A King Is He Who Can Hold His Own by sallysavestheday

A King Is He Who Can Hold His Own

The Nandor of the Greenwood find the notion of kings amusing, to say the least. Structuring rules and routines around a single person makes no sense. The Wood is welcoming, but its depths cannot be plumbed by any individual; they must work together as they slide through the great, green network of its wild mind. What it shares is for all of them – there is no mine, no yours, just ours: the Speaking Peoples, the creatures of air and light and those of the dim, cool hollows that curl beneath the trees. The forest mycelia know no rulers; why then should Elves, who are bound and interwound with the Wood in similarly lacy and eternal ways?

The fleeing Iathrim have other ideas: the power of Doriath flowed from the Queen and King and their ordered grasp on the great mysteries of the Sheltered Realm. For centuries they have been the people of the middle ground: led by those who have seen and sung the Light, yet clinging to the woods and waters of Beleriand, which whispered so sweetly under the stars. The raw tangle of the Greenwood’s peoples and its living web puzzles them: how will they remain who they are, the Iathrim elders ask, in this disordered world?

Among their youth, however, there are those who find the Wood enticing and refreshing. Young Thranduil is rarely to be seen among his father’s people – he spends years probing the depths of the Wood in the company of his Nandorin age-mates, learning the secrets of the forest and teasing out his own new place within. The hunters take him in; he makes a name for himself with courage and skill and a leadership that grows from listening. His silver hair flashes in the shadows as he flits from tree to tree, silent and graceful and proud.

Oropher indulges him. He sympathizes with Thranduil’s desire to fit, to settle, to find a role for himself that means more than survivor, or refugee. Oropher will be forever grateful to the Nandor. Thranduil will simply be one of them.

When the other elders of Thingol’s erstwhile court glower at Thranduil’s airy abandon Oropher only smiles, and asks after their own problems, knitting solutions that bridge the cultural gaps. A minor lord of Doriath, he never had need or opportunity to prove himself capable of anything beyond the expectations of one at the margins of the rule. But in the Greenwood, he slips easily into the role of a trusted counselor, a mediator between the old and new. It is not long before his order-craving brethren call him Lord. He is bemused but not wholly unwilling, and the role settles on him like an invisible crown.

Farther west, Lindon consolidates around Gil-galad as the smoke of the great upheaval fades. His kingdom’s arms grow long, and they reach ever closer to the Greenwood. The Nandor perceived the great cracking and submersion of Beleriand with dismay; they are cautious of the Noldor King whose war that was, and wary of his intentions. It seems to them that these cousins from the West are primed to take first and ask after, holding mastery of steel above a closer kinship with the wild or the gentle guarded balance that the Elves of the forest maintain.

Watching Oropher wield his acquired, diaphanous lordship, the Nandor see a possibility. Gil-galad will need an equal to treat with – a power that matches his own to keep his acquisitive Noldor ways at bay. This Sindar refugee, who still stands half in the ancient court of the Iathrim’s minds, can serve that purpose. His other foot is planted well within the Wood, and, knowing something of the griefs between the Sindar and the Noldor, they have confidence that he will not be led astray.

Thranduil finds the prospect of his father’s kingship mirthful in the extreme, and all the eventual panoply of court will not assuage him. They have fallen into what they fled, in his opinion, and he will dance the dance only as much as is needed to keep up the illusion. The lengthening peace finds him wed and gone into the depths of the Wood, unless his father needs his elegant presence to bolster the daydream of the Sindar court for Gil-galad’s messengers.

One such ambassador, perhaps disappointed in his own king’s resolutely heirless state, praises Thranduil’s natural majesty to Oropher and congratulates him on so secure and noble a succession. Thranduil curls a lip with such disdain as to ensure his reputation for centuries to come. He will have none of kingship or its greed and competition, he vows to himself, as he casts off his silken robes and slips back into the Wood. Oropher is immortal, and secure in his game of power. There is no need to fear that it will not always be this way.