It is well known that there was no way of measuring the passing of time between the awakening at Cuivenen and the discovery of the first born by
Orome.
Well, it is not. Even if we go with the idea that the Sun and Moon
really did not exist before the death of the Two
Trees (which is not the case in
Tolkien’s later writings, including the
Cuivienyarna, or the legend of the Awaking of the Quendi), there were still stars whose poition in the sky visibly changed depending on the time of day and year, and both their movement and the attention of the
Elves to it are mentioned several times in Tolkien’s writings.
Is it stated anywhere that:
- some elves woke as infants?
In the
Cuivienyarna and contemporary writings this is expressedly not the case: the 144 Unbegotten Elves awoke fully-grown and intermarried and began to produce children almost immediately.
Were
elf infants and toddlers part of the march from the lake towards the Western Shores and eventually crossing to
Valinor?
The various texts in part one of
The Nature of Middle-earth give different answers to this question: either that there were no births during the Great Journey, or that there were thousands of them so that the Eldar had to make several halts of more than one hundred years to wait until the children were grown up enough to continue the march.
