Yeah, there are so many places we can take this story when we get to Elrond and Elros. Elrond is easily the most fascinating character in this entire project, and one who will stick with us moving forward once he appears. One of the marvelous things about Elrond is that he has such a tragic story (he loses everyone he cares about, always, since he was a toddler), and yet he is still 'kind as summer' and wise. He is not angry and bitter, or broken, or self-pitying, or really anything you would expect him to be in his situation. He's learned to accept what happened, process his experiences and turn them into wisdom. He knows so much, and has watched so much history play out....
Anyway, yeah, but his childhood is only lightly sketched in a variety of contradictory passages, so we can go in so many different possible directions with that. We should definitely work out what we want the role of herald to mean independently of Elrond assuming that role later. We are world-building at this stage, deciding how to show elven culture to the audience and 'teach' them how this works.
I'm not sure if the audience is going to go along with the warrior/healer dichotomy unless we put some effort into showing how that works. We'll have to relay on several different scenes and comments to paint this picture and reinforce the mindset. So, do people 'choose' a path, or is it just that their temperaments lean naturally in one direction or the other? I am now envisioning elf-children playing a variation of 'doctors and soldiers'* and arguing over who gets to be the doctor. In other words, does everyone go one way or the other, and does the split happen in childhood or adulthood? Are some elves neither? How strict do we want this distinction to be? In many cultures, gender roles are strict; you
don't do something that is the domain of the other gender**. In other cultures, they're more fluid with men 'typically' having some roles and women 'typically' having others, but no one throwing their hands up in horror over exceptions to that. We're planning to divide the roles up not strictly along gender lines, but are the divisions very very strict, so that once you are categorized, it's done? No healer would
ever go hunting? We know Beleg will be both/and. We want Idril to have a 'healer' designation (really, a scholar, but non-combatant nonetheless), and of course we will show her fighting in the Fall of Gondolin. Will heralds
always be healers, or only 'typically' with some exceptions?
Part of my reason for wanting to show the House of Fëanor behaving somewhat differently is that they are, clearly, rebels in many ways. Fëanor was not very willing to accept things the way they were. Of course, when it came to some issues, he was also very conservative (particularly with linguistics), so I recognize that not everything about them is iconoclastic. But also...there's something...off...about a guy who would start wars in Valinor. Fëanor's militancy is off the deep end. So if elven society is divided into fighters and healers...he's ultra-fighter. At the same time, he's scholarly and creative and good at everything he touches, so very likely to be the exact kind of person to disdain the idea that his being a fighter would make him less good of a healer. And, in turn, he would force those who are 'healers' in his following to become fighters too. Not that they'd actually fight in battles, but that they'd be trained to. Perhaps not, but I think there is room for the Fëanoreans to eschew some of this.
Oh, and Glorfindel's mother/sister would only be Fingolfin's Besan if Fingon isn't married. Otherwise, Fingon's wife (Fingolfin's daughter-in-law) would likely fill that role rather than Fingolfin's niece.
*'Doctors and soldiers' was a game we played in elementary school gym class. I have no idea how common/widespread it was, but it was certainly popular at my school! We played it in a hall on rainy days. The way it worked involved having a large tub of sock-balls (balls made out of socks). The kids were divided into 2 teams, and, depending on the size of the group, each team would have 1-2 doctors (identified by an armband or something). Everyone else was soldiers. You set up a boundary line in the middle of the room , and a line further back near the wall. When they said 'go', the soldiers would grab the sock-balls and lob them at the other team. If you were hit, you had to fall down. The doctors would then run out and grab the downed soldier, dragging them back behind the line. Once you were behind the line, you could stand up and rejoin the game. If a doctor got hit, they had to take off their armband and be converted into a soldier. So, obviously doctors were very valuable, and if a team lost all their doctors, they couldn't regenerate any of their fallen soldiers. The game ended when everyone on one team was downed.
Similar to this:
https://www.playworks.org/game-library/medic-dodgeball/
** As an example, in Ethiopia coffee is brewed by women in a coffee ceremony. Men never have a coffee ceremony; they just attend and drink the coffee. This typically happens in families and with neighbors, though it can also be done in workplaces or restaurants. So, when a group of Salesian priests and novices (all men) wanted to have a coffee ceremony as part of a celebration, someone decided that one of the prenovices would make the coffee, but he had to wear a skirt to do it. I know, because he knocked on my door and asked to borrow a skirt
😉. It would not have occurred to me that he would have to dress up as a woman to make coffee in this context!
Similarly, when one of my roommates drunkenly bought a chicken, we had to ask one of the guards for help butchering it. In their culture, men slaughter the animals, but women do all the butchering. So, the first guard refused to show us, because that was women's work (and we didn't offer to pay him). Another guard was nice and took pity on us and he showed us how to kill and clean the chicken. Zebeynas (guards) were always men, too.
