silm questions

[dragonlady7]

I doubt anything will come of this, but I have kept rereading my old fanfic and that of other people, as it's oddly relaxing, and I now have questions about the Silmarillion. (galadhir's Celeborn stuff is so heartbreakingly perfect I can't stop rereading it. Even if you don't like Silmfic, you should read Oak and Willow, just for the characterization of Galadriel, who is so much stronger and more feminine than the usual Strong Woman sort you find in fiction, and also for Celeborn who is, in my humble opinion, Teh (very unconventional) Sexx.
Just little things like this make it impossible for me to stop rereading it:

Everything about him was twilight, from his starlight-coloured hair to the soft grey and silver of his raiment. Looking at him she thought again of the knife - light passing through subtle shadows like the ocean, and the drabness of the Sindar suddenly resolved itself into something else in her mind.

The fitted cuff of his undertunic was a pale blue-grey silk, stitched with silver embroidery, and the overtunic was of charcoal velvet, woven in a diamond pattern that shimmered slightly each time he moved. This dullness is not a lack of art, she realized, Not because they are backwards and have no delight in colour, but because... In the dimness of night the colours the Noldor valued so highly would be stripped away, but these Sindar clothes of many shades and textures would become a delight of half-seen richness; a tease and suggestion of beauty, like a half heard melody that enchants because it cannot be grasped. Because their taste has been formed in millennia of darkness.

It made them both more like the Noldor and more unlike. Like, because they were not the ignorant rustics so many of the Calaquendi had supposed. Unlike because, if they had their own lore, their own arts, how strange they must have grown after so many thousand years apart.

I would never have thought of that.

Anyhow. While I'm thinking of it:


When did Cirdan tell Elu Thingol about the Kinslaying? I am sure it would be more discussed if the Silm explicitly said so, but is there any kind of chronology that would indicate about how long after the Return of the Noldor the beans got spilled?
Thingol suspected something, as he wouldn't let the Feanorions in... and I know Finrod wouldn't tell him but his brother did... but when?
[Is there anywhere that someone smarter than I has made a chronology of the events of the Silm? If I ever had such a thing bookmarked, it was one or two computers ago.]

I want to know because I want to know at what point, relative to the founding of Vinyamar, the inhabitants of Nevrast (both Noldor and Sindar) would have been speaking Sindarin.

Vinyamar was only inhabited a little over a century, I find, so this would be important to nail down.

Comments

[heartofoshun.livejournal.com]

Absolutely adore Oak and Willow and her Celeborn is my canon.

I wanted to comment on the time and language questions yesterday, but I did not know where to begin and further think that my recent considerations on these questions have led me to think about them from an different perspective.

I just finished a rather detailed textual and soul-searching expedition trying to decide what languages would have been spoken by which elves and when at the very beginning of the First Age. I was at first almost entirely fixed in my mind also upon the question of when Thingol had banned the use of Quenya. But I eventually decided that the Noldor would have already begun to learn to speak Sindarin well before that point. My speculations upon where and how this would have come about led me off in an entirely different direction. I then began to examine the time frame relating to the arrival of Feanor and sons’ company in the Beleriand area and how soon thereafter Fingolfin’s group would have arrived. At that point I ran smack into completely illogical and impossible mythical time constructs in canon which were absolutely useless for my own story-telling purposes. I had to think about if I was willing to write a story where Maedhros hung from the cliffs of Thangorodrim for a period of years and decided I did not.

Meanwhile, Claudio was thinking about the same question for purposes of his own story arc. I was speaking with him (hoping for help relating to geography and language) and got into a discussion with him about the time frame. Yikes. All rather complicated, but led me back to the same place in my own reasoning—that canon was for my own intent and purposes pretty useless on the time questions here. For my own story, I decided that Fingon rescued Maedhros probably some three years at most after the burning of the ships and the separation of the two contingents of the Noldor. That Maedhros was a prisoner for two years maximum and could not have been chained to that cliff for more than a couple of weeks. None of this has any basis in canon, but a bit in logic and a lot in my style of writing, which modernizes the main protagonists sensitivity and characterization. This is a speculative non-answer to your question.

I decided that the Feanorians learned Sindarin pretty well in a couple of years. That clearly Fingolfin’s followers would have been lagging behind on the language acquisition question. Claudio pointed out to me that the area in which the settled was fairly heavily populated. Therefore, I decided that well before the ban on the use of Quenya that the Noldor would have been able to use Sindarin with the native population and continued to speak their own language internally. I also decided to use the Quenya names (something which I cared a lot about) for the characters until the time of the ban. I have seen speculation in Tolkien scholarship on this question as well which disagrees with my decision on this as well--something to the effect that the Noldor were extremely sensitive on language questions and would have wanted Sindarin names to go with their daily use of the language. Whatever. Maybe. I decided to stick with what seemed psychologically valid to me based upon my experiences with having lived in places where I was existing in a language not my own.

[elvses.livejournal.com]

Círdan told Thingol? I don't think Círdan would have even known (directly). I'll have to look at the book again.

As far as I recall, Thingol learned the truth around the year 100, at which point Finrod left Doriath for Nargothrond. Prior to that, it wasn't so much suspicion of evil that led Thingol to ban everyone from his realm, but simply that he didn't want anyone coming in. Not even other Sindar. He only allowed the children of Finarfin because they were his close relations. He was more worried that the foreign princes would try to steal his power. So he gave them leave to set up kingdoms in the north (which they'd already done anyhow without his permission), excluded them from his own lands, and spent the next five hundred years pretending they didn't exist.

Vinyamar... I think people would have spoken both Sindarin and Quenya there. Vinyamar is a Quenya name. Quenya was still used more actively in Gondolin than anywhere else in the east, so it would have had to be used in Vinyamar. Officially, the Noldor were speaking Sindarin, at least to the natives (probably not in their own households, because that would make no sense) in the year 20 at the Mereth Aderthad.

You can look at a First Age chronology at the Encyclopedia of Arda (click on Chronicle of Arda and choose your timeframe), but it's both somewhat incorrect and missing many key dates (while including some that have no relevance whatsoever). I made up one of my own that I could email you, if you're interested.