#i apologize in advance for the jumpscare in your notifs

[chaos-of-the-abyss]

(i very much question both beren/luthien and fëanor's naming creativities lol. but one point for the sons of fëanor bc nerdanel, the one we all know to hold all the brain cells in fëanor's family, had some good variety in her sons' mother names. though i do remember seeing this one post somewhere mentioning how if you think hard enough about it all of those mother names have some euphemism in there)

not to get too speculative on what i meant as a rambly post, but i actually think dior's names are veryyyy interesting and also confusing. "dior" is reasonably taken to mean "successor" while "eluchíl" means "heir of elu". also i want to note that eluchíl isn't really a last/middle name like we'd think of it, it seems more like an epithet i.e. finrod felagund. and finrod got that attached to him later in life, not when he was born. as far as i know we aren't given when dior gets his own epithet, so it's possible that his parents actually aren't the ones who gave him that name.

anyway, so dior is emphasized as a successor (name given at birth or close to birth) and thingol's heir. we don't know when or by whom the name "eluchíl" was given to him - it could have even been after he became king of doriath. i have seen some suggestions that people outside of his kingdom didn't know his name was dior, and just referred to him as "eluchíl". it's an interesting notion that "eluchíl" may be more like... his regnal name, almost.

but my question when it comes to the name "dior" is... successor to what? is it also referencing his position as thingol's heir like "eluchíl" obviously is? if so, that strikes me as odd, because nobody expected thingol to die and dior to take up his position as king of doriath. beren and luthien certainly wouldn't have known. they obviously named their son well before thingol's death, so what gives? furthermore, dior grows up in ossiriand, and the place he lives with his family after marriage, lanthir lamath, is also in ossiriand, which seems to imply that while he doesn't necessarily feel unfamiliar with doriath, he maybe doesn't consider it home per se. so, if "dior" is indeed in reference to succeeding thingol, why is he named with such a strong doriath association, as if there's prior knowledge that he'll become its king after thingol? it's weird.

another possibility regarding his name is that it's not referring to thingol but rather to a number of other alternatives:

it could be his maia heritage, as in luthien begins the sole line of eruhini in the lore that have divine blood, and dior is the successor to that.

another idea is that it's talking about him being part human and part elf. the peredhil are treated as a huge deal in-universe -- the choice of the peredhil being an actual established thing in canon which required the valar's active discussion, not to mention it being a key plot point in aragorn and arwen's story; plus eärendil, a peredhel, having a whole prophecy about him centuries and centuries before his birth. a number of the most influential people throughout the tolkienverse's entire history have been peredhil, and the vast majority of them are dior's own descendants. given all this narrative weight, i think the idea of a child between an elf and human is meant to be considered as very strange in-universe, enough to warrant all this hype around it. so dior being emphatically named successor could be him being a successor of elves and men, and a stressing of how that position will be passed down to his own descendants, whom he will also be succeeded by. (an aside, but i feel like dior's maia heritage is given surprisingly little weight compared to him being part human, part elf. he's distinguished as the first of the peredhil, meaning the first of the half-human/half-elf beings. him being a literal minor god's grandson isn't mentioned anywhere in that.)

one more idea, super sappy but not something i'd put past beren and luthien considering how tooth-rottingly sappy they are about each other, is that he's just their successor. they went through gaston celegorm and curufin twice, satan's lieutenant, satan himself, carcharoth, and then death to get where they are. and their son came from all that love, courage, and unhinged "i am prepared to break every single rule in the universe for you" energy.

i feel like all these possibilities make more sense, at least in-universe, than dior being named dior for thingol. because, again... how the hell would beren and luthien know??? how would anyone know?

also regarding eluchíl, if dior did get the name at birth or at least before thingol's death, then... why??? "dior" at least doesn't specify what he's succeeding, but eluchíl explicitly does say he's thingol's heir. beren and luthien giving him that name when he was born makes very little sense to me. i've toyed with the idea that melian is the one who named him that instead, but that implies that she might have known thingol's death was close to unavoidable at that point, which doesn't seem very likely.

otoh, one explanation i have seen for dior being named "eluchíl" before thingol's death that i really like is that it was thingol himself who did so - not because he thought dior would ever actually succeed him as king, but because it came from a place of sentiment for his grandson. maybe it was also a way for him to publicly approve of beren and luthien's marriage, and a gesture of reconciliation with beren. i do think thingol and beren ended with a decent enough relationship; their whole ["the silmaril is in my hand!" / "show it to me!" / *beren holds up his wrist stump*] exchange is stated to soften thingol's mood, after which, realizing how much beren does really love his daughter, he accepts them getting married; beren jumps to thingol's defense against carcharoth which is why he's mortally wounded; and then thingol literally ignores huan and carcharoth's super epic showstopping spectacular never the same totally unique battle to the death happening right in front of him because he's too busy kneeling next to beren in concern. they probably had some level of getting along for luthien's sake, but i definitely don't think thingol continued to disdain and look down on beren.

so errrr anyway. that's my pitch for why those two names of dior's are extremely confusing and raises a lot of questions and theories for me. (i find his other ones, just, like, funny. "ausir" means "the wealthy", "aranel" means "elf king", and then he's also known as "the fair." he's rich, he's got status, and he's hot.)

‘I am the first of the Peredhil (Half-elven), but I am also the heir of King Elwë, the Eluchíl.’

--

"Then," said Curufin, "must the Nauglafring unbroken be given to the sons of Fëanor," and Dior waxed wroth, bidding him be gone, nor dare to claim what his sire Beren the Onehanded won with his hand from the [?jaws] of Melko -- ”other twain are there in the selfsame place," said he, "an your hearts be bold enow."

GAHHH dior is so iconic i love him so very much. he has these two lines and he ate with both of them

his line about being both half-elven and thingol's heir is very interesting! he's acknowledging that he's very much half-elf, that half of him is in fact not elven. but he's also accepting that he's heir to thingol, who is a full elf who ruled an elven kingdom. that the rule he has inherited is one of heavy elvish association. it's a shame that we don't really ever learn in-depth how he feels about the two different sides of his heritage. how did he ever reconcile them? how did he live with the knowledge that he's the first ever human/elf combination but then he also has divine dna mixed in there?

the other passage of him is one of my favorite things ever btw. "morgoth still has two silmarils, and since you want all the silmarils sooo bad, why don't you walk in there like my father did?" he really called the fëanorians cowards