Varda

Varda belongs to the Ainur, the spirits brought forth from the thought of Ilúvatar before the world was made, and she is among those who chose to enter Eä and bind themselves to its history. Within the order of the Valar she is the greatest of the Valier, the queens of that company, and she is counted among the Aratar, the highest of the Powers. She is the spouse of Manwë, and their dwelling is set upon the summit of Taniquetil, the loftiest peak of Valinor, from which the two together are said to look upon the world more clearly than any other of their kind. Her proper element is light: the Valaquenta relates that the light of Ilúvatar remains living in her countenance, and that no words of Elves or Men suffice to describe her.

The name Varda is Quenya and carries the sense of the exalted or the lofty, a description of rank and of the height at which she dwells rather than a title given by any people. In the High-elven tongue she is also Elentári, the queen of the stars, and Tintallë, the kindler, both formed upon the vocabulary of stars and of the setting alight of them. The Sindarin Elbereth joins the element for star to a word meaning queen or spouse, and Gilthoniel names her likewise as one who kindles stars. The Valaquenta further records that of all the Valar it was Varda whom Melkor most feared and hated, since she had known his mind before the Music began and had refused him; her name and his are therefore set against one another from the beginning.

In the Third Age the Sindarin forms were the ones commonly heard, and the hymn sung by the Elves of Rivendell addresses her as Elbereth Gilthoniel and adds the title Fanuilos, which belongs to her white figure upon the mountain. The Quenya names survive in more learned speech: Galadriel's lament at the parting from Lórien uses both Elentári and Tintallë. Appendix E notes that a two-syllable Elvish name of this shape takes its stress on the first syllable, and that the vowel of Varda is the open a of father rather than the flattened English sound.

The earliest deeds recorded of Varda belong to the shaping of Arda, long before any of the Children of Ilúvatar were awake. When Aulë wrought two great lamps to light the newly ordered world, it was Varda who filled them with light, Illuin standing in the north and Ormal in the south, and Manwë who hallowed them; beneath that double illumination the growth of the Spring of Arda began. Melkor cast the lamps down, the symmetry of the lands was ruined, and the Valar withdrew over the Sea to Aman. There her work went on at a narrower compass: when the Two Trees were kindled and their light waxed and waned in turn, Varda gathered the silver dew that fell from Telperion and the golden rain that fell from Laurelin and hoarded them in great vessels, so that nothing of that light should be wasted. The Quenta narrates these events by ages rather than by reckoned years, and gives no dates for them.

Out of that hoarded silver came the deed for which she is chiefly remembered. Foreseeing the awakening of the Firstborn, Varda took the dews of Telperion and made new stars, brighter than any that had burned since the world was made, and she also gathered many of the older stars and set them as signs in the heavens. Among those named are Carnil and Luinil, Nénar and Lumbar, Alcarinquë and Elemmírë, together with the figures Wilwarin, Telumendil, Soronúmë and Anarríma. She set Menelmacar in the sky with his shining belt, which the Eldar read as a forecast of the Last Battle. In the northern heavens she hung Valacirca, the Sickle of the Valar — seven stars placed there to defy Melkor and to mark the doom that waited for him. The labour was long, and it is told that in the very hour it ended, as Menelmacar took his first stride across the heavens and Helluin burned blue through the mists at the rim of the world, the Elves woke beside the water of Cuiviénen. The first thing they looked upon was the stars, and from that hour Varda has been honoured by that people above all others of the Powers.

Her hand appears next in the history of the Noldor. When Fëanor had finished the three jewels that held the mingled light of the Trees, Varda hallowed them, so that no mortal flesh, no unclean hand and nothing of evil will could touch them without being scorched and withered; the safeguarding of the Silmarils thus rested upon her act as much as upon any watch the Noldor set. After Melkor and Ungoliant slew the Trees and the jewels were stolen away, and after the greater part of the Noldor had departed from Aman, the last flower of Laurelin and the last fruit of Telperion were fashioned into the vessels of Moon and Sun, and it was Varda who ordained their courses. Her first design would have left no hour of the world without one of the two lights in the sky; at the plea of Lórien and Estë, who valued sleep and quiet, she altered her counsel, and so a measure of darkness returned to Middle-earth and the ordering of day and night took the shape it has kept since.

The last event of the Elder Days that touches her province is the voyage of Eärendil. When his ship was hallowed and lifted up to sail the airs above the world, bearing the recovered Silmaril, a new star rose that the peoples of Beleriand took as a sign of hope; the deed is ascribed to the Valar together rather than to Varda alone, though the heavens it altered were her ordering. Beyond this the Quenta records no further act of hers in the wars against Morgoth or in the ages that followed. In place of deeds the Valaquenta describes an office: seated with Manwë upon Taniquetil, she hears more clearly than any other dweller in Eä the voices that cry to her out of the lands east of the Sea. That account explains the form her presence takes in the later histories, where she is not an actor but a name called upon.

The Third Age evidence is almost entirely of this kind, and it can be dated. On the night of 6 October 3018, in the hollow beneath Weathertop, Frodo called upon her name as he struck at the Lord of the Nazgûl; Aragorn judged afterwards that the name had done the assailant more hurt than the blade. Later that month, at Rivendell, Frodo heard the household of Elrond sing a hymn addressed to her, sung in a tongue he could not follow, and it is from this passage that the Sindarin forms of her titles are best known. In March 3019 the pattern repeats in Mordor: Sam called upon her at the pass above Minas Morgul in words of a language he had never learned, and again at the gate of the Tower of Cirith Ungol, where his cry and the light of Galadriel's phial together broke the will of the Watchers. In each instance the invocation is made by one with no direct knowledge of her, and the effect falls upon creatures of the Enemy rather than upon the speaker, which is the chief testimony the Red Book offers to her continuing power.

