Legolas of Mirkwood Prince Among Equals by Ellen Brundige

Glorfindel and other Elves of great renown attended the Council of Elrond, yet it was appointed to Legolas to represent the race of Lúthien and Thingol, Galadriel and Fëanor, in the Fellowship of the Ring. Who is Legolas, then, and what is his history? If he is someone important, then why does he identify himself not by his lineage, but by his friends? Why, in a list of all the Elves who came to the Council of Elrond, does Tolkien call him "strange"? There is something unusual about him that has nothing to do with blue contact lenses.

But tracking an elf's footprints is going to take some detective work.

The Scout of Mirkwood

Legolas arrives in Imladris to report on Gollum's escape, and learns only at the Council of the significance of this event. He gives a full account of Gollum's imprisonment, his tricks and habits during captivity, the raid by orcs, and the Elves' attempts to track the escapee. While Legolas might be referring to his people collectively as "we", his account contains firsthand details that imply he himself was not only one of Gollum's trackers after the battle, which was an assault on his father's realm, but also one of Gollum's jailors. Guard duty seems a strange task for a king's son, especially if Gandalf did not tell the king why Gollum was so important.

The Eyes of the Fellowship

His duty in the Fellowship is chief lookout, a role in which even the best of the Rangers cannot surpass him; Aragorn relies on his eyes for the hunt across Rohan. There and on many other occasions, the Elf demonstrates the uncanny sight, hearing, and nimbleness of his race. However, he is not well-versed in lore or history, even that of the Elves, for he knows little about Eregion or even Lórien. He carries a bow and knife instead of the spears, lances, or swords wielded by Gil-galad, Turgon, and other elf princes and kings of old. At Lórien's eaves he briefly becomes the party's guide, but otherwise he remains largely in the background. Nor does he name Celeborn and Galadriel while serving as tour guide. He seeks aid instead in the streams and trees themselves. In every way Legolas is a scout, a hunter, a woodland elf, with deep personal connections to the natural world, but not to the policies, lore, history and problems of the lords and stewards of his race.

Prince Who?

Apart from the first mention of him at the Council, Legolas is never referred to or treated as a king's son. Indeed, Celeborn is the only person who even calls him "son of Thranduil". No one else seems aware of his family or status. Aragorn introduces him to Éomer as, "Legolas from the Woodland Realm in distant Mirkwood." Gandalf declares him "Legolas the Elf" to the door-warden of Edoras, where the wizard takes pains to reveal Aragorn's identity in order to impress Théoden. Gimli himself refers to Legolas' father as "your King", as if he isn't aware that his best friend is more than a subject!

Small wonder, though, since Legolas never mentions it. When Prince Imrahil marvels to see one of the "fair folk" in Gondor, Legolas merely names himself as one of the Nine Companions, identifying himself by his friends rather than by his blood. He never calls himself a king's son or Thranduil's heir, and in fact, his words do a good job of concealing their relationship. At the Fields of Cormallen, Legolas states he will bring Elves to Ithilien "if my Elven-lord allows". Not all sons of Elf-lords are so circumspect about mentioning their parents; Elrohir brought a message "from my father" to Aragorn.

Perhaps Legolas is a younger son, although we never hear of brothers? Perhaps it has something to do with the unusual politics of Mirkwood (see below)? Perhaps as a member of an immortal race, an Elf doesn't want or expect to inherit his father's kingdom? Perhaps the divisions between leaders and subjects are not particularly important to Elves, or at least to him? It seems likely, at any rate, that if he were to meet his modern-day fans, he would be quite baffled to hear himself called "Prince of Mirkwood"!

Legolas the Wood-elf

For those who aren't familiar with the backstory, you need to understand that there are several different Elven races, who settled in different places, and who developed very different cultures. By the time of Lord of the Rings, all the ancient kingdoms (and even the lands where they used to be) are long gone, remembered only by refugees who wound up in Rivendell, Lórien, and Mirkwood. The Elves east of the Misty Mountains, called the "Silvan" or Wood-elves, were a much more primitive race who had never been a part of those ancient kingdoms. Legolas' family are immigrants to that part of the world, as are Celeborn and Galadriel.

