Thanks so much, Oshun! :)

>But it does shade into women and men are not different but equal, but different with women being superior.

I don't see that, personally, from my biased author's PoV. :) Tatie could be seen as "superior" to Tata, I suppose, if one thinks that her ability to lead better than he did made her superior. Tata wasn't exactly a layabout on the Cuivienen couch, eating potato chips and watching football; he invented much of the early language. I actually drew a lot from my own temperament when writing him and more from Bobby's when writing Tatie (in that both have a lot of charisma and ability to make people like them). Tata (and I) can be immensely creative but need solitude, are somewhat socially awkward, and becomes prickly far faster than many people would like. :) As far as the other characters, males with important roles include Enel and Imin (still the leaders of their people, not their wives ;), Finwe, and Rumil. The only other named female character is Elennárë, and she doesn't have much of a role besides the inertia she exerts on Tata's life and perceptions.

This history I was drawing on (which doesn't mean it came through, of course) is that of pre-Christian civilizations, like the Celts, where women had a much stronger role, and femininity--as in balance, creation, compromise, et cetera--was much more valued than it was once Christianity arrived and began actively oppressing women and promoting militarism, dogmatism, dualism, and all those other isms that define our modern society and seem also to afflict Eldarin society, according to texts like L&C.

>I think I was supposed to fall in love with Tatie?

Actually, I agree that Finwe is the much more lovable character. Tatie is a deeply flawed character, for all her obvious gifts. (More than a little of Feanor shows up in her, I think. ;) She is, for all intents and purposes, a politician. She's good at getting people to do what she wants, she loves being the center of attention, and she's very good at making up stories that effect all of the above. If I was feeling less charitable, I'd call her a good liar. ;) The stories she tells the Quendi are no more truth than what Orome eventually tells them, although they accord more with what the Quendi know of their world. When she sees the ease with which Finwe--her own son, the inheritor of her gifts--sways the Noldor to his side, she sees more than a little of herself, which I think is the cause of her despair once the Noldor leave off behind him. Or that's my interpretation of it. :)

>I'd have to skim a few of my stories to remind myself whether I labled Finwe begotten or unbegotten

It's one of those debates with good points on both sides, I think. I always made Finwe Unbegotten just because I liked what I could do with that in my stories. The only reason I remember that particular choice so well in my own verse is because it's mentioned several times in AMC and provoked some discussion when I first posted that story.

Thank you again for reading and for such a thought-provoking comment! I've spent fifteen minutes replying when I should be finishing my articles and getting ready for my trip tomorrow! :D

Thank you for reading and commenting, Alice--although I'm sorry the story made you melancholy! :) I'm afraid I'm not a good writer for happiness and cheer.

Laws and Customs among the Eldar was one of the first HoMe documents I read, and from the beginning, I found a lot of appeal in the bit about how the Avari would refuse the call to Mandos ... and a lot of injustice, too, in how it was depicted as evil rather than a choice for which they likely had very good motives. Now that I know much more about the texts, I find that initial interest is still there and like to try to write from the Avarin perspective that we never got from JRRT. It was a fun story to write, and I'm glad you enjoyed it! (And a belated welcome to the group, too! :)

Oh wow, the Fandom Snowflake challenge actually did bring at least one reader! :D Hooray and thank you for reading.

My favorite way to work with the texts for fanfic purposes is to assume them as mythological and historical sources and treat them accordingly. The awakening at Cuivienen and the infamous "Laws and Customs among the Eldar" both beg that kind of treatment to me. Lo, I got the chance to combine them here! :D I don't like the assumption that the Elves definitively were a certain way (as described in L&C or anywhere else) but rather that these were cultural customs. It's fun to follow that rabbit hole to discover how those customs may have begun and how other Elves responded differently.

