As always, spoiler warnings...

There was also a strange Elf clad in green and brown, Legolas, a messenger from his father, Thranduil, the Kind of the Elves of Northern Mirkwood. (The Lord of the Rings: Book 2, The Council of Elrond)

While we may read the word 'strange,' the first descriptor in the first mention of Legolas in J. R. R. Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings, to mean 'unknown to those present,' I contend that that he is actually odd, although that is revealed gradually and sporadically.

He appears not at all in Books 1 (the first part of The Fellowship of the Ring) and 4 (the second part of The Two Towers), and very little in Book 6 (the last part of The Return of the King). In the rest of the story, his appearances in the text are often sporadic, and occasionally revealing. In Book 5, most of what he says, or is described doing, is related to the Paths of the Dead, narrating that adventure to the Hobbits after-the-fact (trading off with Gimli); this is easily his longest stretch of dialog in the entire Lord of the Rings, but little of it is personal. And in Book 2, prior to the Company coming to Lothlorien, he does not say or do much, although much of what he says and does is revealing and... strange. We get the most insight into Legolas in the last part of Book 2, from Lothlorien to the breaking of the Company, and in large parts of Book 3.

Looking through all of these Legolas moments, I'm struck by how weird Tolkien's Elves are, more than just long-lived, 'nobler' Men, or the idols of Hobbits like Sam, or the 'opposite' of Dwarves, if you will. It seems that Tolkien goes out of his way to highlight the unusual aspects of Elves through Legolas, at least some of the time, even as he does not actually draw attention to those odd traits. Things get stated, and then left for us to consider, if we are noticing. Maybe Legolas isn't particularly odd for an Elf; it's difficult to draw the line between the general and specific when we're really just following around one guy. Another title for this might be Legolas as an Example of How Elves Are Strange, but of course both the general and specific may be true.

So, I'd like to examine the nature of Elves as revealed by following Legolas through The Lord of the Rings (hereafter referred to as the LOTR), the text which contains the longest close-up look we get of any one Elf in Tolkien's published-in-his-lifetime Middle-earth works. We may not be able figure out how much Legolas is a strange Elf, rather than it being a matter that all Elves are generally strange, but I think Legolas is unique in the Tolkien legendarium as he provides us an opportunity to spend time with an Elf, largely in the company of non-Elves, where the strangeness of his Elven nature may be more readily apparent.

'But the Elves of this land were of a race strange to us of the silvan folk' (Book 2, The Ring Goes South)

While The History of Middle-earth series, and related books (such as The Nature of Middle-earth and Tolkien's letters) provide a lot of fodder on Elves, I am going to ignore all of that. These writings were never finished, no final J. R. R. Tolkien-approved versions really exist, and sometimes they even contain contradictions. The content of the letters can sometimes be directly affected by the person to whom Tolkien is writing or the situation for which the letter was written. As a result, any particular answer to a reader's question, for example, might be off the cuff or contain distortions. As Cory Olsen is fond of pointing out, Tolkien has an uncanny ability to closely read his own work in order to puzzle out all kinds of things he did not necessarily consider when writing. The results are often amazingly insightful and - no accident given his day job - scholarly and disciplined. But it is 'after the fact,' and I want to stay within the LOTR.

But there is another reason for that restriction. In Legolas we have something unique in Tolkien: the only Elf who Tolkien follows up-close and personal. While the Elves of the First Age have story arches that extend thousands of years (and, yes, we get less than one year of Legolas at this close distance), the perspective in The Silmarillion is quite different; not a 30,000-foot view exactly, but remote. This is due to the stylistic and narrative difference between The Silmarillion and the LOTR. In the frame narrative Tolkien establishes, one was written by Hobbits translating stories Elves told about themselves and their 'ancient' history, and one was written by Hobbits about contemporaneous events they experienced. In addition, Legolas is interacting with non-Elves nearly all of the time, so his Elvish differences appear more readily as they are revealed in relationship to the others in the Company. The First Age is Elf-dominated.

The Hobbit is even less helpful than The Silmarillion. If we treat Elrond as Half-Elven (so, while an Elf-by-choice, also an anomaly), the only named Elf in the entire Hobbit is Galion, the guard who passes out drunk, enabling Bilbo and the Dwarves to escape the Elvenking's palace. Not much help. The Elvenking is fleshed out a bit more, even if Tolkien doesn't figure out who he really is until her writes the LOTR. But mostly the Elvenking is put in opposition to the Dwarves, until he comes around under the influence of Gandalf and the practicality of Bilbo. (However, we do get an important Hobbit-view of Elves in general through Bilbo's eyes when gets to Rivendell. I'll come back to that.)

