Keep up? Hah!

: My question is actually, how important was Thranduils kingdom?
: Considering the size it's the Elven equalent of Gondor, but we
: don't hear a lot about it. Was it sparesly populated, or was
: the inhabitants really lazy and didn't care about anything but
: singing in the woods? (though a fine way to spend time)
: What's with Thranduils Elves?

We don't know the boundaries of the kingdom. I used to imagine it encompassed all of northern Mirkwood, but now I'm pretty sure it didn't. Thranduil was the most powerful Elven lord at the end of the Third Age. He had the largest population (perhaps larger than Lorien, Rivendell, and Lindon combined) of Elves.

His people built houses. We know that much from the fact that Bilbo raided a village on the river. They engaged in trade with Laketown and apparently enjoyed hunting and feasting in the forest. But they probably had to maintain regular patrols to keep the spiders and orcs from settling down in their region of the forest. So I imagine they would have stayed pretty busy. Then they would have needed to raise food, gather material for clothing, make weapons (spears don't last forever -- I doubt many Elven spears would last very long, and the archers would have needed a lot of arrows).

So, you have Elvish tradesmen, probably carpenters, masons, hunters, farmers, soldiers, and any number of other skilled crafts represented in their society. One area of great speculation is how they would have been organized socially.
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