The Wood-elves were a rustic and unlearned group of Elves that never travelled west and had little or no role in the great histories and events of the First and Second Age. They lived in the forests and the wild, had no cities or much in the way of technology, were well-known for their singing, and seldom bothered about the troubles of the world. Their closest kin were the Green-elves, a part of their own people who had gone a little farther west in the First Age and settled in the forests of eastern Beleriand. The Green-elves were much the same sort of people, culturally and technologically backward compared to the High-elven Exiles from Valinor and the Sindarin Elves of Doriath. Metaphorically speaking, the Green-elves and their Silvan relatives were the "country hicks", and the High-elves and Sindar were the nobility.

When the ancient kingdoms fell, and Beleriand was covered over by the ocean, most of the High-elves and Sindarin Elves sailed away, but some stayed on the west coast of Middle Earth (Rivendell is one of their last remaining settlements in ROTK). The surviving Green-elves fled, and at least some rejoined the Wood-elves. A very few Sindarin nobles went with them, and became Kings, establishing realms in the forests and wild lands east of the Misty Mountains. Legolas' grandfather was one. Yet as we have seen, Legolas' royal heritage is camouflaged, and he always speaks as if he really were a simple Wood-elf.

One could interpret these passages generally, since he says "we" not "I". A foreign king and his family will often identify with their subjects. However, if you remember the manners and habits of the happy-go-lucky Wood-elves in The Hobbit, even taking into account the change in writing style, the character of Legolas in LOTR sounds much more a Wood-elf in temperament than he does the wise, grave, and often sorrow-laden lords and loremasters of the Sindar and High-elves "fighting the long defeat". He is a Wood-elf in more ways than just by association. He thinks like one, too. Two of numerous examples of this:

He is a singer of songs, undaunted and usually cheerful (although not immune to emotional outbursts and distress, as seen at the Council of Elrond and when the Balrog appears). The "I go to find the Sun!" incident on Caradhras is an excellent summary of his lighthearted character and personality. The ghosts of Men hold no fear for him, nor does battle dismay him in the least; he makes a joyous game of it with Gimli at Helm's Deep. As M. Martinez points out in his excellent "Speaking of Legolas" article, no other Elves we've met would play such a game, and Legolas' sudden impulse to ride into the Huorn-forest to get a closer look at the strange trees (The Road to Isengard, TTT) is typical of his innocent curiosity.

So Why Is He a Wood-elf?

As explained above, Legolas' family is Sindar, refugees from the magical kingdom of Doriath that was destroyed in a bloody feud with the High-elves near the end of the First Age. Legolas' noble family left and established a kingdom among the Wood-elves east of the Misty Mountains. He talks as if his relatives initially lived in Lórien. However, since a different king ruled there, it's most likely that Legolas' grandfather originally held sway over southern Mirkwood and the Gladden Fields, and was simply very good neighbors with the Golden Wood. Tolkien says this about Oropher the grandfather of Legolas: Compared with the Elves of Doriath, his Silvan folk were rude and rustic. Oropher had come among them with only a handful of Sindar, and they were soon merged with the Silvan Elves, adopting their language and taking names of Silvan form and style. This they did deliberately; for they (and other similar adventurers forgotten in the legends or only briefly named) came from Doriath after its ruin and had no desire to leave Middle-earth, nor to be merged with the other Sindar of Beleriand, dominated by the Noldorin [High-elven] Exiles for whom the folk of Doriath had no great love. They wished indeed to become Silvan folk and to return, as they said, to the simple life natural to the Elves before the invitation of the Valar had disturbed it. The History of Galadriel and Celeborn, UT.