Legolas is not the only Elf in the LOTR, of course, but he is the only one we follow for any length of time. We get a bit more of Galadriel and Glorfindel than (say) Galdor, or Cirdan, but those first two in particular are characters who seem to show up out of The Silmarillion (which is not a surprise, as they both appear in The Silmarillion), and so seem somewhat alien to the LOTR in general. (Galadriel is to Legolas as Legolas is to Merry, it might be said.) Gildor, Haldir and Celeborn get a little bit of filling out, but only a little. Technically Arwen, Elladan, and Elrohir are, like Elrond, Half-elven, but regardless, the most revealing text on any of the children of Elrond is from the Appendix, in the Tale of Aragorn and Arwen, particularly when Arwen has to face her choice to share the fate of Men and be mortal. Not helpful when trying to get to the bottom of Elf-ness.

Legolas is unique in how closely we follow him and how much we hear from him directly, but Legolas is one particular Elf, so we need to careful not to extrapolate too much from him as being true of all Elves. If Legolas is strange, therefore, it does not mean all Elves are strange, at least not in the same way. He is also an Elf of the Third-age, and Middle-earth is not the same - for Elves, especially - in the Third-age as it was in the First, the time of The Silmarillion. And Middle-earth is not the same as the Undying Lands, where some Elves (such as the Vanyar) have lived for at least 10,000 years. (I imagine if a Vanyar met, say, Boromir, we'd really witness some serious strangeness.)

As mentioned above, The Hobbit does give us some examples of general Third-age Elf behavior even if we don't get to know anyone very well. In Rivendell we get what Cory Olsen has referred to as the 'tra-la-la-lally' Elves, as they welcome Bilbo, Gandalf, and the Dwarves with silly songs and frivolity. Olsen works to reconcile these Elves with the Elves in the LOTR, and those interested should read his book Exploring J. R. R. Tolkien's The Hobbit (or check out his Exploring the Lord of the Rings podcast). Olsen's main take-away, in brief, is that the Elves of the LOTR still retain the 'tra-la-la-lally'-ness of the ones from The Hobbit. Tolkien's Elves love to sing, to tell stories, to be up all night under the Stars, and, frankly, can seem frivolous (and a little strange) to regular folk like the Hobbits. We can see this in the singing-while-walking-outside-in-the-woods-at-night Elves the Hobbits meet in the Shire (in Book 1, Three is Company) and in the Hall of Fire at Rivendell (Book 2, Many Meetings).

We can also see this nature of Elves in Lothlorien. We also see how Humans nearby view them; 'regular folks' like Rohirrim see them as not only strange but dangerous. The hobbits also experience a real foreignness in Lothlorien, both the awe of that strange place as well as the alienness of it (most Elves don't speak Westron, they sleep in trees, there seems to be something the hobbits think of as magic that the Elves just think of as normal stuff, etc.). But are we far off the mark if we consider Lothlorien in the LOTR as being akin to how Legolas' people are portrayed in The Hobbit? The Elves of Mirkwood have hunts for white harts (hunts which are taboo for others to participate in) and midnight feasts in forests. On being interrupted, they disappear in a flash. They are no more harsh than the Elves of Lothlorien when dealing with trespassers, no matter how lost and hungry. The Perilous Realm of Fairy, indeed. (The least Elvish Elves seem to be those working the loading dock in the Elvenking's halls, including Galion. The LOTR movies suggest an Elf can't get drunk, and yet...)

It should be noted that Tolkien himself did not know everything there was to know about Elves when he started the LOTR. Tolkien had a habit of stumbling across people, things, and ideas during the course of writing, seemingly by accident, as if they were already established truths, as if he is truly writing history. This kind of 'discovery' occurred particularly often during the writing LOTR; examples include Faramir's existence, the Palantir, the cats of Queen Berúthiel, and the exact number of Wizards. While it cannot always be proven, it seems there are at least a few times when Legolas opens his mouth or performs an action, and, as a result, Tolkien himself discovers something about the nature of Elves. Part of this may be the specifics of how and when the LOTR was written, but observing an Elf, over a few months, in the company of Men, Dwarves, Hobbits, Wizards, and other beings creates these opportunities in a way that the Elf-centric tales of the First Age do not seem to.

In the following four sections, focusing respectively on Legolas' connection to Nature, his Physical Being, his experience of Time, and his relationship to Mortality, I'll be using Legolas words and actions to flesh out how he, either individually or representing Elves in general, is shown to be different - and ultimately 'strange' - from the other free peoples, as well as us as (I presume) Human readers. What started with singing in Rivendell in The Hobbit, when the world first met Tolkien's 'strange' Elves, was continued and expanded on in The Lord of the Rings, most particularly (and most often) in the portrayal of Legolas, the 'strange Elf clad in green and brown.'

Continue on to Part 2...