The Two Trees of Valinor

After the light of the Two Lamps that had once illumined the world was cast down and ruined by Melkor, Yavanna took it upon herself to raise a new light for the dwelling place of the Valar. Upon the green mound of Ezellohar, also called Corollairë, that stood before the gates of Valimar, she labored long, singing a song of growth and power into the bare earth, while Nienna watered the ground with her tears. From this working two saplings sprang up and grew swiftly to great stature in the sight of the assembled Valar, becoming Telperion and Laurelin.

Telperion unfolded its leaves and opened its first flower before its companion did, and for this the Eldar reckoned it the Elder of the Two Trees. Among the Elves it was known by further names besides Telperion, including Silpion and Ninquelótë, names bound up with the ceaseless fall of silver dew from its blossoms. Its leaves were dark upon their upper side and shone with a soft silver sheen beneath, so that even before it bore light of its own the tree seemed touched with glimmering frost.

Laurelin came into leaf a few hours after Telperion and was likewise called by other names in the songs of the Eldar, among them Malinalda. Its young green leaves were edged with gold, and the light it shed was reckoned warmer in character than the cool silver radiance of its companion, a contrast the Eldar held in mind long after in the way they spoke of the two lights together. The names given to both Trees, multiplying in Elvish tradition beyond the two by which they are chiefly remembered, mark how central their making was held to be in the memory of Valinor.

The light the Two Trees gave was not a fixed radiance but a living rhythm: each tree waxed toward full brightness and waned again over a cycle of some hours, so that Telperion's silver glow was passing into dimness as Laurelin's gold was rising, and the two never shone at their fullest together. Between the ebb of one and the flowering of the other lay a brief hour in which their lights mingled, a blended glow the Eldar came to prize above the full brightness of either tree alone. This alternation, rather than any single unchanging glow, was what gave Valinor its measured days before Sun or Moon existed, and it was this pulse of light and half-light that the Valar and Eldar built their reckoning of time upon.

What the Trees gave off was treated in the telling as more than illumination in the ordinary sense: light fell from Telperion's flowers as dew and from Laurelin's blossoms as a kind of rain, substances that could be caught and stored rather than light that simply dispersed. Varda gathered these fallen drops in great vats to feed the making and kindling of the stars, and this careful collection marks the Trees as a source drawn upon by another power for a separate purpose, not merely an ambient glow left to shine unused. The text credits them with sustaining this gathering for a very long age, but says nothing of them acting or willing anything themselves; they are consistently a grown, tended thing, never an agent.

Fixed in one place and unable to defend or renew themselves, the Trees were wholly dependent on the powers that had made and tended them, a dependency exposed when Melkor and Ungoliant destroyed their light: neither Yavanna's song nor the combined effort of the Valar could call any brightness back into the blackened trunks, and the tale is explicit that they failed. Only a last flower drawn from Telperion and a last fruit from Laurelin, given up before the trees died entirely, could be saved and afterward set as the Moon and Sun by other hands. Beyond that final giving, the narrative attributes no further power of self-renewal to the Trees themselves, and their bare, lifeless stems were said to remain standing in Valinor.

While the Trees still stood in their prime, Fëanor undertook the long and secret labor of enclosing their mingled light within crystalline shells of his own devising, and from this work came the three Silmarils, which Varda afterward hallowed so that no unclean flesh could touch them unscathed. The jewels held living light drawn wholly from Telperion and Laurelin, a fact that bound their fate to the Trees' own from the hour of their making, though Fëanor did not yet know how soon that bond would be tested. Melkor's desire for the Silmarils, and the lies he spread among the Noldor to feed his own ends, sowed discord in Valinor even before any harm had touched the Trees themselves.

Melkor's chance came when Manwë called the Valar and much of the Noldor to a festival meant to heal the quarrel between the houses of Fëanor and Fingolfin, and the gathering drew the watch away from Ezellohar. There, in league with Ungoliant, the devouring spirit he had found lurking in the south, Melkor came upon the mound at the hour when the two lights were mingling; while Ungoliant drained root and bough of their sap, he struck both Trees to their death. Telperion and Laurelin gave up the last of their light in that single assault and sank into blackened, lifeless stems, and a darkness heavier than any Valinor had known before fell over the land.

