Legolas

The name Legolas is Sindarin, and the sense commonly given for it, greenleaf, is carried openly within the narrative rather than only in commentary: when Galadriel's message reaches him in Fangorn through Gandalf, she names him Legolas Greenleaf, setting name and rendering side by side (Book III, ch. 5). The same elements recur in the name given to the northern forest at the close of the War of the Ring, Eryn Lasgalen, the Wood of Greenleaves, which stands in the same records as the older name Greenwood the Great that the wood bore before its darkening (Appendix B). On the sound of the name Tolkien is explicit only by rule: the stress falls on the first syllable, since the penultimate is short and closes with a single consonant, so that the accent retreats to the third syllable from the end (Appendix E). Common usage frequently departs from that rule.

By kindred he is a Silvan Elf of the Woodland Realm in the north of Mirkwood and the son of its king, Thranduil, and he is introduced in that double capacity, as a person and as his father's house made present (Book II, ch. 2). His own sense of himself is consistently that of a woodland Elf rather than an heir of the older western houses. In Lothlórien he distinguishes his folk from the Galadhrim, observing that their speech has drifted apart from his own and that his people have become, by his own reckoning, less versed in lore and more dangerous than their western kin (Book II, ch. 6). The distinction is one he draws himself, without apology, and it colours the way he speaks of forests, rivers, and the Elves who dwell in them.

The posthumously edited writings enlarge the background of that kindred without adding much to Legolas as an individual. The Silvan Elves are there traced to the Nandor, those of the eastward host who turned aside from the great westward march and never came to the Sea, so that their speech and lore developed apart from Beleriand; over such folk in Mirkwood and Lórien there ruled princes of Sindarin descent, which sets Thranduil's line in a different stock from the people it governed (Unfinished Tales, Part Two, IV). The philological side is served in the same manner: the glossary of name-elements appended to the published Silmarillion records the words for leaf and for green from which the name is formed, confirming from outside the narrative what the epithet Greenleaf already indicates within it.

Legolas enters the narrative of the War of the Ring not as a volunteer but as a messenger. He came to Rivendell in the autumn of 3018 of the Third Age bearing tidings his father had judged too grave for silence: the creature Gollum, held under guard in the Woodland Realm at Gandalf's request, had been lost during an Orc-raid while his keepers had him out among the trees. That errand placed him at the Council of Elrond on 25 October, where the report of the escape formed one strand of the long deliberation, and where he was afterwards named among the nine chosen to go with the Ring-bearer, standing for the Elves as Gimli stood for the Dwarves (Book II, ch. 2). The company left Rivendell on 25 December. On the shoulder of Caradhras, where the others laboured waist-deep, he walked upon the crusted snow without breaking it, and it fell to him to go ahead of the party to judge how far the drift ran (Book II, ch. 3).

Turned back from the mountain, the company passed instead beneath it. Legolas entered Moria in January 3019 with open reluctance, and it was he who first recognised what had come against them in the deep halls when a Balrog appeared at the Bridge of Khazad-dûm, and who was least able to speak of it afterwards; Gandalf fell there on 15 January (Book II, ch. 5). The survivors reached Lothlórien on 17 January. At their parting on 16 February Galadriel gave him a bow of the Galadhrim, longer and heavier than those his own people used and strung with elf-hair, together with a quiver of arrows (Book II, ch. 8). He put it to use within days: on the Anduin above Sarn Gebir, shooting by ear into a moonless sky at a dark winged shape that had passed twice over the boats, he brought it down with a single arrow, and the Orc-fire on the eastern bank fell silent (Book II, ch. 9).

The Fellowship broke apart at Parth Galen on 26 February. Legolas remained with Aragorn and Gimli, and the three ran after the Orc-host that had taken Merry and Pippin across the plains of Rohan for three days and nights with almost no rest, meeting Éomer's éored on the fourth morning. On 1 March, at the eaves of Fangorn, they found Gandalf returned, and Legolas received through him a message from Galadriel that was less a greeting than a warning about the Sea (Book III, ch. 5). He rode with the king's company to Helm's Deep and fought through the night assault of 3–4 March; when the fighting ended he and Gimli compared tallies of the slain, forty-one against forty-two, the Dwarf ahead by one. Out of that night came a wager of a different kind. Gimli's account of the caverns beneath the Hornburg drew from Legolas a bargain: the Dwarf would walk with him under the boughs of Fangorn if he in turn were brought back to see the Glittering Caves (Book III, ch. 8).

