Eluréd and Elurín
the twin sons of Dior; the lost children of Doriath
Name and Plight
Eluréd and Elurín — the twin sons of Dior and Nimloth, the grandchildren of Beren and Lúthien, heirs of Doriath’s royal line — were (with their sister Elwing) the last children of the blood of Thingol. At the Second Kinslaying, when the Sons of Fëanor took Menegroth, the twins were captured with their mother; and in the frenzy and hardness of the Oath they were ** — ** — abandoned to die in the woods of Doriath, never found — the most pitiless single deed of the age, “the wickedest” — the Quenta: “the servants of Celegorm… left them in the forest, and they were lost”. (The War of the Jewels keeps one bitter hope: some legends say they were found and fostered — Christopher Tolkien notes the variants of their fate; the despairing mainstream: they perished.)
Significance
Eluréd and Elurín are the “lost princes” — the innocent children of the great love, destroyed as a gesture of the Oath’s cold calculus (to extinguish Dior’s line and the claim of the Silmaril’s holder); their fate is the darkest stain on the Fëanorians, and their loss (with their sister’s survival and her Silmaril’s flight to the sea) closes the tale of Doriath and opens the Havens’ story.