Thank you again for reading and commenting. You've been so kind and generous to me; I am glad I accidentally found the first comment that got lost in the Great Notification Debacle of 2015 and happened upon the others as a result. I have a lot of work to do on a paper I'm presenting at a conference this weekend, and these have boosted my confidence to tackle the revisions. Thank you! *hugs*

Thank you for reading and commenting! I'm glad that it provoked thoughts! :D

I am intrigued that you found the story "political." I don't feel like I wrote it that way (although, of course, it is perfectly valid to interpret something in a way an author did not intend); I certainly didn't intend it to "answer" anything, at least not in the sense of trying to prove JRRT wrong on something. JRRT has his beliefs and I have mine, which are very often at odds; I think it was probably a good thing that I was not writing about his legendarium while he was still alive, as I'm sure he and I would not have gotten along! :) I wrote this piece as I write most of my stories (including AMC): taking the texts as historical/mythological/scriptural works written by in-universe authors who are both fallible and biased. As always, I prefer to represent the viewpoints of characters whom I feel were misrepresented by those in-universe authors. My usual subjects are the Feanorians; in this case, it was the Avari, against whom I've always perceived a significant bias in the texts and simultaneously felt a kinship with for reasons I'll get into in a moment. The whole notion that the Avari stayed behind because of ignorance or relative lack of courage/ambition/wisdom compared to the Eldar is troubling to me. I've always imagined that the Avari would tell the story very differently; this story is an attempt to do so.

If anything, I would call this story "spiritual." It was, after all, written around the Whitman passage that is quoted in the story itself. This is why I say I feel a certain kinship with the Avari: I have always imagined them to be heathen in their spiritual beliefs and practices, as I am in mine, and therefore have always imagined their worldview more comfortable for me than that of the Eldar. These beliefs are represented as sinister in Laws and Customs; again, I've always found this painfully biased and imagined the Avari would tell it differently. This gets into the "ecology of Elves" that I allude to in the endnotes: the desire of the Elves to participate fully in the world to which they are bound, including in death and physical reintegration with the earth rather than participating in the Valarin "rebirth" into identical form and, therefore, immortality (contrary to the normal death-life-death cycles of Arda).

I am assuming you are identifying it as political on the basis of my distaste for the passage from "Quendi and Eldar" that I paraphrased in the story and admitted loathing in the endnotes? You are right that Tolkien is very likely projecting his own Catholic beliefs onto the story here, which were conservative even for his day and age. However, I disagree that these beliefs are no longer relevant because they have become, as you say, "no longer popular." The idea of women as secondary and subservient to men continues to permeate our culture, even if it is not so ugly and overt as in Q&E. Most people, yes, realize that one can no longer say that women are inferior to men and that wives should obey their husbands--although it's perhaps also worth noting that conservative Christian sects that DO continue to affirm this remain alarmingly popular, at least in the U.S., where I live, and this remains the official view of the Catholic Church, which continues to wield considerable political and economic power throughout the world--but these same people very often hold biases based on the notion that women's secondary status is at least somewhat correct. That questions such as whether a woman can be raped by her husband or should be able to be sterilized without her husband's permission continue to be subjects of debate, in the U.S. anyway, suggests to me that more people hold these outmoded views than would openly admit it.

But, as I noted, my intention in the story wasn't so much to "answer" Tolkien's views of gender equality with my own so much as to show how people and institutions that hold power--the Valar, those with access to literacy, those with access to the persons and institutions that determine "historical fact"--can manipulate intentionally and not those "facts" to reflect the status quo. The system that the Eldar established in Valinor was clearly patriarchal, and I don't think it's "out there" to suggest that this reflected, at least in part, the patriarchal structure of the Ainur. The "counting tale" about the awakening at Cuivienen clearly wasn't meant to represent fact; it does, however, represent that culture's values pretty clearly, in my opinion.

And this is why I don't find it relevant whether a particular text was posthumous or even finished, much less something JRRT intended to publish. We see his views in the story but also how those views influenced the legendarium. He pays lip service to gender equality in "Laws and Customs," but it's always seemed to me something he thought made sense for that culture but didn't really know what it would look like in practice (considering that he asserts equality and then gives example of the opposite within the same paragraph). If he imagined at some point such overt sexism for his Eldar (or didn't even know to see it as sexist), that certainly suggests to me that those same beliefs influence, say, how he depicts Luthien's role compared to Beren's or the disappearance of Galadriel through much of the legendarium or why women seem so scarce in Middle-earth. These biases in JRRT and his willingness to allow them as well in his in-universe narrators invites me to peel away that bias and consider what the story might look like without it. And so I write, and this motive influences nearly all of my stories; it was perhaps made more overt by my aside regarding the cited quote from Q&E.

Again, thank you for the comment and also for making it to the end of what is now almost long enough a reply to count as a short story in its own right! :)