In comments in his later letters and writings, Tolkien reveals a startling political divide between Lórien and Mirkwood, almost as great as that between Elves and Dwarves. Galadriel was an exile of the High-Elves (but had lived in Doriath among the Sindar); Celeborn was (in most accounts) a Sindarin kinsman of the King of Doriath. In the Second Age lived in Hollin for a while and visited Lórien often, when it was ruled by another Sindarin King and a friend of Oropher's (Amdir, father of the Amroth we hear about in the Lay of Nimrodel). While the Silvan folk of Lórien welcomed them, Oropher and his people did not. I have a feeling he was not at all happy when Galadriel, who was never free of her cravings for dominion until her showdown with Frodo, started wearing one of the Three Ruling Rings in S.A. 1590. I suspect this was when Oropher decided to make tracks:

Apparently Legolas does not know about these family politics, or at least, he never seems to have any misgivings about Galadriel and Celeborn. He doesn't think about why he has been raised as a Wood-elf rather than Sindar. That's just what he is.

What Is His Native Language?

Wait! Back up a moment! What did Tolkien say back there about Legolas' family? "They were soon merged with the Silvan Elves, adopting their language..." Does that mean Legolas was born speaking Silvan Elvish, and only learned Sindarin (which had become the universal spoken language for the Elves) later?

Yrch is the Sindarin word for "orcs"; Silvan is just yrc. So while he speaks with a Silvan accent, it's obvious that his birth-tongue is Sindarin. Evidently the House of Thranduil had adopted some Silvan words or styles of phrasing, but to say they had completely "adopted their language" as native would be an exaggeration. Keep in mind that the quotes from Unfinished Tales are bits and pieces Tolkien probably never meant to be published; he hadn't reviewed and revised them for consistency.

At the end of this passage Tolkien adds:

In short, Silvan used to be spoken in Mirkwood and Lórien, but by ROTK all that's left of it was a regional accent. Frodo can't understand the Sindarin spoken by some of Haldir's scouts because of their accent. The question is whether Legolas is old enough to remember Silvan.

What Is His Age?

The first of these two quotes again has the generalizing "we" problem; is Legolas simply speaking as a member of a long-lived race which is used to seeing time in this fashion, or is he speaking from personal experience? The second quote implies that he felt young before he started travelling with the Fellowship. Do elves of any age feel young, or is that a clue?

Fans of the Peter Jackson films have an answer to the age question, but it's actually not from Tolkien:

FergoBaggins of CoE has pointed out that this figure matches the year in which Aragorn was born. But in the writings of Tolkien himself, we've found no explicit references to Legolas' age or personal history prior to the War of the Ring.

To answer this question more fully, we must turn to Legolas' recollections and his family history. This approach is problematic, since we can't tell when he's speaking about incidents that happened far away while he was alive, or when he's speaking about events he only knows through the songs and legends of his people.

(Note: S.A. = Second Age, which began when the ancient Elf-kingdoms were covered over by the sea, and ended with the Last Alliance of Men and Elves about 3000 years later. T.A. = Third Age, which began when Isildur cut the Ring from Sauron's finger. Frodo's quest begins in T.A. 3018.)

When the Fellowship is crossing the Misty Mountains, Gandalf and Legolas discuss the Elves who used to live outside the Gates of Moria, a long time ago:

Legolas' family passed over the Misty Mountains to join the Silvan elves "before the building of Barad-dûr" (Tale of Years, Appendix B, ROTK) which was begun in S.A. 1000 and finished in S.A. 1600. Eregion (Hollin) was founded S.A. 750, so depending on whether "the building of Barad-dûr" refers to the start of construction or its completion, it is possible that Oropher left before Hollin was founded. If so, anyone who had gone with him would know little of Eregion, and Legolas' ignorance of Eregion might be explained away.

However, if Legolas were dwelling with his grandfather prior to his removal across the Misty Mountains, he would have known some of the High Elves that settled Hollin, so they would not be "strange" to him. That suggests he was born after his family had moved east. He certainly never mentions that migration, and his consistant attiude that he is a Wood-elf definitely seems to postdate it. So I think we can be pretty sure he was born after his noble family settled among the Wood-elves and "went native", which was sometime in the early part of the Second Age.

