Yavanna

Yavanna belongs to the Ainur, those spirits that arose from the thought of Ilúvatar before the World was made, and she is counted among the mightiest of those who afterwards entered Eä and bound themselves to Arda until its end. Within that company she is reckoned one of the Valier, the queens of the Valar, and one of the eight Aratar, whom the Eldar held to be exalted above the rest; in the roll of the queens her name is set directly after Varda's. Her marriage to Aulë places a quiet opposition at the centre of the Powers, since his mastery is of substances shaped by skill and hers of what unfolds of itself from the soil. She is named also the elder sister of Vána, and her care extends to every kind of growing thing without distinction of size or use.

Her chief name is Quenya and descriptive rather than personal: it joins the element yávë, fruit, to anna, gift, so that the whole may be rendered as one who bestows fruit. Beside it stands the reverential title Kementári, formed from kemen, earth, with tári, queen, a word of the same root as the tar- of high or royal names; the Silmarillion notes that this is the name used of her in honour. Both names describe an office rather than a history, and neither is presented as bestowed by another hand. Tradition also preserves two manners in which she has been perceived: as a tall woman clothed in green, and as a tree reaching from earth to sky, sunlit at the crown and shedding dew from its branches, at whose feet the soil grows rich.

The name survived into the reckoning of later ages, where it is attached to the season of ripening. In the calendar of the Númenórean kings and its successors the ninth month is Yavannië in Quenya and Ivanneth in Sindarin, the latter showing the regular correspondence of Sindarin initial i- to Quenya ya-; Shire-folk called the same month Halimath. Pronunciation follows the ordinary rule for Quenya words of three syllables: because the second syllable is closed by the doubled consonant, the stress rests there, giving ya-VAN-na rather than a first-syllable accent.

Her recorded deeds begin with the ordering of Arda, when the Valar laboured to establish the shape of the world against Melkor's undoing. After Aulë had wrought the two great Lamps and Varda had filled them with light, Yavanna sowed the seeds she had long pondered, and beneath that steady illumination there came the season the chronicles call the Spring of Arda: mosses and grasses spread over the new-made lands, ferns and tall dark trees rose, and beasts moved in the meadows and the waters. The account is careful about the limits of that season, for no flower had yet opened and no bird had yet sung, such things still awaiting their hour with her. The Valar kept their dwelling upon the isle of Almaren in the midst of the Great Lake, and there the first age of growth had its centre.

That order was broken when Melkor cast down the Lamps. The lands were riven and reshaped by the fall, and the first flowering perished in fire and tumult, so that her earliest labour was the first of the Valar's works to be undone. The Powers withdrew over the sea to Aman and there established Valinor, and Middle-earth was left in a long twilight under the stars. Upon her growing things came the sleep that later tradition names after her, in which much that had begun to unfold was checked and held dormant. Of all the Valar she and Oromë are the two remembered as returning to the Outer Lands with any frequency, she to tend and heal what Melkor's malice had marred, and it is to those visits that the great woods of the Hither Lands are ascribed.

In the new realm she performed the work by which the Elves chiefly remembered her. The Valar assembled at the Ring of Doom, and upon the green mound of Ezellohar before the western gate of Valmar she hallowed the ground and sat long in silence, singing a song of power, while Nienna stood beside her and watered the earth with weeping. From the mound rose two saplings that grew into Telperion and Laurelin, the one bearing silver light and the other gold, each waxing and waning in turn over seven hours so that there were two daily minglings of their radiance. Because their light measured the days of the Blessed Realm, the reckoning of the Years of the Trees was counted from their making, and her single act thus set the frame of the chronology in which the greater part of the elder history is told.

A second turning point followed Aulë's secret making of the Fathers of the Dwarves. Learning what her spouse had done, and that his creatures would come forth before the Children of Ilúvatar and would delve and hew, Yavanna went to Manwë and set before him her fear that the growing things of the earth, which cannot flee or defend themselves, would be spent without pity for the works of others. Manwë sat in thought and perceived within the Music a part he had not marked before, and answered that spirits would come to dwell in the trees and walk in their defence, and that eagles would nest in the mountain heights. Returning to Aulë, she told him that his children should have a care where they set the axe; he replied only that they would nonetheless have need of wood.

The Trees stood until Melkor, released from his sentence and afterwards fled from Valinor, returned in league with Ungoliant during a festival of the first fruits that Manwë had ordained. In the hour of the mingling of the lights he pierced the Trees and the spider drank their sap and their radiance until both were withered, and darkness covered the land. When the Valar sat in council at the Ring of Doom, Yavanna declared that the light of the Trees was gone beyond her recall save by one means: the imperishable light preserved in Fëanor's jewels, if he would surrender them to be broken. Fëanor refused, judging the demand a theft of his heart's work, and word came at that moment that Finwë had been slain and the Silmarils carried away, so that the offer was already void.

Her last work upon the Trees themselves recovered something from their ruin: singing again beside the weeping of Nienna, she drew from Telperion a single flower of silver and from Laurelin a single fruit of gold, which Aulë's people set in vessels and Varda sent upon their courses as Moon and Sun. Of her later making the most consequential was the tree she gave to the Elves of Tirion, an image of Telperion in form though without light of its own, from whose line came a seedling planted upon Tol Eressëa and, in descent from it, the white tree Nimloth that stood in the courts of the Kings of Númenor. Through a fruit rescued before that tree was felled, and through the sapling found upon the mountain above Minas Tirith at the crowning of the King, the same stock was still growing at the end of the Third Age.

