Mother-less Heroes
Feanor's story also resonates with the 'wicked step-mother' theme when Finwe takes a new wife, Indis. Feanor's step-mother is not wicked. Perish the thought. But she is a member of a distinctly different caste of High Elves, the Valyar. This intimate presence of someone from another tribe of Eldar in his father's house, intensifies the drama of Feanor's forth-coming estrangement and separation from Manwe, the Valar and most of the Elvish population in Aman. For just as bad goes to worse, Finwe is murdered by Melkor during the theft of the Silmarils. Feanor then, by his own sanguinary oath of revenge, becomes an out-cast king, and kin-slayer upon whom Mandos pronounces the Doom of the Noldor.
And you think you have had bad days. If one were to carry the notion of 'mother-less hero' from an individual to a community of characters, the entire population of those Telerin Elves remaining in Middle-Earth after the Great Journey to Valinor to dwell in the light of the Two Trees have been abandoned and dispossessed. Excluding those First Born who 'refused the call', the Avari and the Nandor, 'those who turned back', most of the Teleri under the leadership of Elwe Singollo, were left waiting at the wharf, as it were, by Ulmo, who after nearly two centuries of waiting, suddenly got impatient and upped anchor with only a fraction of the Teleri on board. Bye-bye, so long and don't forget to write when you find work.
Needless to say, this recurring motif of orphan-hood can in no way to be regarded as the result of a lack of imagination or inventiveness on the part of the author. (No sense preaching to the choir. Tolkien Rules!)
Why, then, this emphasis on abandonment, separation, estrangement precipitated by the loss of one or both parents? Why is this aspect so common to so many of Tolkien's characters' profiles and so often further emphasized by a secondary desertion of the character by a parental figure?
One can only speculate. And so, I will.
In my humble opinion, (ahem) Tolkien used the commonality of the 'mother-less hero' as the stage-setting, the prerequisite personal background necessary for his characters to embark upon their heroic quest. In "The Hero With A Thousand Faces", Joseph Campbell, reasons that the universal hero enters the first stage of the adventure by a "separation or departure".
I would like to contend that this separation is not simply the
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