"Yes, I agree. Say hello, explain your capabilities, offer to do things that seem useful and interesting, explain that you'd do more useful and interesting things but the Enemy, get lots of agreement that the Enemy is pretty terrible. Any offensive will be on the King's orders, I have nothing to do with it except being a very powerful and very compliant servant of the King in this."

"I should probably talk to Dwarves at some point, too. Especially since Dwarves apparently have chocolate." (She says this last word in Genoshan; if there's a Sindarin word she doesn't know it.)

"You should! Though they are already on board with the offensive and tend to think that all above grounders are harmless and a little nutty. You could also meet my nephews - I have Dwarf nephews."

"...Adopted, or...?"

"No. Nobody knew that that worked until it did, but it turns out that it does."

"I have so many questions and I'm not sure any of them are appropriate."

"I can't think why they wouldn't be. Elves and Men can have children, though it's rare and in some Elven kingdoms prosecuted; I think Men and Dwarves can have children, though I don't know of any; there are creatures in nature much more varied than the children of Eru who nonetheless can bear their own children. Dwarf genes tend to win out. My brother Caranthir had a Dwarf - girlfriend? boyfriend? Dwarves don't have genders, though only some of them can have children - and eventually they realized they must have been married and not noticed."

"I have no idea how to interpret that. 'Basically half-elf half-dwarf but significantly more dwarf-like than elf-like' answers one of my questions. Celegorm says that some of his people have had the kind of sex with humans that would normally lead to marriage and not been married by it. Do dwarves do the soul thing? When you say only some dwarves can have children do you mean that some of them can bear children and the rest have reproductive organs more traditionally associated with the male gender and they just don't do gender psychologically, or that they're all reproductive hermaphrodites and some of them are sterile? People who are not elves consider themselves married without the soul thing, do your brother and his spouse have the soul thing, is that the kind of thing you can just not notice."

"They do not have the 'soul thing'. You definitely notice it. They decided to consider themselves married anyway because they'd been together for a century and were now expecting a child. Dwarves are biologically some male and some female but consider this as relevant to personality or social role as hair color, and much harder to tell than that, and so uninteresting; they had all sorts of creative explanations for what everyone else meant by 'gender' but 'reproductive capability' wasn't among the guesses. They all use male pronouns in languages that have genders. 

It was not known to me that our people sometimes have sex with humans and don't get married, that seems like a disastrously bad idea and Celegorm should tell them to stop on pain of an extended active duty rotation what are they thinking?"

"I could nnnnot tell you. It seems like less of a stupid idea now since any given human isn't inevitably going to die in a handful of decades but kind of an insane risk before then. If your brother is married to his spouse the way non-elves get married and not the way elves get married I'm not sure why you would think that an elf and a human could get elf-married, actually. ...Do dwarves live indefinitely like elves do?"

"Dwarves live around three hundred years." He sighs. 

"I will visit dwarves and spread around my de-aging magic, then, they certainly sound like they get a better deal than Men and probably require de-aging less urgently but still require it."

"I'm sure they'll appreciate it." He closes his eyes for a second. "I'm going to convey the new laws to everyone."

Okay then. If Celegorm didn't want her to mention the thing to Maedhros he would probably have said.

"There's a reason we have a policy of ignoring Men instead of governing them even with a very light hand. There are completely different community needs. I have no idea, for example, what happens if an Elf has children by a human woman - who supports them, whose families they're considered part of - if they're not married - there's also such a power dynamic -"

"Those are very good points. Maybe I should look into that. If there are human women with hybrid children struggling to make ends meet, well, we're going to have a decent place to put people who need things soon. ...I have no idea if any of the local societies look enough like things I've observed or learned about in social studies classes that I can reasonably expect to predict things but naively I would expect a range from 'kicked out for bearing a bastard' to 'child is unproblematically integrated into mother's family'."

"I also don't know, thus my distress at the idea. The Men mostly know me as the terrifying scarred general who orcs run away from, I'm not sure it'd occur to them to come here with a grievance if something happened..."

She sighs. "No one's come to me with any such thing, either, and I've been trying to present myself as the benevolent magic person who will solve all of their problems that she can, and I haven't noticed anyone who looks significantly elfier than normal...I'm not sure there exists a delicate way to ask about it."

"In the meantime all my subjects have been told to stop doing that. Blunt instrument, but it will achieve the intended goal."

"Damage control," she sighs. "I wish I had picked up on the significance when it came up...your species can just choose not to have children, it's possible there aren't any hybrids wandering around as a result of this behavior, not that that was the only reason it needed to stop."

"We can with each other. I am not sure if we can with Men. It's hardly your obligation to think through the consequences of tidbits on race relations in my territory. You can encourage your sister to consider how she'll rule in hers."

"At a guess she's not going to outright forbid fraternization between any combination of persons based on criteria like that--instances of specific people having power over each other, like teachers and stuff, probably, but if elves have an inherent power advantage over humans in her territory I imagine she'll see that as a failing on her own part. I guess people could still perceive that imbalance as existing even if it doesn't anymore, but historically trying to forbid certain groups of people from having sex with each other has not gone over well in our world."

"People do tend to ignore laws like that," he says agreeably. "I don't think my subjects will in this case. We don't enforce laws against homosexuality, they know I don't do this sort of thing lightly."

"D'you have those? I got the impression that the rationale behind 'homosexuality is bad' was the Valar, and I sort of got the impression you guys care less over here about what the Valar think than your uncle and cousins do."

"It's more that there's nothing to gain for us from compliance with the Valar's laws; they're hardly going to reembody Celegorm sooner, should he die, if he gets married and has two point six children. But cultural taboos that are several thousand years old tend to accumulate a lot of baggage that doesn't have much to do with the context in which the taboo was created."