When Aragorn resolved to take the Paths of the Dead, Legolas and Gimli went with him, riding from Dunharrow at daybreak on 8 March; of the living company he alone was untroubled by the Shadow Host, being able to hear in their pursuit the voices of the unhoused dead rather than only their dread (Book V, ch. 2). The road brought them to Pelargir on 13 March, where the Corsair fleet was taken and the ships turned upriver. There, by the shore, he heard gulls crying, and the sound worked on him exactly as Galadriel's warning had foretold, so that from that hour the desire for the Sea lay on him and the woods of his home lost something of their hold (Book V, ch. 9). Two days later he fought on the Pelennor Fields, and on 25 March he stood with Aragorn's army before the Black Gate.

He remained in Gondor through the healing of the wounded and the crowning of Aragorn on 1 May 3019, and rode north with the escort that bore Théoden's body home in the summer. Afterwards the two debts of the Hornburg were paid in order: Gimli was brought to the Glittering Caves of Aglarond, and Legolas led him under Fangorn, after which the pair went their own way apart from the rest of the company (Book VI, ch. 6). In the years that followed he brought a body of his father's folk southward out of the northern wood and settled them in Ithilien, which under their care became the fairest region of the western lands again, and their ships and craft revived the traffic of the lower Anduin (Appendix B).

Within the company Legolas serves chiefly as scout and archer rather than as counsellor. The road is chosen by Gandalf, Aragorn, and the Ring-bearer; what falls to him is watching, ranging ahead, and the bow. His second office is comparative: he stands as the Elf beside the Dwarf, and the slow undoing of that old estrangement is worked out through the two of them in incident rather than argued as doctrine. The pattern is visible early, when the wardens of Lothlórien would admit Gimli only blindfolded and Legolas protested at the terms before accepting Aragorn's ruling that the whole company go so hooded (Book II, ch. 6). It is worth marking how narrow his presence in the legendarium otherwise is. No deed of his is recorded before the autumn of 3018, no kin is named for him but his father, and the posthumously edited papers, rich as they are on his people, add nothing to him as an individual.

His attested faculties are those of his kindred, sharpened by wood-craft. His sight carries far across open country: on the plains of Rohan he made out a body of horsemen at a distance where his companions saw nothing, and reported their number and the colour of their hair before Aragorn could distinguish shapes (Book III, ch. 2). He rests without proper sleep, walking or sitting with open eyes in the manner the narrative calls elvish dreaming, and he took the horse Arod without saddle or rein, the beast suffering him willingly. He also perceives what others do not: in Hollin he found the very stones grieving for the Elves who had once quarried and dwelt there, though the land itself was empty and silent to the rest of the party (Book II, ch. 3). These gifts have plain bounds. For all his endurance, the three-day pursuit across Rohan did not overtake the Orc-host, and the escape of the captives owed nothing to it.

He works no spells and practises no craft that the text describes; such power as attaches to his gear is a gift received, not made. Against the greater evils he is simply outmatched, and the narrative says so. At the bridge in Moria he set an arrow to the string as the Balrog came on, and his hand failed him: the shaft fell, and he cried out in dread rather than shot (Book II, ch. 5). Nor does the record credit him with any decisive single deed in the great battles before Minas Tirith and the Black Gate, where he fights within an army and not above it. The one lasting change worked upon him comes from outside his mastery altogether, in the cry of gulls by the sea-coast, and it is presented as a hurt he cannot undo rather than a strength gained.

The bond that defines Legolas by birth is also the one the narrative shows least. Father and son never appear on the page together; Thranduil is present only as an authority reported at second hand, and Legolas acts throughout as his father's voice rather than in his own right. At the Council he speaks for the Woodland Realm under reproach, explaining that the guards set over the captive Gollum had been moved to pity and had allowed him more liberty than a prison would, and that the failure which followed lay in that kindness rather than in negligence. He does not disown the judgement, and the loyalty implied there is of a piece with the way he later disposes of a body of his father's people at his own discretion. No mother, no brother, no wider kindred is named for him anywhere: the family consists of one relation, and that relation is filial duty.

