Elfthreads!

[Kappa]

Why the hell does everyone keep withholding Silmarils then?????? XDDDDDDD

[lintamande]

Uh, that's even worse in canon where, if you like, one read is that they are literally just shiny rocks. All of their glowfic properties (healing, stop decay, reverse fading, can be used to amplify things) have some canonical basis (in particular, Celebrimbor made the Elven Rings of Power as a sort of tribute to them - sky, sea, fire - and have those abilities, and the Silmarils are used at the end of the world to heal Arda, and could have healed the Trees). But none of them are actually stated, so one could red the story with the Silmarils having zero strategic value beyond prettiness.

e l v e s

[Kappa]

ELVES

<3333333333333333333333333333333333333333333

[DanielH]

Is the th → s sound change canon? In either case, why do Maitimo and Fëanor call the primary enemy Maia “Thauron” while still calling the subject of their Oath a “Silmaril”? The latter implies that the s sound did exist, just distinguishable from the th sound; the former implies that all s sounds used to be th.

[MaggieoftheOwls]

Why does Thauron imply that the S sound didn't exist?

[jalapeno_dude]

There are two places in your glowfic (that I remember right now) that seem to depart from canon-as-I-understand it (which is basically Silm + lots of skimming Tolkien Gateway) before butterfly effects from non-Arda characters showing up could have changed things:

1. Feanor is still alive when Loki shows up (but Maedhros has been captured).
2. Sauron is hanging out in Valinor talking to Aether.

Do you have a Watsonian reason for 1)? Obviously the Doylist reason is just that you wanted Loki and Feanor to overlap. Also, does this imply that the Feanorians never renewed the Oath in this continuity like they did after Feanor's death in canon?

For 2), I'm not going crazy, right? Sauron is definitely hanging out in a dinner in Valinor. My understanding was that he was busy overseeing Angband while Melkor was in captivity, so I guess this was a deliberate change?

[Alicorn]

We just wanted Loki and Feanor to overlap. No explanation for Mairon.

[DanielH]

At this point he would have introduced himself as Sauron, but both Fëanor and Maitimo undid the sound change to get Thauron. There is no reason to do this if the s can come from anywhere other than a th. It’s said that they call him Thauron over linguistic prescriptivism involving that change.

[teceler]

The root of Sauron is, in some versions, actually one of the ones affected by the th -> s sound change, so if you assume lintamande is using that version it works, but s can come from other places -- that's actually an argument used by people against that sound change, because it makes new homonyms in some places.

[lintamande]

Yeah, as others have said there is an s in Quenya before the th->s sound shift; it is the s in 'Silmaril'. Even after the sound shift, the s-that-was-formerly-th is written with a different tengwar character than the s that wasn't, so even people who don't keep 'thúle' would know that Sauron was a súle (the letter formerly known as thúle) and not a silma. And Vanyarin and Telerin Quenya never made the sound shift.

The Nolofinweans criticized the Feanorian retention of thúle as posturing linguistic prescriptivism, but it's really just a (politicized) choice of dialects, like modern politicians mocking each other for saying 'nuclear' like poor people say it.