What's up with Celeborn?

[Ibrîniðilpathânezel]

Originally Posted by William Cloud Hicklin

However, as with much of the Lorien chapters (written fifteen years before the final form of Appendix B), it's pretty clear that *at the time of writing* Tolkien regarded Celeborn as a native Avar, not even a Nando (who didn't exist), and I surmise one who therefore would or could never go West, so that his parting from Galadriel would be permanent within Time.

Well... In Letter 347 -- written on 17 December 1972, less than a year before JRRT died -- Tolkien said, "Celeborn is a transl. of the orig. name Telporno; though said to be a kinsman of Elu Thingol he was so only afar off, for he too came from Valinor." This is in keeping with at least one version of his background story for Galadriel and Celeborn, and how they came to ME at the time of Feanor's revolt.

This is why I consider a lot of what's in the HoME books to be interesting, but not to be taken as the last word. They present variations of what he was in the process of writing or revising, but not necessarily his final thoughts on the matter, nor what he would have chosen to be published. Neither do the Letters, really; they are both insights to the mind of the man, and how he worked, and he appears to have been a writer whose creations were a constant work in progress. He was always thinking of how to improve them, how to edit them and tweak them to bring them closer to the vision he had -- at that time. I have to wonder from that letter if he forgot that he had already given Celeborn's Quenya name as Teleporno, or if he had reconsidered the form of it and decided to drop the second E. Was that what he was thinking at the time...? We don't really know.

Now, all that said, the notion of Arwen being a "treasure" shared by both Celeborn and Aragorn seems not implausible to me -- a rather grandfatherly bit of indulgence, as it were.