Thranduil

In The Hobbit the ruler of the wood-elves is never given a personal name. He appears only as the Elvenking, or as the king of the Elves of Mirkwood, and the story keeps him at the distance such a title implies, a crowned figure met chiefly through his gate, his cellars and his judgements. The name Thranduil belongs to The Lord of the Rings, where it enters obliquely, first as a patronymic attached to the messenger who comes from the north to Elrond's council, and afterwards in the chronological tables of the Appendices, where the realm is spoken of by its king's name. The form is Sindarin; the guide to pronunciation appended to that book gives TH the voiceless value it has in English "thin", and the ending is to be read as two syllables rather than a glide, du-il. A reader who comes to the older book after the later one must therefore make the identification himself, since the earlier text nowhere makes it.

As to kindred, The Hobbit sets his folk among those Elves who never made the westward journey to the Blessed Realm and remained instead in the twilight of the wide lands, and the narrator weighs them accordingly: not an evil people, but less wise and more perilous than the High Elves of the West, with a long memory of grievances and a marked love of treasure, above all of silver and of white gems. The Lord of the Rings supplies the missing distinction. Its appendix on languages describes the woodland folk of Mirkwood as Silvan Elves who kept their own speech, while the princes who ruled them were of Sindarin descent, so that a Sindarin name stands at the head of a people whose daily tongue was not Sindarin. The wariness the summary of his character records is thus not merely temperament but position: a lord of one kindred set over another, on the northern edge of a forest whose southern half was already darkening.

The genealogy behind that arrangement is given only in the posthumously edited material, and carries correspondingly less weight. There Thranduil is named the son of Oropher, a Sinda who had dwelt in Doriath and who passed eastward over the mountains after its ruin with a small following of his own kin. Among the Silvan Elves of Greenwood the Great he was received as lord, and he withdrew his seat northward, away from Khazad-dûm and from the growing power in Lórien, wishing to keep his people apart from Dwarves and from Noldorin authority alike. Oropher and his companions took up the manner of life and, in large part, the speech of the folk they governed, which accounts for a royal house Sindarin in origin ruling a realm Silvan in character.

The first event in which Thranduil himself is recorded belongs to the close of the Second Age, and it is preserved only in the posthumously edited material. When the Last Alliance was formed and the host passed east over the mountains, Oropher led out a great force of the woodland folk, armed after their own fashion with spear and bow and light gear rather than in the manner of the Noldor, and unwilling to take orders from Gil-galad. In the assault upon the gates of the Black Land he charged before the signal was given and was slain, and the greater part of his people fell with him; the chronological tables of The Lord of the Rings place the battle on the Dagorlad in the year 3434 of the Second Age, seven years before Sauron was overthrown. Thranduil survived, brought home the remnant, and took the kingship over a folk reduced to something near a third of those who had marched south. The account presents this loss as the making of the realm's later policy: a kingdom that thereafter avoided open war, kept to its own borders, and trusted to the forest rather than to alliances.

The Tale of Years gives the shape of the long centuries that followed in a handful of entries. About the year 1050 of the Third Age a shadow fell upon Greenwood the Great, and the Elves gave the forest the darker name by which it was afterwards known; some fifty years later the Wise learned that an evil power had taken a stronghold at Dol Guldur in its southern reaches, though they supposed at first that the dweller there was one of the Ringwraiths and not Sauron returned. In 2063 Gandalf went to Dol Guldur and its master withdrew into the East, and for nearly four hundred years the Watchful Peace held; in 2460 the power came back with strength increased, and the pressure upon the wood was never afterwards lifted. Through all this the Elvenking's realm lay in the north, with the darkened half of the forest between it and the enemy, and the tables record no expedition by him beyond his own borders. In 2850 Gandalf entered Dol Guldur a second time and confirmed at last that Sauron held it.

The year 2941 brought Thorin Oakenshield's company through the wood, and with it the episode for which the king is chiefly remembered. The narrative first explains the standing grievance: in old days Elves and Dwarves had gone to war over treasure, the Elves charging theft, while the Dwarves maintained that they had taken no more than their wages, since the king had hired them to work his raw gold and silver and had then withheld payment. Thorin, seized alone after the travellers blundered into the woodland feasts, refused to name his errand and was imprisoned; his companions, rescued from the spiders and taken by the guards soon after, proved equally close-mouthed and were shut up in separate cells. The king dealt with them without cruelty by his own measure, offering release in return for a plain answer and getting none, and the imprisonment ended only when Bilbo floated the Dwarves out of the cellars in the empty wine-barrels that went down the river to Lake-town.

When Smaug was killed and the news went up the river, the king gathered an army and set out for the Mountain, reckoning the hoard masterless; meeting messengers from the ruined town, he turned aside first to bring food and help to the survivors of Esgaroth, and only then marched east with Bard. Before the closed gate he counselled patience and said plainly that he would not begin a war for gold, and it was to him and to Bard together that Bilbo brought the Arkenstone by night, hoping to force a settlement; the king received the burglar with courtesy and offered him shelter in his own camp. The arrival of Dain's Dwarves nearly brought the quarrel to blows, and it was the sudden coming of the goblins and Wargs out of the mountains that turned three armies into one, with the Elves holding a wing of the field in the Battle of Five Armies. In the division of the treasure afterwards Bard gave the king the emeralds that had once belonged to Girion of Dale, the stones he valued most, and Bilbo on his way home offered him a necklace of silver and pearls in payment for the food and drink he had taken uninvited, so that the king named him elf-friend and let him go with a blessing.

