So like, this is not all hypothetical, we do actually see the two of them interact in The Hobbit, and it is decidedly friendly. That was actually one of the things that prompted this train of thought for me, because I was joking about how Bilbo must have embellished exactly how much they got along, because it didn’t seem very likely to me that Gandalf, annoyance to at least half of the leaders of Middle Earth (and also plenty of ordinary people, if the Shire is anything to go by) would be all that welcome in the halls of someone as reclusive and paranoid as everything we know about Thranduil paints him to be.
(For what it’s worth, Bilbo totally still embellished, because he’s Bilbo and that’s how The Hobbit is written, but I have come around to thinking that the gist of their exchange at the end of the book – “Farewell! O Elvenking!” said Gandalf. “Merry be the greenwood, while the world is yet young! And merry be all your folk!” / “Farewell! O Gandalf!” said the king. “May you ever appear where you are most needed and least expected! The oftener you appear in my halls the better I shall be pleased!” – might actually be closer to verbatim than my knee-jerk instinct would have suggested.)
Anyways, after thinking about it further, I think that’s half true. I don’t think he liked Gandalf much at first, when the Istari first showed up in Middle Earth. I think it probably would have taken a while for him to actually trust him at all. But I also think that by the time of The Hobbit (and probably a fair few centuries before that, too), he had completely turned around to thinking of Gandalf as one of his only real allies, and that’s for one simple reason: Mirkwood is fucked, and very few people are listening.
Let’s backtrack though. It’s the start of the Third Era, and Thranduil just became king of the Greenwood. It is absolutely, beyond a shadow of a doubt, the worst thing that has ever happened to him. Not only is is monarchical succession a pretty raw deal if you are an immortal and also like your parents, but the particular conflict that his father was killed in also completely decimated their people – TWO-THIRDS of the elves from the Greenwood that fought in the War of the Last Alliance died over the course of the conflict. So he leads an utterly wrecked, almost certainly traumatized group of people home after Sauron’s defeat and has a lot of responsibility placed on his shoulders at the same time.
This makes him. Uh. Paranoid.
In the Unfinished Tales, we get this:
But there was in Thranduil’s heart a still deeper shadow. He had seen the horror of Mordor and could not forget it. If ever he looked south its memory dimmed the light of the Sun, and though he knew that it was now broken and deserted and under the vigilance of the Kings of Men, fear spoke in his heart that it was not conquered for ever; it would arise again.
And this is when a lot of other people were still a little more optimistic that Sauron was gone for good!
(As a side note, this is also one of the reasons why I think he might have been colder to Gandalf at first. Oh? You’re a messenger from the Valar that’s here to help now? After the war that killed my father and the bulk of my people? Thanks for nothing. I have my own problems to deal with now.)
For a while I think he didn’t give much of a thought to anything outside the borders of his kingdom. After all, there was probably a lot of work to do there turning things back into a functional society – especially for a new ruler – and I think he was probably not feeling the most charitable towards some of the rest of his own people, as a Sindar elf who had lost a whole lot in a war that he probably chalked up to problems that the Noldor had caused (or at least made worse). And I don’t think he would have interacted much with Gandalf in this time.
But then, the strangest thing happens! Guess who moves into the Greenwood around 1050 of the Third Age. That’s right! Our old buddy totally not Sauron the Necromancer!
(It’s Sauron. It’s Sauron.)
It sounds like the effects of him making his home there were pretty immediate – the timeline in RotK actually suggests people were calling the wood “Mirkwood” instead of the Greenwood by 1050, and it isn’t until a vague couple decades later that the Necromancer was a known entity. It’s also a little unclear who exactly first came to the conclusion that it was actually Sauron there, but my money? Is on Thranduil. Not only would he have known more about what was going on in his own kingdom than most of the other leaders in Middle Earth would be aware of, but Tolkien describes him as so explicitly afraid of the return of Sauron that I can’t imagine him not taking the threat incredibly seriously as soon as it arose. Even if he wasn’t the first to realize it, I still think he would have accepted it quickly and early.
And that’s exactly why I think he likes Gandalf: because the only other character we see regularly, consistently taking the threat seriously – and not only that, but trying to do things about it, too! – is Gandalf.
RotK tells us that by 2060, “the Wise” suspected it was Sauron in Dol Guldur. Three years later, Gandalf himself goes to investigate, chasing Sauron away for a bit. The Watchful Peace commences. 400 years later, Sauron comes back. The Watchful Peace ends, and the White Council is formed. In 2850, it’s Gandalf again who goes to Dol Guldur to confirm it’s definitely Sauron there, and urges the Council that they need to do something about it. Almost ONE HUNDRED years later they finally do (because Saruman was mucking things up for his own purposes and preventing the others from acting).
I am pretty sure that for centuries, conversations in Mirkwood went like this:
THRANDUIL: Hey, Gandalf, I know you believe me and can see how much of a problem this is, when is everyone else going to come help?
GANDALF: I’m going to try bringing it up at the meeting again, hopefully it will work this time since you and I both know we REALLY need to act on this.
THRANDUIL: SAURON LIVES IN MY BACKYARD, GANDALF
THRANDUIL: I’M RAISING A CHILD IN THESE WOODS, GANDALF
THRANDUIL: YOU’RE THE ONLY ONE WHO UNDERSTANDS ME, GANDALF
GANDALF: No, I won’t punch Saruman in the face for you this time. Sorry
THRANDUIL: Never mind. I hate you.
(Side note, but how much Schadenfreude do you think Thranduil got when his son came home and said “Oh, by the way, that Saruman guy? Evil. 100% evil. We fought against his armies and everything.” Galadriel and Elrond left Middle Earth just so they wouldn’t have to deal with his next few centuries of “I was right and you were wrong” gloating)
So anyways. That’s why I think Thranduil likes him. Gandalf was his earnestly-doing-his-best committee guy for CENTURIES (and occasional on-the-ground help, even – certainly more times than anyone else was) while he constantly petitioned for someone to help with his overblown invasive species problem, and probably really genuinely one of the only allies he trusted actually had Mirkwood’s best interests at heart – something which I think would have gone a long way with him. Mirkwood was fighting the battle that would become the conflict of the Lord of the Rings books for far longer and way earlier than any other corner of Middle Earth. And they were doing it mostly alone.
Most needed and least expected, indeed.
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