How old is Legolas in The Lord of the Rings?

Legolas is one of the most popular characters from The Lord of the Rings. Elves live forever, but exactly how old is this one?

Weirdly, author J.R.R. Tolkien is silent on the matter, and I say “weirdly” because Tolkien was pretty thorough with this kind of stuff. The appendices to The Lord of the Rings are filled with specific information about names and dates, but they don’t mention when Legolas was born.

That said, the people behind the “official movie guide” for The Lord of the Rings list Legolas as being born in the year 87 of the Third Age of Middle-earth, which makes him some 2,931 years old around the time of the War of the Ring, which happened over 3,000 years into the Third Age of Middle-earth.

Legolas age in The Lord of the Rings

Still, if Tolkien didn’t say when Legolas was born, we shouldn’t assume that the folks behind the movie guide know. Oddly, “2,931” happens to be the year in the Third Age when Aragorn was born. Maybe it was a coincidence, or maybe the people putting that book together saw that number, decided it sounded like a good age for Legolas, and wrote it in.

So far as contextual clues as to Legolas’ age, the Ask Middle-earth tumblr has collected a few. Legolas father Thranduil is mentioned as having lived during the First Age of Middle-earth as well as participated during the Battle of the Last Alliance, which ended the Second Age. Legolas is not mentioned as having been alive during those times, so we can assume he was born during the Third Age.

Still, the Third Age last thousands of years, which still leaves plenty of room for ambiguity. He does seem young for an elf, having never seen the sea for the bulk of the book series and having never visited Lothlórien, Galadriel’s stronghold in Middle-earth. Elves of Mirkwood — where Legolas lives — and Lothlórien would visit each other for around the first 1,000 years of the Third Age, but stopped around the time Sauron started to rise again in Dol Guldur. This suggests that Legolas was born after the year 1,000.

But that only narrows it down a bit. And we probably won’t learn anything new in The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power, which takes place during the Second Age of Middle-earth. That show premieres on September 2.

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