There's a fan-theory that has cropped up in a few places recently (or, perhaps, it's more that I've recently become aware of it) that the mithril shirt that Bilbo obtains on his adventure, and that he subsequently gives to Frodo, was made in Erebor for Legolas when the latter was a child.
 |
| (c) New Line Cinema |
This, of course, is an attempt to syncretise a throw-away reference in a book for children, with the lore that was then created to tie that children's book to a wider mythology. When Tolkien wrote The Hobbit, there was no intention to write The Lord of the Rings; he did not have to think about how to tie the story to the world of The Lord of the Rings (which did not exist), nor to the unfolding and ever-changing details of the story of The Silmarillion. Mirkwood and its Elf-king exist in The Lord of the Rings because they exist in The Hobbit, rather than the other way around. It was not until the work of creating The Lord of the Rings was underway that references in The Hobbit acquired any kind of world-building significance. When The Hobbit was written and the mithril coat invented, Legolas did not exist. He was created during the writing of The Lord of the Rings. But once The Lord of the Rings was published, and with the further elaboration of the legendarium in The Silmarillion, Unfinished Tales and the Histories of Middle Earth, fans (of which I most definitely am one) have attempted to see the whole thing as a complete whole and work out, from scattered hints that were never intended to 'mean' anything beyond establishing that these stories took place in a land that already had a history, what the histories of people, places and artefacts 'actually was'. And Bilbo's mithril coat is one of these.
.jpg) |
| (c) New Line Cinema |
It has been suggested that the coat was not made in Erebor at all, but came there as treasure brought by the Dwarves from Moria or elsewhere. It is true that it is nowhere said that the mail-coat was made in Erebor, and post-Hobbit writings say mithril is only found in Moria (among Dwarf-realms at least, it's also mentioned in some writings as being found in Numenor). If it is not of Ereborian manufacture, it may be that it was made in Moria for a young 'prince' of Eregion before the destruction of the realm of the Gwaith-i-mirdain, or even for a prince of the Galadhrim. If it was made in Moria, it could have been made at any time in the First or Second Age, and up to the sack of Moria in 1981 of the Third Age (LotR: Tale of Years). Perhaps Amroth of Lorien, or even his father, Malgalad/Amdir, was the intended recipient; maybe it was Elladan or Elrohir, the sons of Elrond. These were not 'princes' in the sense 'sons of a king', because Elrond never claimed the Kingship of the Noldor; but they are reasonably 'princes' in the looser sense of younger male members of the nobility. There is even a suggestion that it was made for Earendil when he was in Gondolin, at the behest of his mother Idril. Or perhaps the coat was intended as a gift for some more far-away realm of which we know nothing, it never having been recorded in the different versions of The Silmarillion, The Hobbit or The Lord of the Rings. Of course, if it were intended as a gift from ruler of Moria for a prince of some Elf-realm, that realm might have been that of the Elves of Mirkwood (or Greenwood the Great as it was earlier known). Whatever anyone may believe about intended recipients of a 'Morian' (as opposed to 'Ereborian') mail-shirt, these theories may be regarded as theories of an 'early' manufacture (ie, before the collapse of the Dwarf-kingdom of Moria in 1981TA), as opposed to a 'late' (ie Ereborian) manufacture after 1989TA. It is not impossible that, if the mail-coat was made in Moria, it was made for Legolas; but he is perhaps not the most likely candidate.
One problem of course is that if it were made for an Elf-prince, why did it not remain with the Elf-prince or his family? Was it ever delivered to the Elf-prince, or did the Dwarves retain it for some reason? Was it returned to the Dwarves by the Elf-prince or his family? We might expect a gift to a young noble to stay with them. Why then is it found among the treasures of the smiths who (we assume) made it?
We do not know for sure when it was made, we do not know where it was made, and we do not know for whom it was made.
However, there are some things we do know, or at least can be reasonably sure about.