Among the Powers Yavanna holds no realm bounded by place or element, as Manwë holds the airs and Ulmo the waters; her province is a condition of things rather than a region, and it crosses every land alike. The Valaquenta sets under her care all that lives and grows in the earth, and the later account of her dispute with Aulë preserves the terms by which that care was divided: the olvar, which are rooted and cannot stir, and the kelvar, which move and are able to flee or to defend themselves. She is said to reverence all of these without regard to their stature or their usefulness, and the argument she carried before Manwë rested on that principle rather than on any claim of ownership. Her kinship reaches into the lesser order as well, for Melian, who afterwards came to Middle-earth and became queen in Doriath, is described as being of Yavanna's kindred from before the World was made.

Her power is exercised chiefly through song, blessing, and long forethought, and its products are grown rather than fashioned. The chronicles are consistent on this: seeds are devised in thought over an age before they are set in the ground, ground is hallowed before anything rises from it, and what she brings forth thereafter unfolds by its own nature. The same manner of working governs preservation as well as increase, for the dormancy that fell upon growing things in the darkened world is presented as a checking of growth rather than its destruction, from which much could afterwards wake. Nothing in the texts attributes to her the making of independent creatures with will of their own; when guardians were needed for the woods, she could ask for them but not appoint them, and the answer came from Manwë's hearing of the Music and from Ilúvatar's thought behind it.

The limits of that power are stated by Yavanna herself and are unusually explicit for a Vala. When the Valar asked whether the Trees might be renewed, she answered that even the greatest of those under Ilúvatar have works they can perform once and no second time, and that the making of the Trees had been such a work; what she afterwards drew from them was a last remnant, not a restoration. She had no means of defending them in the hour of attack, and the light they had held was recoverable only through the Silmarils, which lay outside her reach. In Middle-earth her labour is described as tending and healing hurts already done rather than undoing Melkor's marring, and her repeated errand there is presented as necessary because that marring persisted. She likewise holds no authority over the Children of Ilúvatar: she could warn that the Dwarves should be careful where they laid the axe, but not forbid it, and Aulë's reply that they would still have need of timber stands unanswered in the text.

The union with Aulë is the relationship by which she is chiefly defined, and the texts present it as a pairing of two makers whose methods do not meet. His work is upon substance mastered and shaped, hers upon what is set in the ground and left to unfold; yet each has depended upon the other, for it was his labour that framed the vessels of light beneath which her first sowing came up, and his people who afterwards enclosed the last flower and fruit of the Trees so that they might be borne aloft. Their one recorded disagreement is instructive in its manner as much as its matter: she did not contend with him directly but carried her fear to Manwë, and returned only afterwards to tell her spouse what had been granted. That the last word in the exchange belongs to Aulë, and concedes nothing, suggests a marriage in which the difference of purpose was acknowledged rather than resolved.

Among the other Powers her closest working fellowship is with Nienna, who stands beside her at both of the great acts of growth in Valinor, so that song and grief are twice joined in the same labour. With Varda there is a division of function rather than a partnership: light is kindled, set in place, or sent upon its course by the Star-queen, while what that light quickens belongs to Yavanna. Manwë appears in her history less as companion than as the authority to whom she appeals and who alone can answer her out of the Music. Her nearer kin are Vána, her younger sister, whose province of flowers and unfading youth adjoins her own, and Oromë, Vána's spouse, the one other Vala who kept the road back to the Hither Lands. Of her kindred among the lesser spirits the texts name Melian, who served Vána as well as Estë and tended the flowering trees in Irmo's gardens before she ever passed east.

Her enmity with Morgoth is notable for never becoming a meeting. He does not confront her, and she is nowhere set against him in arms; his malice falls instead upon what she has raised, and she is left to count the loss and to labour at the healing of it. Ungoliant, who consumed light and gave nothing back, stands as the exact reverse of a power whose whole office is bestowal. With the Children of Ilúvatar her dealings are similarly oblique: she gives, warns, and asks, but does not command. The Dwarves receive a caution about the axe, the Elves of Tirion a tree made in the likeness of one they had lost, and Fëanor a request he was free to refuse and did.

In the earliest stratum of the legendarium she is most often Palúrien, an earth-power of markedly more elemental cast, with Yavanna standing beside that name rather than displacing it. The Lost Tales give her also Kémi, the Earth-lady, and a Gnomish name, Bladorwen, glossed as the wide earth together with all that grows and ripens upon it. The genealogy of that period differs sharply from what was afterwards settled, for Oromë appears there as the son of Aulë and Palúrien, so that the huntsman who in the published account is her sister's husband was first her child. The older simplex survived the recasting only as a component of Kementári, but it is still recorded in the etymological work of the 1930s, where the root KEM yields a Quenya Kémi rendered Mother Earth, beside YAB, fruit, and ANA, give.

The Two Trees pass through comparable change. In the Lost Tales they are Laurelin and Silpion, the latter only later becoming Telperion, and their kindling is a shared labour in which Palúrien's song stands beside the vessels of golden and silver light that the Valar drew upon. More striking is the aftermath of their ruin, for there the last fruit and the last flower are drawn forth by the weeping of Vána and Lórien upon the roots, a scene afterwards reassigned to Yavanna's singing with Nienna at her side. Her dispute with Aulë over the fate of growing things belongs at the opposite end of Tolkien's working life, being a late chapter composed long after the surrounding narrative and afterwards fitted into the Quenta. Among the last speculative essays there is also a scheme in which the Sun is primeval, which would have taken from the Trees their office as the first source of light in Arda.