some notes on her jewellery: i hold that noldor pierce just about every bit of skin they can get a needle through because why wouldn’t you want to attach as many pretty shiny things to your body as possible??? though she isn’t noldor, ardemmacto is married to one and likes the look of facial piercings. curufin made her a lot of very elaborate jewellery early on in their courtship but it tends to get in the way of her work so he switched over to simpler - though no less skilfully made - designs! her necklace is the first nail celebrimbor ever made, it’s not fancy but it is very sentimental!
First up we’ve got Sartissë Falassendil, called Ardemmacto. Her names are in reference to her personality and interests. Sartissë is her amilessë, meaning “one who is steadfast, trusty, loyal”, and Falassendil is her ataressë and means “friend/lover of the wave-beaten shore”. Neither really suited her though, and so she goes by the epessë she earned as a young adult! Ardemmacto means “one who creates pictures/images of Arda”. She’s a cartographer/oceanographer. I couldn’t find the specific job title but she makes sea charts!
As you can probably guess, Ardemmacto is Telerin! The initial idea for her was more Jenny’s than mine, but we developed all of these characters through conversations so ultimately she’s ours. We were discussing Quenya-Sindarin name translation and Jenny brought up the one (bad) draft where Celebrimbor was Telerin, and how that still influenced the published Silm because the form of silver used in his name “Telpe” is specifically Telerin Quenya! Noldorin Quenya would have been Tyelpe. This got the ball rolling on my favourite kind of Silm speculation: how can we make things just a littlebit worse? Being half-Teler gives Celebrimbor something in common with his Arafinwion cousins as additional motivation for disowning his father’s family, and makes the kinslaying at Alqualondë very literal. So!! Curufin marries a Telerin woman, how the hell do we fit this into canon?
So before I get into any specific characters I want to lay out my process for creating them. My preference for headcanons and aus is to keep them close to canon. It’s just what I find most fulfilling! The little tweaks, the puzzle of what needs to be different when you make a small change, stuff like that. And the Silmarillion - and Legendarium in general - is very good for that kind of headcanoning!!! I prefer to be conceit conscious, to consider the texts as if they are real historical accounts rather than works of fiction, because that gives me room to analyze why this is included while that is left out. The many watsonian scribes and historians who compiled the Quenta Silmarillion were doing their best to accurately tell the facts of first age beleriand but they also had a specific narrative that they wanted to portray - the fall of the Noldor - and that is a massive bias! Furthermore what their sources are, whether or not they witnessed the events themselves, and how they interpret what they saw/heard will greatly impact what we can understand.
A good example of this is Jenny’s pet theory that the Union of Maeðros wasn’t actually called that until after the Fifth Battle became the Unnumbered Tears. They likely would have named the alliance after Fingon if it had a formal name at all. But then it becomes a massive disaster, and well, it’s easier to blame it on the surviving general who then goes on to commit several atrocities, than to keep the name of the beloved martyred High King. By reframing the Nirnaeth as the Union of Maeðros it becomes another black mark against the Fëanorions, a precedent for the mass murders that Maeðros will lead in the coming years. This allows the survivors to shift the blame off of themselves, and to keep with the neat historical revision that Maeðros was bad all along.
All of this to say: the big puzzle with these spouses was working out why they weren’t included in the Quenta Silmarillion. From a doylist perspective it’s just that Tolkien didn’t develop them beyond a brief mention that Caranthir and Maglor were married, and that Curufin must have had a wife for Celebrimbor to exist. But it’s much more fun to ask why they weren’t considered to be part of the histories of the first age - even as a name in a list of genealogies. I wanted the reasons to vary from “no one knew that they were married” to “remained in Aman” to “it’s politically valuable to leave out this fact”, and then you get to work out the whys behind that. Why stay behind, why hide the marriage, why obscure the history, why did they die?
The secondary puzzle is to look at the canon character and go “what kind of person would they marry?” That’s a much simpler question, but still requires a lot of work! Then by the time I had a solid grasp on both, I had a fairly fleshed out character who only needed a name and some more little details before I felt comfortable to finish with development. So now I’ve got four in-laws and a solid method for filling in the character lacunae in the Silm.
very tempted to polish up and post my feanorion spouses headcanons/ocs but who do i start with. developing them with @iridescentoraclehas been one of the most rewarding parts of getting into this fandom because it was an exercise in character analysis for the canon halves of the pairings, character development for the ocs, working out the puzzle of why they arent present in the published silm (allowing for conceit consciousness), AND my fav kind of au in which everything is made Slightly Worse.
i could post about them in descending order of canonicity, or just by vibe. options are: maglor, curufin, caranthir, and amras. between the four of them theres two dead wives, a divorce, a husband forever sundered, the only growing branch of the house of feanor, the inventor of the harpsichord, an office romance, and so so so much politics
