Aelir.
The wife of Thranduil and mother to his sons.
*PTERODACTYL SCREECH*
OH MY WORD, SHE IS SO BEAUTIFUL – I love how like a forest sprite she is! AND I HAVE HAIR-ENVY LIKE WHOA
those earrings! That puckish sweet face, full of humour and interest! LEAVES AND FLOWERS IN HER HAIR YAAAS and eeee her hands..! I am so in love with her wide hips and clever hands, omg
SHE IS SO GORGEOUS I LOVE HER I LOVE HER THANK YOU SO SO SO MUCH!!
YES PERFECT, chattering squirrel elf ❤
hey Nonnie! lmao whoa – sure thing!
Yup, Aelir, that’s right! And yes – I have the white gems as a courting gift, from Thranduil. The only jewellery she wore.
Heh, she was the one to pursue him. She decided to climb that tall, stiff, proud dude with the pretty hair – wait for it – yes, like a tree. :))))
Aelir was the one who began the crowns woven from the olvar: she wasn’t much into heavy golden things, and bleh to those flimsy little circlets that the rest of the Elves wear, frankly. So she was out in her woods one day and had an odd thought, and immediately put it into practice. She took some branches and wove her own, decorating it with the summer fruits and flowers. It was so beautiful that Thranduil went ‘RIGHT YES PERFECT’ and wore one for every season since.
He makes his own these days.
LMAO, she’s cool with the Elk (though it has been a succession of elks, really)! Doesn’t have her own: she likes to glide and race through the forests on her own, clinging to branches with her hands, touching the leaf-litter with her bare feet.
Thranduil suspected that the elk(s) and Aelir gossiped about him, but could never prove it.
(AHHH THANK YOU!!)
Yep, Aelir sailed! Thranduil insisted, though it broke both their hearts. She is in Valinor – in Tirion, to be exact – and she is alive.
;)))
Hi there, Nonnie!
Ooooh, this may be a convoluted answer. Here we go!
Here’s my Aelir tag, so you can get a handle on who she was. I’ll separate this answer out into each of the princes, so you can get the gist of their relationships.
Laindawar
When he was born, Aelir often bundled her eldest child onto her back as she raced through her beloved woods. Laindawar grew to toddlerhood sitting under green eaves beside his mother, or strapped to her as she clambered and danced and leaped through the trees.
Aelir was an odd sort of duck. She was tall, dishevelled, nearly squirrelish in her manner, not very talkative at all. Her eyes spoke more than she did. She was more at home with her trees than in the company of other elves, and Laindawar most definitely absorbed this tendency. He too is a loner more content under the branches. This is not only due to his own natural tendencies, but to those early formative years spent with his mother, alone but for the wind in the leaves and the soft puff of their breath.
As he grew, Laindawar was brought forward into the world of his father: the court, the business of being a crown prince and a political figure. He would retreat to his mother as an escape, for the peace and rest her presence brought.
(Thranduil did likewise, funnily enough. Aelir was a calm, wild haven for them both.)
As Aelir sickened, Laindawar’s resolve to kill all the evil in the forests hardened into something diamond-plated and implacable. He has never given up.
Laerophen
Our awkward giraffe was born several years after his brother, and he was at one glance obviously Thranduil’s child. He had the hair, the eyes, the height! Yet he was in spirit a retiring soul, and preferred the quiet and his own company.
Also, it appeared that he was made mostly of elbows and knees.
It was for Laerophen’s sake that Aelir began to stay longer and more frequently in the palace. It was Thranduil who taught him to read, but it was Aelir who sat with him and listened as he devoured all the books around him and told her about what he had learned in excited piping tones.
She often brought him out of his rooms, just the two of them (three, if Laindawar were willing to take time away from his hunting). Unlike Laindawar and Legolas, Laerophen would walk through the trees by his mother’s side. He would not leap from bough to bough. She would hold his hand.
She taught him the bow, though he did not show any especial gift for it. But he loved the time with his mother, and so he worked diligently at it.
When she left, Laerophen’s world contracted to his rooms once again. The only one who could coax him out was Legolas.
Legolas
Their little green leaf was such a shock. SUCH A SHOCK. Aelir had been sickening for centuries – how was she to know that this was any different? But there it was, she was due another child. Weakened as she was due to the poisoning of the forests, she worried. God, did she worry.
She needn’t have worried, not for him. Legolas was walking before he was crawling, desperate to stand and do everything right now!! NOW!!! He wanted to see everything, know everything, touch everything. He was, unlike her quiet eldest children, noisy. He cried loudly, sang loudly, laughed loudly.
He was effusively affectionate.
Everything in him bubbled over with curiosity and joy.
Aelir brought him into her forests as much as she was able, and strapped him to her back as she had for Laindawar. Unlike his brother, Legolas did not enjoy being confined to such safety. As soon as he was able, he wriggled free to dangle and clamber and run just as his mother did. “Look Naneth! Look at me! Look what I can do!”
He made her laugh helplessly and happily, even as the shadows under her eyes deepened.
She tried to stay for him. She truly did.
