Okay so I, like most Silmarillion fanartists, draw the Fëanorian twins as looking like...well...kids. The book says they were the youngest in the family, and we all went, “Okay then they’re children.” Which...yeah, that’s fair. They really just seem to be chilling most of the time, which makes them seem a bit more innocent than the others. But rather early on in my time doing Silm fanart, I thought about how funny if would be if they looked way older than their brothers. But I never did anything with the idea.
Well, after finishing the Fëanorian Week drawings this year I was thinking about how I don’t really draw many Ñoldor due to not having headcanons about many of them. And you guys know by this time that I love a bit of good angst, so I looked at the twins and said, “...ooh goody” and gave them a big old revamp. (The drawing is of Amras and Maedhros, by the way. For one thing, I’ve said before that I don’t like drawing identical twins. And for another…we’ll get into that in a second.)
Real quick, for those who aren’t super familiar with the different pieces of source material we have from Tolkien: in the Silmarillion both twins survive most of the story until they die together in the same battle near the end of the book. However, in one lone version of the story, Amrod dies when the ships are burned at Losgar. Okay so. That’s what’s been published, from here on out it’s just headcanon territory.
I think Amrod did die when the ships were burned. Elves are spiritually a bit...different...so I expect twins have a particularly strong bond. Amras wasn’t really able to handle the death of his brother, and went a little bit weird in the head. He believed that half of his own soul died at Losgar, and half of Amrod’s still lived inside of him. For the rest of his life, he answered to Amrod’s names, his own names, and Ambarussa, and signed his name and managed accounts as any of them as well. He refused to acknowledge Amrod’s death and became irrational when any of his brothers mentioned it, so eventually they played along. The story spreads that there were two of Fëanor’s sons that guard East Beleriand, but they are unsocial and rarely seen together. People will report having seen one or the other of them but no one can tell the difference (in reality, this is because there is only one that is still alive.)
It’s uncertain who all knows about Amrod’s death, even among the Ñoldor that came with Fingolfin. Most of the Sindar and Silvan elves don’t know. Probably no humans know. Anyone who does know doesn’t talk about it, and all everybody else knows is what they're told, and this is why in most versions of the story they both survive until Sirion. For a while you’d see one or the other of them out hunting or going to war, and you just assumed the other was doing something else. But then after Sirion no one ever saw either one. Therefore, they obviously both died in the same battle.
Anyway, that’s just the version I came up with. I don’t know if I’ll keep it, but it makes Amras a much more interesting character. And that let me come up with a more visually interesting design, much older than I used to draw them. Whether this was always the way they looked or a change that Amras went through after arriving in Middle Earth I haven’t decided yet.
