Obscure Topics of the Legendarium

[Formendacil]

It's uncanonical as Mary Sue, but I always liked the idea that Gil-galad was the son of Fingolfin's son Argon (Arakano)--mentioned only in the Shibboleth texts and said to have died just after the crossing of the Helcaraxe. The reason it worked for me is that it allowed the basic outline of the published Silmarillion to remain intact, an outline I have a nostalgia for simply because I encountered it young.

In such a case, Gil-galad is still associated with the House of Fingolfin. It makes sense that the son of Argon would remain with the Elves of Hithlum, but it also makes sense why he'd be skipped over in the succession by Turgon--like others, I found that the hardest point to swallow in the published Silm narrative: the passing over of the House of Fëanor is presented as an aberration, so why isn't the passing over of the House of Fingon treated likewise?

I might also like it for the meta-narrative reason that it keeps Gil-galad's genealogy "obscure"--it's not quite the "left unsaid" that Christopher Tolkien ended up wishing he'd followed, but as Argon sits on both the edge of obscurity and the edge of canonicity, it leaves Gil-galad's parentage sufficiently forgettable that it makes sense to me that his father could be forgotten in the published tales, leaving later, mannish, scholars to speculate if he was the son of Fingon or the son of a Finarfinian.