Ooooh crumbs. Yes? Thank you for asking, Nonnie 🙂
Okay, so we know that Thranduil was present when Doriath fell, and that he fled with his father to Lindon and thence to the Greenwood.
So, he saw that massacre when he was still young.
I feel that young!Thranduil would have been full of a red-hot rage, a fire. He would have been passionate about the wrongs he saw that were done to his people, and to the world.
Then he meets Aelir, and she brings out the gentleness and curiosity in him. Her influence calms him, makes him breathe without tasting the injustice of it all at the back of his mouth. They are given two beautiful children, and Thranduil’s grief and anger are briefly allayed by the joy in his life.
Thranduil names the first child ‘Free Forest’, or Laindawar. A wish for the future, a prayer for things to come, a promise to this little soul. He will be free. They will stay free.
Aelir names the second ‘Tree Song’, or Laerophen. Her ears were forever full of their music, her body swaying with their branches, half-wild dryadlike thing that she is.
So. They’re happy. But it doesn’t last.
Then: Dagorlad. Another massacre, one full of monsters and horror and loss. In Thranduil’s case, the loss is deep and personal. He loses his father, and the grief and the rage inside him begin to crystallise.
The darkness builds, the Second Age turns into the Third. Aelir grows worried: the song of the trees is sickening, twisting itself into new and gruesome sounds. It twists her inside as it does so.
They are given a last, late gift long after their other children: a Green Leaf, Legolas, a small bright dancing spark amidst the gathering gloom. Aelir names him, her child, so small and hopeful, a green shoot in a forest of dark and blackened things.
Thranduil is grim. He fights against the encroaching darkness with an ever-more-stony countenance. His determination is clad in ice. His home will not die, not again. No more massacres of his people. Not again. Laindawar is of his mind, and fights at his side. Laerophen is more timid, and shrinks away to surround himself with books of the past.
They fight and fight as the years roll on, bringing the rotting trees back to health, rooting out and destroying the nests of spiders, singing away the mists that cling like slime to the southern forests. The years roll on, and Thranduil misses the signs of sickness in his wild woodland wife.
Until he can’t miss it, not anymore. She has always been close to the trees, nearly part-tree herself. And now she is sickening and failing for want of sunlight, and the clashing songs of the forest are an agony to her. She must go.
Thranduil fights this, as he has fought everything else. They try everything that can be done, to no avail. The healing has begun too late: not even the arts of Elrond can halt Aelir’s illness. The only hope is to go to the West.
She does. Weeping, but her chin held high. She will see them again, she breathes into the hair of her family. Her voice is feeble, and she must be carried onto the ship.
Watching, Thranduil holds onto his youngest child, his green leaf, and his heart turns to diamond inside him.
This world will take no more from him.
Awww, thank you for asking! Spoilers under the cut:
I have named her ‘Aelir’ (”Birdsong”) and she was a Silvan Elf, not a Sinda. Her hair was very pale gold, rather than the Sindar white/silver.
She was incredibly close to the trees, even more than is usual for Elves. She would have been the sort of Elf who began ‘waking up the Trees, teaching them to speak’ and walking with the Ents, had she been around in the Age of the Lamps, for example.
She was tall and athletic, and never wore gowns or jewels except for a single necklace of white gems, a courting gift to her from her husband. She always wore green, and usually went barefoot, with grass-stains on her feet. Thranduil courted her for decades, fascinated by her strength and her freedom and her wisdom and her gentleness, all the joy she found in her home and in the things that grow. She was not a skilled and deadly warrior, as he was – but she was quite a wild thing nevertheless, forever clambering into the canopy of the trees like a squirrel, or flitting through the forest, constantly singing to the leaves and the sky. She hated the idea of being confined to formality and pomp (not unlike Bomfris, but of course Bomfris wouldn’t give two hoots about trees) – but in those days Thranduil was gentler and less chilly, and his tenderness and respect eventually won her over. She carefully unearthed his deep-buried heart as though it was one of her beloved trees, and she coaxed it back into bloom. They would dance amidst the leaves season after season, lost in the whispering of the wind.
She loved completely, and fully – her husband, her children, her home. Her elder two boys were much like Thranduil in demeanor, dignified and reserved (though Laerophen gained her lanky height, and Laindawar had her lithe, squirrelish strength and her delight in the woods). However, her third child was most like her in spirit – in wide-eyed love with the world, singing constantly and heedlessly, sensitive to the green, slow unspoken world of growing things. (ALSO he managed to inherit her slightly obvious and oblivious manner!!)
As Thranduil became more and more involved in trying to keep his Kingdom free from the taint of the growing darkness, he missed the first signs in his wild Silvan wife. By the middle of the Third Age, Aelir had sickened greatly, practically reflecting the sickness creeping through the wood, and it was too late for any healer to halt its progression. The only cure was to go over the sea, to Valinor, where healing would come.
But once there, there is no coming back. No ship comes East through the mists.
It was an awful time. For all of them. And yet another loss for Thranduil to endure, surrounding his heart in yet another layer of ice. All he has left, he clings to all the more tightly.
Aw Yiss 