Valar

The Valar did not come into being within Arda but existed before it, as Ainur — spirits born of Eru Ilúvatar's thought prior to the making of the world, who took part in the Great Music from which the design of Arda arose. Of the many Ainur who beheld that design, only some chose afterward to enter the world and take up its shaping, and among these the Valar were the greatest in power and knowledge. Their descent is thus not one of birth or lineage after the manner of Elves or Men, but of being older than Time: they entered Arda by their own choice, having first seen its likeness in the Vision set before them by Ilúvatar.

The word Valar is Quenya and was given to them by the Elves who first met them in Aman; a single one of their number is called a Vala, and a female Vala individually a Valië, the Valier being the name reserved for the group of Valar-queens as a whole. In Sindarin, the tongue afterward spoken by the Elves who remained in Middle-earth, the same beings were called Belain, singular Balan — a form less commonly met with in the tales but preserved in Elvish naming tradition.

Among Men, and above all among the Númenóreans who kept friendship with the Eldar, the Valar were known under other names as well: they were spoken of as the Lords of the West or simply as the Powers, and in the reverence paid them by later generations of Men that regard came perilously close to worship, though the Valar claimed no such honor for themselves. This shift in naming reflects a shift in distance rather than in nature — where the Elves who dwelt among them in Valinor knew the Valar as governing Powers with distinct offices and counsel, Men who saw them only from afar remembered them chiefly as exalted rulers beyond the Sea, invoked but rarely encountered.

Once the Valar had descended into Arda, their first labor was to give it shape and light, raising the Two Lamps, Illuin and Ormal, upon pillars in the north and south so that the young world might grow in their radiance. Melkor, resentful of this ordering, cast down the Lamps and shattered the lands around them, so violently that the very seas and continents were disfigured. Unable to repair the ruin at once and wary of further destruction, the Valar withdrew from the ravaged mainland and crossed the sea to the western continent of Aman, leaving the rest of Arda for a time largely unshaped and dark.

In Aman the Valar built their lasting dwelling: they raised the Pelóri mountains as a rampart against further assault and founded Valinor within them, while Yavanna brought forth the Two Trees, Telperion and Laurelin, whose mingled light became the new source of illumination for the Blessed Realm. This period of relative peace was not untroubled, for Melkor had returned secretly to Middle-earth and built the subterranean stronghold of Utumno, later extended by his servant Sauron into Angband, from which he prepared to contest the Valar's dominion over the world he still regarded as his own.

When the Elves awoke at Cuiviénen and Oromë brought word of them to Valinor, the Valar resolved on war against Melkor rather than risk his corrupting influence upon the new Children of Ilúvatar. In this War for the Sake of the Elves they overthrew Melkor's power in the north, though Utumno's deepest halls were never fully broken, and bound him in the halls of Mandos for a term of three ages. In the aftermath the Valar issued their summons to the Elves to leave Cuiviénen and journey west to Valinor, a call that only part of the Elvish peoples heeded, so that the Great Journey became the root of the later divisions among the Eldar and those who remained in Middle-earth.

Released at the end of his sentence and admitted, feigning repentance, to a measure of trust, Melkor set about undoing the Valar's work from within. His conspiracy with the great spider-being Ungoliant led to the destruction of the Two Trees and, soon after, to the theft of the Silmarils and the slaying of Finwë, upon which Melkor fled Aman and took up again the name Morgoth in Middle-earth. The Valar did not pursue him at once; when the Noldor under Fëanor rose in wrath and departed Valinor against counsel, the Valar pronounced upon them the Doom of Mandos and thereafter held largely apart from the wars of Beleriand, leaving Elves and Men to contend with Morgoth's power for the better part of an age.

Only when Eärendil crossed the sea to plead on behalf of both Elves and Men did the Valar act again in force. They raised a great host under the Maia Eönwë and came to Beleriand in the War of Wrath, breaking Thangorodrim and Morgoth's armies and casting him out through the Door of Night into the Void beyond the world, an intervention so violent that much of Beleriand itself was broken and drowned beneath the sea. This victory closed the First Age and marked the last occasion on which the Valar made open war within Middle-earth.

As reward to the Edain who had aided them, the Valar raised out of the sea the island of Númenor, though they set upon its people the Ban of the Valar forbidding any landing upon the shores of Aman. When later kings of Númenor, corrupted by Sauron, defied that Ban and sent an armada against Valinor, the Valar laid down their guardianship of the world and called upon Eru Ilúvatar himself, who broke and reshaped Arda, drowning Númenor and removing Aman from the circles of the world reachable by mortal ships. From that downfall onward the Valar governed Men and Elves only at a remove, their last recorded direct intervention being the sending of the Istari as emissaries into Middle-earth during the Third Age, a mission undertaken in their council but carried out through others rather than by their own hands.