Our next milestone is Oropher's move from the vicinity of Lórien to the northern half of Mirkwood. What does Legolas know about this migration?

It sounds as if Legolas was not alive when his folk still "journeyed hither back to the land whence we came", but it's hard to tell. The fact that Legolas never shows any suspicion or hostility towards Galadriel and Celeborn suggests he was born after the doubts and resentments that led his family to move north in the middle of the Second Age had died down. That pushes Legolas' birthdate up to the latter part of the Second Age at the earliest. Now we get to a sticky problem.

Here we have a quote with a firm date: the Balrog arose in Moria in T.A. 1980, and Amroth and Nimrodel were both lost during the resulting chaos in 1981. However, Legolas seems to have made a mistake. He's forgotten the Elvenking's mighty hall of stone. When was it actually built, and why? When the shadow of Dol Guldur fell upon Mirkwood around T.A. 1000, the Silvan Elves...

Legolas' home is the main "strong place of stone...delved in the ground like Dwarves" among all the Silvan folk; we don't see any such place in Lórien. So he has to have his father's hall in mind. But the event that he says inspired its construction is a thousand years too late. If you assume that the mistake is not Tolkien's, then the most logical explanation is that Legolas was born well after the deaths of Amroth and Nimrodel, long enough for them to be a poignant legend, for the Balrog to be blamed even for things that had nothing to do with him, and for any family grumbling regarding Celeborn and Galadriel (who took charge of Lórien after this event) to have died down. We know the issue was still sensitive at the time. They took the title of Lord and Lady, not King and Queen, "for they said they were only guardians of this small but fair realm" (UT, same chapter), even though Galadriel still had "Queen" on the mind right up until she faced off with Frodo. Legolas seems blissfully ignorant of the politics of the period.

Legolas has also never been to the Golden Wood before. If he were older than two thousand, he'd predate Dol Guldur, and would have been living closer to Lórien. You'd think he'd have visited his closest kin and neighbors at least once, to deliver messages or pay his respects to King Amroth, an old family friend! After all, Legolas left Mirkwood with (he thought) a distressing but minor matter: the escape of a prisoner whose importance was not understood. I simply cannot believe he would never have visited Lórien before it became dangerous to go that way. So I'm putting his birth after Dol Guldur, and feel pretty confident that it's necessary to do so. That pushes his birthdate past T.A. 1000, making him less than two thousand years old: younger than any other elf named in the story. And again, there was enough contact between Lórien and Mirkwood for the Woodland Realm to hear details about Amroth and Nimrodel a thousand years later, so someone was still travelling between them even then. But it wasn't Legolas.

That's another hint, but only a hint, that Legolas postdates their deaths. Are there any more clues that can help us?

Well, we have Tolkien's habit of making parallel generations in closely-allied families: Tuor and Huor, Túrin and Húrin. The pattern here is less obvious, but King Amdir of Lórien and King Oropher of Mirkwood are both Sindar princes of Silvan Elves who moved east at the same time, died in the same war, and were succeeded by sons of the same age. If Amroth and Nimrodel hadn't died during the mess following the Dwarves' discovery of a Balrog in Moria, their children would have been born less than a thousand years before ROTK, and Legolas would be the same generation as their kids. So there's a fourth clue pointing in the same direction.

I also can't help but wonder about Bilbo's mithril coat, made for a half-grown elven prince. The dwarves who settled the Lonely Mountain were fleeing Moria after the Balrog disaster. There was only one Elf-king left in Middle-Earth by that time. For whom was the coat made? Unless Legolas has siblings we never hear about (which is of course possible), that was supposed to be his! So there's a fifth clue, but a tenuous one, since I don't think Tolkien had come up with Legolas when he was writing The Hobbit.

