#I do have a timeline of all finwean birth years buried somewhere in my notes for the unburied

[thelordofgifs]

Wait question, trying to work things out for a fic of my own and I was wondering, how the hell do you determine all the Finweans’ ages in relationship to their siblings to create their dynamics so well in your stories? Don’t like, none of them even have a canon birth year except for Feanor?

What a compliment, thank you anon! I am very far from an expert on this, but as usual “canon” is a vague and muddy field here.

Finwëan birth years we do know, all from the Annals of Aman in Morgoth's Ring:

Fëanor in YT 1169

Fingolfin in 1190

Finarfin in 1230

Turgon and Finrod in 1300

Galadriel and Aredhel in 1360

(An additional fragment of the Annals in The Nature of Middle-earth gives Fingon's birth year as 1260.)

There is plenty of room, within these dates, to play around with birth years to find a dynamic that suits you! One resource I find invaluable is this excellent post on elven aging, which puts the information LaCE gives us into numbers. Because I am Like That, I wrote up a Python script that uses this formula to convert between elf and human ages. If you're slightly more normal, you can use the fact that elves and humans age at the same rate up until three years, and then after that

elf age = 38.25 - (log((27/human age) - 1)/0.059

and

human age = 27/(1 + e^(-0.059*(elf age - 27)))

to convert between them.

Then you can just use this to work backwards and decide on birth years. Posit, for example: Maedhros was always Fingon's Cool Slightly Older Cousin, and the elf-equivalent of a glamorous twenty-year-old when Fingon was elf!17. That gives us that Maedhros was 56 when Fingon was 47, putting his birth year at 1251, nine years before Fingon. Or perhaps you feel very strongly that Celegorm was older than Finrod, but only very slightly: then give him a birth year of 1297 or so. Were Fingolfin and Lalwen codependently close in age? That gives you somewhere around 1195-1200 for her birth year.

I can't emphasise enough that absolutely none of this is necessary! The Annals of Aman do (as far as I know) often contradict what's "established canon" (so much as that exists), and so you can literally throw out any of these birth dates that don't spark joy. And the LaCE maths is even more optional. But I think the working backwards is key: decide on a dynamic you like for the various siblings and cousins, and then reverse-engineer the birth years to give you something you like!