Elmo
Elmo was an Elf of the royal house of the Teleri. He was the younger brother of the two Kings of the Teleri, Elwë and Olwë.
Elmo was an Elf of the royal house of the Teleri. He was the younger brother of the two Kings of the Teleri, Elwë and Olwë.
Biography
Elmo and his elder brothers were directly descended through eldest son to eldest son from Enel, the first of the Nelyar to awaken. Unlike his older brothers who had been born by the time the Elves were found by the Valar, Elmo was born during the Great Journey.
He remained behind in Beleriand after Elwë was lost in Nan Elmoth and Olwë departed for Valinor. After Elwë returned as Elu Thingol, Elmo became one of the Sindar in Doriath.
Given that Elmo’s grandson Celeborn was reckoned a prince of Doriath, it is likely that Elmo was likewise a prince. It is unknown if he survived the Second Kinslaying or what his fate was otherwise. No specific deeds are ascribed to Elmo, and he is largely notable for his descendants: Celeborn, who was one of the noble Sindar, and Nimloth, who was briefly Queen of Doriath, when she married Dior, Thingol's successor.
Etymology
The name Elmo is in Quenya. Its meaning is unclear, but it could be a combination of él (being a poetic word for star) and the suffix -mo ("person").
Elmō was also a Primitive Elvish name for the planet Venus.
In other versions
Elmo was developed to explain the reference in The Silmarillion that Celeborn was a "kinsman of Thingol". One of the solutions was to establish Celeborn as the son of an unimportant brother of Thingol. Depending on the texts, Elmo is considered as a younger brother of Elwë (Thingol), the grandfather of Celeborn or his father.
In a draft genealogy of Elwë and Elmo's descendants dated to December of 1959 that Christopher Tolkien rejected from Unfinished Tales of Númenor and Middle-earth, Nimloth is the granddaughter of Elmo rather than great-granddaughter (sister rather than daughter of Galathil).
In other, later writings, Celeborn is a Teler of Aman rather than a Sinda of Doriath, and a grandson of Olwë rather than of Elmo. Without further revision to Galadriel's own genealogy, this origin for Celeborn would cause the couple to become first cousins. Tolkien did not develop this idea further.
Nelwë
In The Nature of Middle-earth there appears a character called Nelwë. There, he is presented as an ancestor of Celeborn (who was an elf of Aman in this version of his history), and a younger brother of Elwë, Olwë, and Eärwen.
The entire text in which he appears, however, was struck through and rejected. While it is not explicitly mentioned anywhere by Tolkien that the character of Nelwë is equivalent to that of Elmo, or otherwise the latter's literary successor, he nonetheless fulfills the same role as an ancestor of Celeborn, in which the kinship of Celeborn and Thingol is elaborated on in a more exact manner.
The name Nelwë is in Quenya, but its meaning is not entirely clear. The second element of the name -wë is a suffix used mainly in masculine names of the First Age, being an old word for "person". According to Paul Strack, the first element of the name might be a derivation from the root NEL ("three").