Is there a character you're obsessed with?

[Urwen]

Is there a character that you're practically obsessed with? That you want to know all about them and wish there were more to find about them?

For me, there are three.

[Pitchwife]

No.

[unbrakochaz]

has to be Gríma Wormtongue, charmingly evil

[mindil]

Legolas's mother. I want to convince the world that she was alive, intelligent, loving and involved in Mirkwood politics straight through to the end of the War of the Ring.

Hopeless. I wrote one mini-story on Fanfiction and no one else is helping to fill in her true backstory. I'm not trying any more.

Except for this one stab - please grant that Tolkien's not mentioning female characters if far from proof that he thought they were dead. It would be quite farfetched to think that Sam, Merry, Pippin and Gimli were all orphaned of their mothers, yet there isn't a peep about any of them. Orphanhood, especially from mothers, gets mentioned (too often) - Frodo, Boromir and Faramir, Aragorn, Eowyn and Eomer, semi-orphanhood for Celebrian's kids. The silences probably refer to the living mothers.

Make hay out of that regarding Tolkien's approach to mothers! (I think another thread did this already.)

So yeah - I'd like to meet Mrs. Thranduil.

[Formendacil]

Originally Posted by mindil

Legolas's mother. I want to convince the world that she was alive, intelligent, loving and involved in Mirkwood politics straight through to the end of the War of the Ring.

Hopeless. I wrote one mini-story on Fanfiction and no one else is helping to fill in her true backstory. I'm not trying any more.

Except for this one stab - please grant that Tolkien's not mentioning female characters if far from proof that he thought they were dead. It would be quite farfetched to think that Sam, Merry, Pippin and Gimli were all orphaned of their mothers, yet there isn't a peep about any of them. Orphanhood, especially from mothers, gets mentioned (too often) - Frodo, Boromir and Faramir, Aragorn, Eowyn and Eomer, semi-orphanhood for Celebrian's kids. The silences probably refer to the living mothers.

Make hay out of that regarding Tolkien's approach to mothers! (I think another thread did this already.)

So yeah - I'd like to meet Mrs. Thranduil.

I think this is an interesting--and probably practicably useful--approach. In the case of Mrs. Thranduil, shouldn't her nickname be "the Elvenqueen?"

Though, if we say that she IS alive, it does seem a bit odd that there's never a reference to her in The Hobbit--not because this necessarily means she's dead, but because the Elvenking and his halls were stolen from Thingol and Menegroth in the writing of The Hobbit and in-universe Thranduil and Oropher before him are attempting to recreate Menegroth among the Silvan. And my point is that Menegroth without Melian makes no sense.

So there is AN argument that since we never anything in The Hobbit or elsewhere that hints at the existence of a Melian-ersatz. However, it's also possible that I've already glanced at the answer: Oropher, not Thranduil, had the wife who was the Melian-equivalent. And the reason Mrs. Thranduil has no prominence might be that Mrs. Oropher, unlike Melian, never vanished after the death of her husband. Thus, instead of being able to be the Elvenqueen (Nimloth to Thranduil's Dior), Mrs. Thranduil forebears from a clear public presence and Thranduil reigns effectively alone--if someone had said to Galion, "the Elvenqueen desires some wine," would he have brought it to the dowager or to her daughter-in-law?

And the idea that the Dowager-Elvenqueen never left Middle-earth (at least as of the start of the Fourth Age) isn't implausible. We don't know for certain whether Oropher or Thranduil wedded fellow Sindar or Silvan Elves, though if we posit Mrs. Oropher as a Melian-analogue, then a woman of higher race seems possible--and maybe we have the source of Thranduil's golden hair there: perhaps some half-Vanya in the train of the Finarfinians stayed in Doriath with Galadriel, and though a step down from Melian, that would still leave as sufficiently exalted to be the Melian-analogue in a woodland realm that was a step down from Doriath. And, certainly, if Legolas's mother were a Silvan Elf (and, given the timeframe, possibly even a Silvan Elf of a late enough generation to just as plausibly have some Avari in her blood as be pure Nandor), it would make sense that even if Mrs. Oropher was very retired after her husband's death that Mrs. Thranduil would feel uncomfortable stepping into her place while she yet remained in Mirkwood.

On that note, I think that fanon has tried to make Oropher a branch of the House of Elmo--on the strength of Oropher and Amdír being Sindarin "princes" and on Celeborn referring to Northern Mirkwood as their kin. And this has a logic to it. But it's nowhere in Tolkien's work, at least that I recall, and it could just as easily be that Mrs. Oropher was the connection to the Elwëans and that THAT made her the Melian-analogue, while it was Oropher's "commoner" status that made him her relatively-lesser, though more-active, consort. And, if that's the source of Thranduil's right to rule, then it is completely understandable why his wife wouldn't take the role of "Elvenqueen" if his mother was still living in Mirkwood--but, though I like this theory, it doesn't have the convenience of tying up Thranduil's mysterious golden hair.

[mindil]

The behavior of the Mirkwood elves in the Hobbit has a flavor of Tokien's style of male-companionship, more than his notions of female propriety. We don't see Thranduil himself carousing, but he seems not to rein in his people. Some see this as evidence that most of the Mirkwood elves were Avari.

Be that as it may, it probably fits better with Mrs. Oropher, the Melian-figure, having left for Aman some time before, and for Mrs. Thranduil being a lower-status person unable to put her stamp on the goings-on. Or being Avari herself and enjoying that sort of thing.

It also fits with Legolas seeming somewhat clueless about the wider world outside Mirkwood, despite having had hundreds of years to get educated. If his grandmother had no Noldor blood (Vanyar weren't "knowers" either) and if he was brought up by an Avari mother with his grandmother out of the way, he might end up being something of a hick.

This clashes with my preferred picture of her being Sindar, but it makes more sense.