But if we assume that Tolkien did not make a mistake, and that all these clues are not coincidence, then it seems Legolas was born after the tale had been glamorized into legend. That makes him less than eight or nine hundred years old, though old enough to have seen five hundred autumns. Say seven hundred. He would certainly be old compared to the rest of the Fellowship, but as an Elf he's still in his "tweens", as the Hobbits would say, or in human terms, he's a young man just coming into the prime of his life.

After sifting through all of this, I discovered that Michael Martinez, the author of Visualizing Middle Earth, had concluded that Legolas was not much past five hundred years old. See his "Speaking of Legolas" article; he follows an entirely different line of reasoning.

His Family's Losses

There is one major event in the history of Mirkwood which Legolas apparently did not witness, but which again sheds light upon his heritage. Appendix B of Unfinished Tales chronicles the part his family played in the Last Alliance of Men and Elves (end of S.A.). His grandfather, King Oropher, set aside personal misgivings about the Exiles and joined the Alliance with a sizable host of Silvan Elves, marching with a smaller Lórien company led by King Amdir (in this account called Malgalad). The Silvan elves took horrible losses, for the same reasons as the Green-elves in the First Age: they were ill-equipped compared to the other elves, used very little metal, and wore no more armor than Legolas. King Amdir's company was cut off and slaughtered in the Dead Marshes at the Battle of Dagorlad. To make matters worse, Oropher would not take commands from Gil-galad, led his own charge, and was massacred before the Black Gate along with all the champions of his household. Two-thirds of the Silvan Elves were killed before Sauron was defeated. When Oropher's son led the survivors back to Mirkwood,

We begin to see more reasons why he seems ill-tempered and reclusive, and yet is compassionate to those who have suffered great losses (the Lake-men), in The Hobbit. I wonder how much Thranduil kept this to himself, for there is no shadow on the heart of his son, nor does Legolas mention it at a time and place where any veteran of that war could not have failed to feel dread. In the very spot where two-thirds of his people died, where Oropher and his household perished in a reckless charge, and where Legolas' own father barely escaped alive, Legolas walks willingly into a kamikaze battle against hopeless odds. Did he know? I don't think so. But I wonder what was going through Elrond's mind when he appointed Legolas to the Fellowship: as Gil-galad's herald, he surely had seen Oropher's fall.

What Does He Look Like?

LOTR gives us almost nothing about Legolas' appearance, save that he is stunningly beautiful as all Elves must be, and tall with long fingers. We have one other tiny clue from The Hobbit, where his father is described as "a woodland king with a crown of leaves on his golden hair." Presumably Legolas' family is light-complexioned after the manner of a few High Elves (Galadriel), rather than dark-haired like many of the Sindar (Celeborn, Tinúviel). Some readers have objected to a blond Legolas, citing:

However, it was pitch-black at the time; Legolas could not even see what it was he shot, and his eyes are better than Frodo's. The darkness there has nothing to do with his hair.

Legolas' grace, his singing, his emotional and poetic language, Tolkien's early conceptions of Elves as fairies, and popular impressions about elves in general have given many readers the impression that he is a bit of a lightweight. Tolkien later had to set the record straight, as his son noted:

Perhaps "pretty" is the wrong adjective, but "fair of face beyond the measure of Men" is a typical description. Looks notwithstanding, Tolkien's point is that he's a formidable fellow.

What's in a Name?

It's fairly common in Tolkien for Elves to receive an epithet that's actually a translation of their name: Thingol Greycloak, Arwen Evenstar (in this case a translation of Undómiel). There's a puzzle with Legolas' name, however. Laeg is not only extremely archaic, but the only other example we have for it is Laegel, "Green-elf". The Green-elves, a splinter branch of Silvan Elves, were a rural, backward people compared to the High-elves and Sindar. On top of this, they were considered cowards, since after an early massacre in the First Age they refused to join the wars or fight openly against the Enemy. Only to a member of Thranduil's family would they seem worthy of respect.