Against that thin family record, the friendship with Gimli is drawn in detail, and its progress is shown through small practical concessions rather than declarations. In Rohan the two shared a single horse, the Dwarf riding behind the Elf, an arrangement that made the older enmity absurd by making it inconvenient. When Gimli and Éomer came near to blows over words spoken slightingly of the Lady of Lórien, Legolas had an arrow on the string before Aragorn checked all three. The friendship does not require agreement: walking through Minas Tirith they fell out over the works of Men, Gimli judging that such labour always falls short of its promise, Legolas answering that the seed of it survives the failure and comes up elsewhere unlooked-for.

With Aragorn the relation is one of settled deference. After Gandalf's fall Legolas raises no claim of his own and accepts the new leadership without argument, and when the road turned under the mountain to the Paths of the Dead he and Gimli were the only members of the broken Fellowship to go with him. What the record conspicuously withholds is a personal adversary. He has no named foe, no feud, no enemy who knows his name; the enmity with Sauron is corporate, discharged in armies and never in a meeting. His relationships are therefore all of one kind, chosen rather than inherited, and the only lasting mark left upon him comes from no person at all.

The name belonged to another person long before it belonged to the prince of Mirkwood. In the early tale of the fall of Gondolin, written during and shortly after the First World War, a Legolas Greenleaf appears among the Noldoli of the hidden city: one of the survivors of its sack, gifted with sight that served him in darkness, who for that reason led the fleeing company across the level plain outside the ruined walls by night. The tale adds that he was still living at the time of its telling, dwelling in the western isle where the mariner heard it, and that the Elves there called him by an equivalent name in their own tongue, Laiqalassë, which the appended name-list gives with the same sense of green leaf. Nothing else connects that figure to the later one: he is not of the woodland folk, he has no royal father, and he does not survive into the published legendarium in any form.

The materials of the name were settled well before either character was fixed. The philological lists compiled in the 1930s set down the words for leaf and for green in both of the chief Elvish tongues then in use, so that the compound was available to Tolkien as a formation rather than an invention when he came to need it again. Its reappearance in the later work seems to have carried none of the earlier bearer's history with it; the editorial apparatus treats the two as separate persons who happen to share a name. On the other side, the drafts for the chapter in which the Mirkwood Elf enters show the council at Rivendell rewritten repeatedly, with the number and identity of those chosen to go south altering from version to version before the final company was reached, so that his place among them was not a fixed point of the design but one of its later settlements.

In the older adaptations Legolas is a subordinate presence, kept close to his function in the narrative and given little beyond it. Ralph Bakshi's animated film of 1978 uses Anthony Daniels for the voice; because that film carries the story only to the battle at the Hornburg and no continuation was made, everything belonging to the later part of his role — the southern road, the coast, the settlement in Ithilien — falls outside it altogether. The BBC Radio 4 dramatisation broadcast in 1981, in twenty-six parts, casts David Collings in the role, and the greater running time allows the part to be carried through to the end of the story with the Sea-longing and the friendship with the Dwarf both retained as spoken material rather than compressed away. Neither production adds a scene for him that the book does not supply.

Peter Jackson's three films, released from 2001 to 2003, cast Orlando Bloom, and the part is enlarged considerably as a fighting role. The Elves of Lórien are sent to the Hornburg in the films, so that Legolas fights there beside a contingent that has no counterpart in the book; he is given feats of arms invented for the screen, including the single-handed felling of a mûmak on the Pelennor. The Sea-longing, which in the text is the one lasting change worked upon him, survives only as a passing note. The same actor returns for the trilogy made from The Hobbit between 2012 and 2014, where the character does not appear in the source novel at all: he is written into the Woodland Realm as a captain under his father, who is himself shown on screen for the first time, and is paired with Tauriel, a she-Elf invented for those films with no basis in Tolkien. He is carried through to the battle at the mountain, and a line is added at the close pointing him toward the Ranger who will become Aragorn.