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.
Aw Yiss 