The Halls of Thranduil

The cave-palace

The Elvenking's halls lie in the north-eastern part of Mirkwood, a few miles inside the forest's eastern edge, where the Forest River comes down from the Mountains of Mirkwood on its way to the Long Lake. The palace is cut into a wooded hill on the northern bank. Its gate is a great door of stone at the end of a bridge over the river, closed by enchantment so that no one can pass in or out without the king's will, and beyond it torch-lit passages wind down into the rock. The largest cavern is the king's hall, where Thranduil sat on a carved chair with a crown of leaves or berries according to the season. Deeper down lie storerooms, cellars and dungeons, and beneath them all a water-gate opens on the river, through which empty wine-barrels were pushed out to float down to Lake-town.

The halls were not gloomy like an orc-hold; they were lit, dry and full of feasting, and most of the Silvan Elves lived not inside them but in the surrounding woods, coming to the caves only for shelter, council and celebration. Thranduil's Sindarin ancestors had known the caverns of Menegroth in Doriath, and the delving of the halls was a deliberate echo of that lost kingdom. The Elves of the realm traded downriver with the Lake-men and drank the wines of Dorwinion, carried up the river in barrels and back down again empty.

Oropher's people first lived on Amon Lanc in the south of Greenwood and moved north by stages as the power of Mordor grew, settling beyond the Forest River before the Last Alliance. When the Shadow fell on the southern forest around T.A. 1050 the caves became the fortress of the free north, and Thranduil held them through two thousand years of encroaching darkness without the help of an Elven-ring.

In the autumn of 2941 Thorin and his company, starving and lost after the spiders, were seized by the king's guards and shut in the cells for refusing to say what they wanted in the forest. Bilbo, invisible, haunted the halls for weeks until he found the water-gate, packed the Dwarves into barrels and rode them down the river to Lake-town. Thranduil marched with his army to Erebor when Smaug died and fought beside Bard and Dáin in the Battle of Five Armies. In 3017 Aragorn brought Gollum to the king's keeping at Gandalf's request; his guards allowed him to climb a tree by day, and during an orc attack in June 3018 he vanished. In March 3019 the realm itself was invaded by the host of Dol Guldur, and Thranduil's victory in the Battle under the Trees kept the halls free. He ruled there into the Fourth Age, and his son Legolas led a company of the forest Elves south to settle Ithilien.

In the north-east of Mirkwood beside the Forest River, upstream of the Long Lake and Lake-town, east of the Mountains of Mirkwood and south of the Grey Mountains.