Legolas

Lineage and home

Legolas was the son of Thranduil, King of the Woodland Realm in the north of Mirkwood, and so the grandson of Oropher, a lord of the Sindar who had come east from the ruin of Doriath at the end of the First Age. His father's house was Sindarin, but the people it ruled were Silvan Elves, and Legolas grew up among them, in the caverns of Thranduil's halls and under the trees of the great wood. He spoke of himself as a Wood-elf and thought of the Silvan folk as his own; his skills with bow and forest path were theirs, and he had never, before the War of the Ring, travelled far from the Woodland Realm. His mother is never named, and nothing is told of his childhood or of his exact age, though he was old enough to have lived through many of the years of the Watchful Peace and to remember the wood before the shadow returned. The Fellowship knew him as keen-sighted beyond any of them, able to count riders at five leagues and to run for days on end; he walked over deep snow on Caradhras as if it were grass, and he slept, when he slept at all, with open eyes.

The messenger from Mirkwood

In the summer of T.A. 3018 Gollum, whom Aragorn had captured and left in Thranduil's keeping, escaped from the Wood-elves during an Orc raid arranged for the purpose. Thranduil sent his son to Rivendell to bring the news to Elrond and Gandalf, and so Legolas sat at the Council of Elrond on the twenty-fifth of October, where he reported the escape and answered the hard words of Glóin, who had not forgotten his own imprisonment under the same roof seventy-seven years before. When the Fellowship was chosen, Elrond named Legolas to represent the Elves, the first of the Free Peoples. He carried a bow of the Wood-elves and a long white knife, and he needed neither boots nor cloak against the cold.

The Fellowship

Legolas's early part in the quest was watchful rather than loud. He scouted, he saw the crebain over Hollin, and on Caradhras he ran ahead over the drifts to find the sun. In Moria he went unwillingly and with dread, and it was he who first named the thing that came out of the dark at the Bridge as a Balrog, Durin's Bane. In Lothlórien he was the Fellowship's spokesman to Haldir and the Galadhrim, and there began the change in him for which he is best remembered. He and the Dwarf Gimli had bickered since Rivendell, each carrying the grudge of his people; but Galadriel's courtesy to Gimli, and Gimli's answering grace, shamed the old quarrel, and the two began to walk the woods of Caras Galadhon together. From Lórien Legolas carried a great bow of the Galadhrim, longer and stronger than the bows of Mirkwood, and a quiver of arrows, and at the parting Galadriel warned him, in verse, to beware the crying of gulls, for if he heard them he would never again be content under the trees.

On the Anduin below the Argonath, on a moonlit night, he shot the winged beast that carried a Nazgûl over the river, a shot made in the dark at a shape rather than a target. When the Fellowship broke at Amon Hen, he and Gimli fought the Uruk-hai beside Boromir and came too late to save him; then he set Boromir's body in the boat with Aragorn and Gimli and sang the Wind of the South for him as the boat went over Rauros.

Across Rohan and the war in the West

With Aragorn and Gimli, Legolas ran for three days and nights across the plains of Rohan after the Orcs who had taken Merry and Pippin, forty-five leagues without rest, a feat the Rohirrim scarcely believed. They met Éomer and his éored, entered Fangorn, and met Gandalf returned. Legolas rode to Edoras, and at Helm's Deep he held the wall and then the Hornburg through the night, keeping the tally of the slain with Gimli in a grim game that Gimli won by one. At Isengard he saw Saruman's voice at work, and he refused Gimli's suggestion that they turn aside; but he also made a bargain with the Dwarf, to visit the caves of Aglarond if Gimli would in turn walk with him in Fangorn.

When the Grey Company came with Halbarad and the sons of Elrond, Legolas chose to follow Aragorn through the Paths of the Dead, and he alone of the living company was unshaken by the Dead, having no fear of the shades of Men. He rode with the Dead to Pelargir, fought on the ships of the Corsairs, and there, on the shore of Anduin's estuary, heard the gulls crying, and knew that Galadriel's warning had come true. He fought on the Pelennor Fields, walked in Minas Tirith and judged its stone fine but its gardens lacking, and marched with the Captains of the West to the Black Gate, where he and Gimli stood together in the last battle before the Ring went into the fire.

After the war

Legolas stood in the Court of the Fountain for the crowning of Aragorn and for the wedding of the King and Arwen, whom he had known since Rivendell. He kept his promises. He and Gimli went into the Glittering Caves together and then walked the depths of Fangorn, and Gimli, who had wept at the beauty of Aglarond, was silent in the forest, though Legolas was happy there. Then Legolas brought some of his father's people south to Ithilien, where the King had given Faramir the princedom, and the Elves of the Greenwood made a colony among the woods and fair rivers that the Enemy had scarred. There he dwelt for the length of Aragorn's reign, restoring the land, but the sea-longing did not leave him.

The last voyage

The tradition preserved in the Red Book records that after the King Elessar died in Fo.A. 120, Legolas built a grey ship in Ithilien and sailed down the Anduin and over the Sea, and that Gimli, alone of all the Dwarves, went with him, out of love for his friend and for the Lady Galadriel, who is said to have obtained this grace for him. If the tale is true, it was the last of the Fellowship's partings, and the strangest: an Elf of the wood and a Dwarf of the mountain, sailing together to the Undying Lands.

Legacy

Legolas is the Elf of the Third Age whom Men and Hobbits knew best, and through him readers of the Red Book see what an Elf is like as a companion: tireless, unafraid, unclouded, aware of time on a scale that made a year seem a ripple. His friendship with Gimli stands in the tale as a mending of the oldest rift among the Free Peoples, and it is in Legolas, hearing the gulls at Pelargir, that the whole fate of the Elves of Middle-earth is shown in small: even the most rooted of them, in the end, is called to the Sea.

Dwelt in Ithilien through the reign of Elessar; after the King's death in Fo.A. 120 he built a ship and sailed over the Sea with Gimli.