The mail-coat is described as being made for 'some young Elf-prince long ago'. Ultimately the conceit is that Bilbo wrote 'There and Back Again' of course, so it is Bilbo not Tolkien writing here; but that conception hadn't arisen when The Hobbit was written. Personally, I tend to take Tolkien's word as an impartial observer, unless I think there's good reason not to. I don't think here there is any reason to doubt what he says. The intended recipient, at the time he wrote The Hobbit, was an Elf, not a human, was 'young', was a 'prince', whatever we might suppose that to mean, and it was made 'long ago', in the time-frame of 'The Hobbit' - before the Dragon descended on Erebor, obviously, and possibly some considerable number of centuries before that.
We know it was found in Erebor. We do not know whether it was made in Moria and brought to Erebor as a finished item; or if it was made in Erebor from mithril mined in Moria but brought to Erebor as ingots. I think it's unreasonable to posit that it might have been made at a third location from Morian ingots and brought to Erebor co-incidentally. Even more implausibly, one could argue it was made of Numenorean mithril at another location and only ended up in Erebor by accident, and had no connection to Moria at all. These conjectures would mean none of the possible dating evidence we could apply would be relevant, and nothing could be deduced about the mail-coat or its intended recipient. Likelihood (and Occam's Razor) says that it was either made in Moria or Erebor. On balance, I think the idea that it was made of Morian ingots in Erebor is somewhat more plausible than it being made in Moria and brought to Erebor as treasure, but I certainly do not see that as being settled - it's my feeling about what is more likely. So, I would favour a 'late' manufacture, while conceding that this essential fact is unprovable.
 |
| (c) New Line Cinema |
The creation of such a gift seems vastly unlikely. The return by its recipients of such a gift seems if anything even more unlikely. Mithril just cannot be as valuable as Gimli and Gandalf claim, it doesn't make sense. Gimli uses mithril to repair the gates of Minas Tirith after the War of the Ring - it is light and strong and beautiful, certainly; but if it is also valuable at the ratio of something like a province to a few ounces, it is a ludicrous thing to make either into city-gates or mail-shirts - especially mail-shirts for children that will only be of use for two years. So I cannot accept that mithril is as valuable as all that. I can believe Thorin's gift to Bilbo is princely indeed, but not that it is a sign of insanity. Nor can I believe that the manufacture of a mithril shirt by the Dwarves in the first place, nor its gift to 'some Elf-prince long ago', is the equivalent to giving a child a shirt worth as much as a country, as that too would be a sign of insanity; and then its return to the Dwarves after a couple of years would further be a sign of insanity. I realise we're dealing with pre-capitalist economy here, one in which conspicuous gift-giving might indeed be a feature, but even in a world of wizards and dragons and talking thrushes, such blatant disregard for economic necessity is still unbelievable. If Gandalf and Gimli are right, that one mail-shirt would buy whole armies for the Dwarves, and it would have bought armies for the family or realm of the 'Elf-prince' for whom it was made. Expensive, truly a luxury item, but I cannot believe that it would have been worth as much as a small realm.
That in the end is about as much as we know about the mail-shirt and almost everything we know about mithril. It gets us very little closer to solving the problem of its manufacture. It is all a question of possibilities at this point.
.jpg) |
| (c) New Line Cinema |
The second conjecture is that actually, Legolas is the only named Elf-prince whose birth may have been approximately-contemporary with the Dwarf settlement of Erebor. In turn, this relies on two lines of argument.
The first argument is that the birth-dates of known Elf-princes (such as Elrohir and Elladan, Amroth etc) are all far too early for a gift of an Ereborian mithril shirt. If the shirt is of Ereborian manufacture, it must have been made for an Elf-prince after 1989TA, and there are no known candidates for that Elf-prince that is not Legolas. So we can rule all of them out. But can we rule Legolas in?