It is still a strange thing to name his son. Mirkwood's original name uses the later word for "green" : Emyn Galen. At the end of ROTK, Thranduil renames it Greenleaves. Does he use his son's name? No! He calls it Emyn Lasgalen. What's going on here?

In spite of Tolkien's comment about the Sindar of Mirkwood adopting Silvan language, Legolas' name is the only example we know of where a Sindarin word has been "Silvanized". It's normally the other way around: Silvan elves adopt Sindarin (even in Mirkwood), and Silvan names are "Sindarinized" (Caras, Lórien). Mirkwood's various Elvish names are all purely Sindarin. Legolas' name is unique. And I keep coming back to Laegolas. Why not simply Laeglas(s)? Why laeg at all, a word as old-fashioned to them as "thews" would be to us? Why not use Lasgalen or Calenolas or Calellas, and then Silvanize one of those? Why does his name sound so suspiciously like laegel?

What Sindar, in all the history of Middle Earth, would be most likely to reject Sindar and Noldor blood altogether, and woo a Silvan or even a Green Elf?

Thranduil. Or, of course, Amroth, who was a kindred spirit.

There's no evidence that Legolas is anything but pure-blooded Sindar, except for the fact that he never acts like it and no one treats him that way. However, his name isn't really the Silvanized version of laeglas, Greenleaf. The extra syllable makes it sound more like laegel, Green-elf. We have some precedent for pun-names, too. The Galadhrim, the "Tree-people", and Galadriel, the "radiant garlanded maiden", occasionally swapped the spelling of their names, even though they're actually using two entirely different roots.

Is the "Green-elf" echo in Legolas' name a mere coincidence? What does Tolkien mean by "of royal and originally Sindarin line"? There is no way to be sure, but many people have speculated that his mother, like Amroth's lover Nimrodel, was not Sindar at all.

Conclusion

One thing is clear. Far from being a royal and noble prince, Legolas of the Nine Walkers is simply a formidable and loyal friend, who would rather be known for the company he keeps than for his noble father. That sort of loyalty is what they needed most for the Fellowship. And it is his loyalty to Gimli, not just the call of the Sea, that sends this "Wood-elf" on the last ship west to the Undying Lands. There he is to this day, presumably following the hunting-horn of Oromë.

Bibliography

This article relies on J.R.R. Tolkien's own writings, usually directly, or occasionally based on the commentary provided by his son, who organized, edited and published his notes and letters after his death.

• J.R.R. Tolkien, The Hobbit
• J.R.R. Tolkien, The Lord of the Rings
• J.R.R. Tolkien, Unfinished Tales, ed. by Christopher Tolkien
• J.R.R. Tolkien, The Book of Lost Tales, vol. 2, ed. by Christopher Tolkien
• J.R.R. Tolkien, Letters, ed. by Christopher Tolkien

For Further Reading

You won't want to miss M. Martinez's excellent article, "Speaking of Legolas".

Also see my work-in-progress on the Legolas of the films: "The Boy With the Bow: Stunt Archery in Fellowship of the Rings".

Addendum: Legolas of Gondolin

In Book of Lost Tales 2, there are several references to one "Legolas Greenleaf of the House of the Tree" who served as guide for the refugees of Gondolin. There are two obvious reasons why this can't be the son of Thranduil. First, as noted above, Tolkien decided "Legolas" was a Silvanized spelling of a Sindarin name, and that makes no sense for a resident of Gondolin, whose Elves were Noldor. Second, in FOTR, Legolas tells the Fellowship that the elves of Eregion are a race that is strange to him. Those elves were Noldor, many of them refugees from Gondolin. Christopher Tolkien therefore identifies "Legolas Greenleaf of the House of the Tree" and "Legolas Greenleaf son of Thranduil" as two different people. Legolas of Gondolin only appears in Tolkien's very early writings, long before he began to write LOTR, when he was still calling Noldor "Gnomes". Tolkien's story, characters, and world evolved and changed significantly after that. Legolas' name is one of a great many that appear in Tolkien's early writings and are later reused and given to someone entirely different.

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