Within his borders the Elvenking's authority is shown in The Hobbit as complete and unshared. He hears the captured travellers seated on a carven chair with a staff of oak in his hand, wearing a wreath of berries and red leaves in the autumn of the year and of woodland flowers in spring; no council, no lords and no law stand between his questions and his sentence. His seat lies beyond a stone bridge over a forest river, behind doors that close like a gate, with cellars, guard-rooms and cells behind them, and the narrator is careful to explain that the caves are a refuge and a treasury rather than a preference, since most of his folk lived under the trees and used the fortress when enemies pressed. What he commands, then, is a defensible place and the people who can hold it.

The powers displayed in that story belong less to the king than to his kindred and their country. Torchlit feasts in the forest go out and vanish when strangers break in upon them; a dark stream crossing the path carries sleep and forgetfulness to anyone who touches it; the gates of the halls open and shut at a word and cannot be forced from outside. Against these the narrative sets ordinary strengths and ordinary weaknesses: hunters and archers who know the wood, and a traffic in goods with the men down the river, wine brought up from the south in barrels that were floated back empty through a water-gate. It was that traffic, and a butler and a chief of the guard who drank more of the king's cellar than they should, that let an unseen burglar empty the cells. Enchantment guarded the doors; it did not watch the trapdoor.

At the scale of the Age the limits are plainer still. No Ring of Power sustained his kingdom, the Three being held elsewhere by those named at the end of The Lord of the Rings, and no seat on the White Council is recorded for him; his strength was numbers, ground and vigilance, and it sufficed to keep a northern province and no more. The spiders bred in his own forest and were not cleared out of it, the shadow in the south stood for some nineteen centuries, and the chronological tables show him fighting only when the war came to his trees. His one recorded service to the Wise, the keeping of a prisoner at Gandalf's asking, ended in escape.

Of Thranduil's household the books published in his author's lifetime name a single member, and that only obliquely: the messenger who comes to Elrond's house is introduced as the son of the king of the northern wood, and everything the reader afterwards learns of the father's affections must be inferred from what the son does elsewhere. Legolas speaks for the realm at the council, carries its bad news south, and by attaching himself to the Company binds a kingdom that had kept within its own borders for centuries to an errand far from its trees. No wife or mother is mentioned anywhere; the king's own father is named only in the posthumous material. The relation is thus visible chiefly in its consequences — an heir abroad among strangers of every kindred, a father who is not consulted and does not follow.

With Dwarves his dealings are the most fully drawn and the least generous, and the older quarrel over withheld payment governs them before a word is spoken: he reads the ragged strangers taken in his wood as trespassers with something to hide, and Thorin's refusal to explain himself confirms the reading on both sides. What gives the episode its later interest is that it does not end there. Glóin, one of the company shut in those cells, sits at Elrond's table two lifetimes of men afterwards while the Elvenking's son sits in the same hall, and it is Glóin's son and that same Legolas whose friendship, formed on the road south, quietly outlives the grievance neither of their fathers had set aside.

Outside his own kindred the pattern is one of correct distance rather than alliance. Toward the Men of the lake and of Dale he is courteous and, when they are ruined, open-handed, and the settlement he reaches with Bard is arrived at by negotiation and gift-giving rather than by any older bond; the hobbit who robbed his cellars is dismissed with a title of friendship and no reproach once payment is offered. Toward the Wise he is helpful when asked and no more, and the one recorded favour, granted at Gandalf's request, was undone by the mildness with which his guards treated their prisoner. Toward the Elves of Lothlórien, with whom his folk shared a Silvan ancestry, the chronicles record no dealings at all until the war was won, when the two rulers met at last on the ruin of their common enemy and divided the forest between them.

The earliest screen appearance of the character is the Elvenking of the Rankin/Bass animated television film, where he was voiced by the film director Otto Preminger in a rare turn as a voice actor. That version keeps him nameless, as the novel does, and the compression of the whole book into roughly ninety minutes leaves him little to do beyond the seizure and imprisonment of the Dwarves and a brief presence in the closing battle; the long-standing grievance between his people and the Dwarves, which the book explains at some length before the trial scene, is passed over. He has no part in the animated Lord of the Rings of the following decade, which in any case breaks off midway through the story, nor in Peter Jackson's live-action trilogy of that book, where his son is a principal figure throughout but the father is only spoken of and never brought on screen.

Lee Pace plays Thranduil in Jackson's three-film treatment of The Hobbit, where the role is enlarged far beyond its scope in the novel and the character is named from the outset. The trilogy opens his part before the main action, at the Mountain in the days of Thrór, and gives him a personal motive that Tolkien does not supply: a set of white gems he holds to have been wrongfully withheld from him, which thereafter governs his handling of Thorin's company and his claim on the hoard. Legolas, who has no place in the novel at all, is written in as his son and as a captain of his guard, alongside the invented Tauriel; from this the films build a domestic thread with no source in the book, including the king's objection to his son's attachment to her and references to a mother whom Tolkien nowhere mentions. The effect is to move him closer to an antagonist in the final film than the novel's king ever becomes, since his march on the Mountain is driven by a private claim rather than by the reckoning of a masterless treasure, and his conduct during the battle is given a wavering the book does not describe.