We do not know the birth-dates of many Elf-princes; the information we have is very much centred on the line of the Kings of the Noldor, the children of Finwë, and especially the 'Golden House of Finrod' (or Finarfin, given the changes to the genealogy over the 50-something years the Professor was refining his mythology), the direct kin of Galadriel and Turgon and Elrond. Even some of them (poor Orodreth!) are moved about in generations and parentage and are never given a convincing home; and there are strange figures like Gildor Inglorion (at the time of writing, Inglor was the name given to the character later known as Finrod, and 'Inglorion' could mean 'descendent of Inglor') and Glorfindel ('Golden-hair'... when we are told that only the kin of Finrod among the Noldor had golden hair), who may be members of this House but are never given a place in the family tree. Others, outside this kin, are even more nebulous. Celeborn seems to begin as an Elf of Lothlorien, then his origin is removed to Doriath, then to Eldamar. Amroth hardly figures in the wider legendarium outside of his doomed love for Nimrodel, and his father is unknown (or rather goes by the twin names of Amdir-Malgalad, as his name was never formally decided and readers can decide which they favour. Personally, I prefer Malgalad, because I like the explanation that 'Amroth' is a nickname, and therefore find it unlikely that his father's name would have been chosen, before Amroth ever took to the 'long climb' of living in a talan out of love for Nimrodel, in order to alliterate with it). All Malgalad (or Amdir of one prefers) actually does is die in the War of the Last Alliance, along with Oropher, who also has little biographical information.
Oropher, and his son Thranduil, are crucial to understanding the case for Legolas's suitability for the mithril short. At the time of Oropher's death, Thranduil is already an adult. He accompanies his father to war, and returns as King of the Elves of the Greenwood, horrified by the blighted lands under the dominion of Sauron. What happens next is somewhat confused as different versions of the text say different things, but one interpretation is that for the first thousand years of the Third Age, the Elves of the Greenwood live in some kind of cultural and geographic continuity with the Elves of Lorien. The division is the river, that is all. At this time, we may imagine Thranduil and Amroth as both new kings - their fathers were both killed in the war - and near-neighbours - the Elves of the Greenwood lived in the south of the forest at that time, in the vicinity of Amon Lanc, that would become Dol Guldur. Thranduil and Amroth may even have been companions-in-arms; certainly Thranduil accompanied his father, and possibly Amroth did the same, in the War of the Last Alliance (Unfinished Tales: Celeborn and Galadriel).
Thranduil, it is hinted, may have been born in the First Age, and travelled with his father from Doriath. Certainly there are hints that the Elven-kings Halls, first described in The Hobbit, are an echo of Menegroth, Thingol's palace-fortress in Doriath; but by the time these are built (and this is crucial to the dating of Legolas) Oropher is dead. Who then remembers Menegroth? It can only be Thranduil. Of course, when The Hobbit was written, Tolkien used Beleriand as a basis for it. The Dwarves and Bilbo journey to the east in settled lands, somewhat troll-infested to be sure, meet some Elves in a hidden fortress, cross goblin-infested mountains, meet eagles and bear-men, cross a mighty river, then enter a guarded Elven forest where they are beset by spiders and eventually end up in an Elven underground fortress, before journeying on to a 'Lonely Mountain', near some Iron Hills. This is the geography of northern Beleriand; the Shire is near the mountains that guard Hithlum, Imladris is Gondolin, the Beornings and the Great River are analogues of the Edain of Beleriand and the Sirion, the spiders are those of the vales of Gorgoroth, the Elven fortress-caverns are Menegroth and the Lonely Mountain is the Hill of Himring, with the Iron Hills of Angband beyond. This then makes the King of the Elves Thingol not Thranduil. Tolkien may have used that geo-political framework, but he consciously sets this story millennia later; Elrond refers to Gondolin long-gone. The geography echoes Beleriand, but the story makes it clear that it happens long after the fall of Beleriand. The echoes are there for one reason (what we may think of as Tolkien's efficiency of setting) but in terms of the story, they are remembrances by the characters of a long history.
So Thranduil, who perhaps remembers Menegroth and must then have been born in the First Age, is King of the Elves of the Greenwood in the south of the forest that becomes Mirkwood. It is around 1050TA that evil begins to stir in this region (LotR: Tale of Years), leading to the creation of the dark power of Dol Guldur. This is when the movement of the Elves of the the Greenwood begins. They withdraw, and settle around the highlands known as 'The Mountains of Mirkwood' in later days. They then, after perhaps another thousand years or so, withdraw even further, into the north of the forest, and it is at this point that the 'Elven-king's Halls' of The Hobbit are established. This is around the same time that the Dwarves also arrive in this area.
