time.

From the same article, page 410:

The form penni is cited as coming from the ‘Wood-elven’ speech of the Vales of Anduin, and these Elves were among the most friendly to the fugitives from Beleriand, and held themselves akin to the remnants of the Sindar.

Penni was one of the five Avari names meaning “Elves”.

[Morthoron]

Only the Elves could be embroiled in such hirsute minutiae.

[William Cloud Hicklin]

Oh, certainly Tolkien never could make up his mind. That's rather the point: any discussion about Middle-earth really contains within it the question "when?" The publication of one book plus its cursory revision simply cut through an ongoing development transversely in time. When he wrote The Lord of the Rings T clearly thought the Wood-elves to be Avari; but in the History of Galadriel and Celeborn "They were descended from those of the Teleri who, on the Great Journey, were daunted by the Misty Mountains and lingered in the Vale of Anduin...but they still remembered that they were in origin Eldar."

Yet still at the same time T could give us Mithrellas, an Elf of Lorien who, according to the Appendix A statement that there were only three marriages of Eldar and Edain, by definition could not be Eldarin.

Even that is less solid than it appears; the 1st Edition text has it that there were three marriages "between High Elves and Men" - a statement which was an error when he wrote it because Luthien, however lofty her maternal lineage, was never a High Elf.

Similarly the Silvan tongue: when T wrote the chapter, Frodo simply couldn't understand the Avarin dialect of Lorien. By the Second Edition, a footnote tells us F was listening to Sindarin spoken with a Silvan accent. Two late essays state that A) Thranduil's household spoke Sindarin but not his Silvan-speaking people, and B) Silvan was no longer spoken in Mirkwood/Lorien by the late Third Age. Pick one.