Standing over the ruin of her work, Yavanna told the assembled Valar that only the light held captive within Fëanor's Silmarils might yet call some virtue back into the Trees' dead wood, and Fëanor was asked to yield the jewels for this one uncertain hope. He delayed his answer, and before he could give it word came that Melkor had slain his father Finwë at Formenos and carried the Silmarils off into the north. With the last vessels of the Trees' light gone beyond recall, whatever chance Yavanna's plea might have offered was lost with them, and Telperion and Laurelin were never restored.

From the flower and fruit saved in the Trees' last hours, the Valar had vessels made to carry their remaining light above the world, shaped by the craft of Aulë and filled with brightness that Varda herself set and hallowed. Tilion, a hunter among the Maiar devoted to Oromë, was chosen to steer the vessel of the Moon, while Arien, a Maia who had long tended Laurelin's golden blossoms and grown mighty in that service, was set to guide the vessel of the Sun. With their first risings the Years of the Trees came to an end and the Years of the Sun began, a new reckoning of time that the peoples of Middle-earth would keep from then on.

In memory of the Tree she had lost, Yavanna raised a lesser likeness of Telperion, called Galathilion, in the courts of the king upon the hill of Túna, so that the Noldor might keep some living reminder of its shape if not its light. A seedling of Galathilion was later given to the Elves of Tol Eressëa and grew there as Celeborn, and from Celeborn's line came Nimloth, which the Númenóreans planted before the King's house in Armenelos. Through this succession of trees, each grown, cherished, and in time lost in its turn, something of Telperion's likeness endured far beyond Valinor, carried into ages the Two Trees themselves never saw.

Within the structure of the Quenta Silmarillion, the Two Trees function less as scenery than as the engine that sets the whole tale in motion. Because their light was singular and, once quenched, could never be called back into their own branches, the fraction of it that Fëanor had sealed into the Silmarils became irreplaceable rather than merely precious. It is that irreplaceability, more than the jewels' beauty alone, which gives Melkor's theft its weight, turns Fëanor's oath into a doom binding his whole house, and pushes the Noldor toward the kinslaying and exile that shape the rest of the age. The Trees themselves do nothing after their fall, but the story keeps returning to what was lost in them, so that their absence, rather than any deed of theirs, drives much of what follows.

The manner of their ending also gives the tale its particular note of tragedy: Valinor is not overrun by force but caught unguarded, its watch drawn away by a festival meant to mend a quarrel among its own people. Read as part of the larger narrative, the Trees come to stand for a fullness that is undone through a lapse rather than a siege, and for the way even the Valar's combined power cannot simply remake what has been lost, only salvage a last flower and fruit from it. That failure to restore what was ruined becomes a pattern the rest of the legendarium repeats in smaller ways, and it is the Trees' fate that first establishes it.

The story does not let the Trees' light disappear entirely from view even after the First Age closes. Because a Silmaril travels with Eärendil into the sky as a star, and because Galadriel draws on that same star's light for the phial she gives Frodo, a trace of Telperion and Laurelin's brightness reaches all the way into The Lord of the Rings, carried by two travelers who have no notion of the Trees themselves. In this way the Two Trees remain present in the tale long after their stems have gone dark, less as characters than as a distant origin point that later story keeps quietly citing.

The earliest account of the Two Trees, told in The Book of Lost Tales, is markedly less austere than the tale later fixed in the published Silmarillion. There the silver tree is generally called Silpion and the golden tree Glingol, names that stand alongside the pairing Bansil and Glingol used in some of Tolkien's early verse, showing that Telperion and Laurelin had not yet settled as the fixed, primary names. The trees' making is also credited jointly to Aulë and to Yavanna, called Palúrien in these early writings, working together on the mound before Valinor's chief city, rather than to Yavanna's song and Nienna's tears alone as in the later telling.

The tale of the Trees' ending likewise differed in its earliest form. Melkor appears there under his early name Melko, and the spider who aided him was not yet called Ungoliant but went by names such as Wirilómë or Gloomweaver, dwelling in a southern waste named Erumáni, the forerunner of the later Avathar. The vessels made afterward to bear the Trees' last light were also steered by figures who did not survive into the published legendarium: a fire-spirit named Urwendi guided the Sun, and an Elf named Ilinsor, who contended with servants of Melko, steered the Moon, in place of the Maiar Arien and Tilion of the later account.