So throughout the Third Age there is a gradual northward movement of Elves from the south of the Greenwood to the central regions and then to the north where we find them in The Hobbit.
So how does Legolas fit in? There are two clues as to his age using this chronology - three really but I do not rate one of them as being at all illuminating. The least important in my estimation is the aside that the trees of Fangorn make Legolas feel young as he has not since journeying with the 'children' of the Fellowship (Age is a curious thing in Tolkien's legendarium, with many races living much longer lives than normal humans. The actual ages of the characters are: Frodo is 50, Merry is 36, Pippin is 28, Sam 38, Gimli 139, Aragorn 87 and Boromir 40. Gandalf of course is co-eval with the universe and doesn't count). This, in my estimation, tells us absolutely nothing useful except that he is older than the other members of the Fellowship, which we might well have guessed.
A more telling statement is that he has seen oaks grow from acorn to ruin. Because Tolkien was Tolkien and always writing about trees, this is likely significant. He most likely meant 'English' oaks as the species he was most familiar with (though some species do grow older - but if he had meant something other than 'an oak which readers and indeed their children are likely to be familiar with', he would probably have described it), and therefore he likely had in mind a life-span of approximately 500 years. It may be that the 'oaks' Legolas saw grow up from acorns and die all lived at the same time and he is saying that he has seen many oaks simultaneously grow and die over the last 500-and-a-bit-more years, but then, he may as well have just said he'd watched one. A more likely interpretation, at least in my opinion, is that though there is overlap there are two or more complete cycles here; pluralising the oaks implies to me that he is saying that he is at least (roughly) one thousand years old.
The War of the Ring happens in 3018-19 of the Third Age. If this interpretation is valid, Legolas seems to be saying he was born before (approximately) 2019 of the Third Age, possibly long before, and very unlikely to be long after (though we may perhaps allow a little lee-way; 900 years does not seem to be stretching the point unduly, 700 years does, to me at least).
But how much before? This is where sketching out the history of the Woodland Realm becomes crucial. In the first chapter in Lorien (FotR: Lothlorien), Legolas and Haldir refer to each others' people in ways that suggest they are estranged. As we have seen, on what might be called the 'standard interpretation' based on the Tale of Years, until 1050TA, the Elves of Lorien and The Greenwood lived close together and were in regular contact. Legolas's statement about the strangeness of the Galadhrim implies (though it does not state directly) that he has lived only while there was no contact between the Elves of the Greenwood and Lorien (or at least, little: there must have been some, given that he knows the Song of Nimrodel, which cannot have been composed until 1,000 years after the Elves of the Greenwood separated themselves from the Elves of Lorien).
This implies that the earliest potential birth-date for Legolas is around 1050TA.
What we are left with using these two lines of evidence is the feeling that Legolas is born 'somewhere' between c.1050TA and c.2019TA, which makes him between 999 and 1,968 years old at the time of the Council of Elrond.
The latest date here is 30 years after the Dwarves came to Erebor. It is a small but significant window of opportunity. If one accepts an Ereborian forging of the mail-coat, using ingots from Moria brought by the exiles, one cannot escape the possibility - and may even have to admit the strong possibility - that the mithril shirt that Thorin presents to Bilbo was likely made for Legolas, a young prince of the Elves of Northern Mirkwood, in the first few decades of the Dwarf-kingdom - between 1989 and approximately 2019, perhaps as late as around 2025 or 2026TA. No other possible known candidates exist for a 'late' manufacture, and Legolas cannot be ruled out. Again, Occam's Razor suggests that it was at least intended for (even if never one could argue it was never delivered to) Legolas - that in creating him for The Lord of the Rings, Tolkien accidentally supplied the only possible 'Elf-prince' that could fit an 'Ereborian' manufacture of the mithril shirt.
