Thranduil

Origins

Thranduil was born in the First Age, the son of Oropher, one of the Sindar of Doriath. After the drowning of Beleriand his father, unwilling to live under the Noldor in Lindon, led a company of Sindar east over the Blue Mountains and across Eriador into the great wood east of the Anduin, which was then called Greenwood the Great. There the Silvan Elves took Oropher as their king, and Thranduil grew up as a prince among a people not his own by blood, adopting their speech and their simpler woodland ways while carrying with him the memory of Menegroth, the cavern-city of Thingol. Unfinished Tales records that the caves he later delved in the north of the wood were made in imitation of that lost hall, on a smaller and rougher scale.

The Last Alliance and the kingship

In S.A. 3434 Oropher marched south with a great host of Silvan Elves, allied with Amdír of Lórien, to join Gil-galad and Elendil against Sauron. Oropher would not take orders from the High King, charged early at the Battle of Dagorlad, and was killed; two thirds of his people fell with him. Thranduil fought through the rest of the war and the seven-year siege of Barad-dûr, and when it ended he led scarcely a third of the army home. He became king of a diminished realm and, mindful of the cost, kept it out of the affairs of the wider world for the next three thousand years. His son Legolas was born in the Third Age; his wife is nowhere named.

The shadow on the wood

Around T.A. 1050 a darkness settled on the south of Greenwood, spreading from Dol Guldur, and Men began to call the forest Mirkwood. Thranduil drew his people north and east across the Forest River and established his halls in caverns behind a gated bridge, guarded by enchanted doors and by the river itself. His realm became a wary, half-hidden kingdom, trading wine and goods down the river with the Men of Lake-town, hunting under the trees by torchlight, and watching the spiders and the Orcs creep north. He was not friendly to Dwarves, remembering an old quarrel with their kin over treasure in the Elder Days, and Unfinished Tales says that he did not trust the Noldorin influence of Galadriel in Lórien either.

Thorin's company and the Five Armies

In T.A. 2941 Thranduil's hunters found the Dwarves of Thorin Oakenshield starving and lost in the wood, and the King imprisoned them when Thorin refused to explain their journey. Bilbo, unseen with the Ring, contrived their escape in barrels down the river. When word came that Smaug had been slain, Thranduil marched with spearmen and archers toward Erebor, turning aside to help the ruined people of Lake-town first. He and Bard laid siege to the Mountain, and he counselled patience rather than an assault on the Dwarves. The arrival of the Goblins and Wargs under Bolg changed everything: the Elves, Men and Dwarves fought together on the slopes of Erebor, and Thranduil's archers held the southern spur. After the victory he received from Bard the emeralds of Girion, and Bilbo, in a gesture the King did not forget, gave him a necklace of silver and pearls in payment for the bread he had eaten as an invisible guest. Thranduil named the Hobbit elf-friend.

The War of the Ring

Gandalf and Aragorn entrusted Gollum to Thranduil's keeping in T.A. 3017, and the King, who was not cruel, let the creature climb a tree by day under guard. In June 3018 Orcs from Dol Guldur attacked the guards and Gollum escaped; Thranduil sent Legolas to Rivendell with the news, and so his son joined the Fellowship. On the fifteenth of March, 3019, the same day as the battle on the Pelennor, Sauron's forces from Dol Guldur assaulted the Woodland Realm. There was a long battle under the trees and a great burning, but Thranduil drove the enemy back. On the sixth of April he met Celeborn, who had taken Dol Guldur from the south, and the two lords divided the wood: the northern part to Thranduil, the southern to Lórien, and the middle to the Woodmen and the Beornings. The forest was renamed Eryn Lasgalen, the Wood of Greenleaves.

Legacy

Thranduil reigned on into the Fourth Age, the last of the Elven-kings of Middle-earth to hold a realm after Elrond and Galadriel had sailed. He was proud and a little grasping, quick to imprison strangers and slow to trust, but also brave, generous to the people of Lake-town in their need, and just to Gollum in his own way. His realm was the largest surviving Elven kingdom of the late Third Age, and through Legolas its people took part in the healing of Ithilien.

Still reigning in the Woodland Realm at the beginning of the Fourth Age; his later fate is not recorded.