Among the Valar the several spheres of care are distributed, and Varda's is light and the ordering of the heavens. Her power, as the Valaquenta and the account of the beginning of days present it, is chiefly one of filling, gathering and hallowing rather than of fashioning: light is set into vessels that another has made, the dews of the Trees are gathered and stored against need, jewels are consecrated, courses are appointed. She is nowhere credited with the shaping of lands, of growing things or of living bodies, which belong to Aulë, Yavanna and Oromë, nor with the winds and airs, which are Manwë's. Her authority is exercised alongside his and is described in terms of complement rather than of rank, and the texts do not measure the two against one another.

The sources are equally plain about what that power does not extend to. Varda takes no recorded part in any of the wars against Melkor: the assault upon Utumno and the campaign that ended the Elder Days are the work of Tulkas, Oromë and the host of the West, and after the withdrawal to Aman she is never said to have crossed the Sea. Her hallowing of the Silmarils scorched the hands of Melkor when he took them, but it neither prevented the theft nor held the jewels in Valinor; it exacted a lasting pain and left the deed done. Her first ordering of the two vessels of light was likewise set aside in council at the plea of other Valar, an authority evidently subject to deliberation. The single act attributed to her in a later age is of the same deliberative kind: in the account of the choosing of the emissaries to Middle-earth she spoke against the naming of Curunír, a word he did not forget.

In the works published in Tolkien's lifetime she is not an agent at all, and the distance is itself part of what is being described. The lament sung at the parting from Lothlórien names her as the kindler of the stars and sets that memory against the gulf now dividing the singer from Valimar; the grief of the song rests on the fact that her country lies beyond any road that can be taken from Middle-earth. What the Third Age evidence supports is therefore narrower than it is sometimes taken to be: the potency of a name among those who have cause to fear it, remembered and uttered by peoples who have never seen her, rather than any intervention of her own that the record can show.

The bond with Manwë is the first of her relations and the frame for all the others. The Valaquenta sets out the spouses of the Valar as pairs of shared office, and of Varda and Manwë it records no offspring, no household in the manner of the Children of Ilúvatar, and no division of counsel; what it records instead is that each is made more perceptive by the presence of the other. Her queenship is therefore twofold, held by her own stature among the Valier and by the partnership on the mountain, and the texts nowhere separate the two claims. Of the Maiar only Ilmarë is named as attached to her service, a handmaid answering to Eönwë, who bears the standard and the errands of Manwë; beyond that single name the sources describe no company about her.

Her enmity with Melkor is likewise singular, and it is unequal in the way it is reported. The hatred and the fear are consistently ascribed to him; no speech of hers against him is preserved, and she is not shown contending with him in any council or field. What the record gives is a rejection made before the Music and a memory of it that he could not put down. It is worth marking that this enmity is not inherited by his lieutenant: Sauron is nowhere set against her in the sources, and the terror her name works upon his creatures in the later ages belongs to what those creatures are rather than to any quarrel between the two.

With the Eldar the relation is one of reverence returned as attention rather than as intervention: they hold her above the other Powers, and what the sources credit her with in answer is hearing. Only once is she shown turning that attention into a word that shaped events in Middle-earth. In the account of the choosing of the emissaries to oppose Sauron, Aulë advanced Curumo, and Varda spoke to the ordering of the company in a way that raised Olórin above the place assigned him. Curumo remembered the slight, and the memory is offered as one root of the rivalry that followed between Saruman and Gandalf. It is a brief intercession, and characteristic: a judgement of persons rather than a deed of power.

In the earliest matter her place was already what it would remain — Manwë's spouse, dwelling with him on the mountain above the plain of Valinor — but her names were not. The Lost Tales call her Tinwetári, queen of the stars, in the tongue Tolkien then named Qenya, and Bridhil or Timbridhil in Gnomish, the language afterwards replaced by Noldorin and at last by Sindarin; the form Elbereth has no existence at this stage. The star-making, too, is told in a more anecdotal manner than the later Quenta permits. Varda scatters the stars from vessels of the silver dew of Silpion, the early name of the White Tree, and the heavens are filled star by star with names attached as they go; Morwinyon, the great star of the west, is explained there as one she let fall in her haste, so that it rolled away and burns low at the world's edge. The seven stars hung in the north against Melko are present from the first, under the name of the Silver Sickle.

The familiar names belong to the writing of the 1930s and after. The Etymologies, compiled alongside the Quenta Silmarillion, enters Varda under a root carrying the sense of loftiness and gives Elbereth as the equivalent in Noldorin, which was then the speech of the exiled Noldor and only later reassigned to the Sindar of Beleriand. In the material gathered in Morgoth's Ring the kindling of the stars is fitted into the annalistic frame of the Annals of Aman, where the deeds of the Valar are set out under reckoned years, a chronology the published narrative mostly leaves aside. The same volume preserves the late essays in which Tolkien attempted to reconcile the legends with a world round from its beginning and a Sun coeval with it. Such a revision would have unsettled every account of the ordering of lights, and it was never carried through the narrative texts, so that the version edited for publication rests on the older astronomy.