Though the Valar are spirits and not by nature bound to flesh, most choose to clothe themselves in a self-fashioned raiment, taking on hue and shape after the likeness of the Children of Ilúvatar, yet greater in stature and fairer than anything later born into the world. This form is a garment rather than a body proper, put on out of love for Arda and for the peoples who would one day dwell in it, and it can be set aside at will; it is worn most fully and constantly by Manwë and Varda in their halls, while Ulmo, whose province is the waters under the earth and the Great Sea, seldom takes on settled shape at all, appearing when he does in storm, foam, or the sound of waves rather than in any figure a mortal eye could easily hold.

Valian society is ordered by paired marriage and by distinct province of craft: Manwë is wedded to Varda, Aulë to Yavanna, Oromë to Vána, Tulkas to Nessa, and Mandos and Lórien each to a sister, Vairë and Estë. Aulë shapes stone and metal and teaches smithcraft; Yavanna calls forth and tends all things that grow; Oromë hunts and tames the beasts of the unlit world; Nienna's province is grief and pity, and from her sorrow others learn endurance rather than despair; Mandos keeps the houses of the dead and pronounces judgment and doom upon deeds done in the world; Vairë weaves all that comes to pass into abiding tapestry. None of these offices stands wholly apart from the others: the Valar debate and settle the greater governance of Arda together in council upon the Ring of Doom before the gates of Valmar, and although Manwë is honored as first among them, his authority rests on that shared counsel rather than on command alone.

Unlike Elves or Men, the Valar do not know death as an ending proper to their kind; their being as Ainur was woven into the Music and into Time before Arda existed, and having entered the world they remain bound to it, unable to leave until its story is completed, so that patience rather than haste marks their manner of ruling. This endurance is not the same as changelessness: a Vala's strength can be spent and thinned through great labor or grief poured into the substance of the world, so that some among them grow visibly diminished in later ages even while none of them perishes outright. It is this long, unhurried view of time, so unlike the brief urgency of mortal life, that most sets the Valar apart from the Children of Ilúvatar whom they were given to shape and to watch over.

Elvish tradition draws a further division within the fourteen Valar who remained after Melkor's fall, ranking them into two companies of seven: the Lords and the Valier, or Queens. The Lords are reckoned as Manwë, Ulmo, Aulë, Oromë, Mandos, Lórien, and Tulkas; the Valier as Varda, Yavanna, Nienna, Estë, Vairë, Vána, and Nessa. This grouping does not track the marriage pairs or the separate provinces of craft by which the Valar are otherwise distinguished, since husband and wife are commonly assigned to opposite halves of the list; it survives chiefly as a naming convention for addressing the Valar as a formal company, rather than as any working chain of command among them.

Cutting across both Lords and Valier is a smaller and more consequential company, the Aratar, whom the Elves name the High Ones of Arda: eight of the fourteen judged foremost in majesty, namely Manwë, Varda, Ulmo, Yavanna, Aulë, Mandos, Nienna, and Oromë. Membership in this rank is explicitly said to rest on greatness of being rather than on physical strength alone, a distinction the tradition draws pointedly by excluding Tulkas from the Aratar despite his renown as the mightiest of the Valar in bodily power. The naming of the Aratar as a fixed inner company, set apart from the Valar as a whole, is one of the few places in the tradition where the governance of Arda is presented as resting with a select few rather than with the full assembly gathered in council.

Within The Lord of the Rings, the Valar are almost never seen and almost never named outright as actors; they exist instead as a presence felt at the edges of the story, invoked in song and oath rather than encountered in person. Characters swear by Elbereth, appeal to the West in moments of crisis, or speak of the Powers as one speaks of a moral order underlying events rather than a set of agents directly steering them. This narrative choice gives the tale a sense of providence working through small and unlikely hands, hobbits above all, while the great Powers remain a distant guarantee rather than a rescuing force, so that the courage and choices of Frodo, Sam, and their companions are never diminished by any expectation that higher powers will simply intervene.

The Silmarillion tells a different kind of story with the Valar, one in which they are fully present as characters, yet their role there follows a recurring rhythm of shaping, withdrawal, and delayed return that itself carries meaning: each time the Valar act decisively, whether raising the Lamps, warring on Melkor, or sailing to Beleriand, the victory comes at a cost measured in ruin, and each time they hold back, evil is left to grow largely unchecked among Elves and Men. Read as narrative rather than chronicle, this pattern casts the Valar less as infallible guardians than as a stewardship that must constantly weigh the danger of over-mastering the world against the danger of abandoning it, a tension that gives the First Age its particular note of grief even amid triumph.

Because Melkor himself once stood among their number before his fall, the Valar as a group also serve the story as proof that greatness of being offers no immunity to corruption, a point the narrative returns to whenever lesser figures, whether a Vala, a Maia such as Sauron, or a King of Númenor, mistake stewardship for ownership. Their consistent refusal to compel the free choices of Elves and Men, even when compulsion might have spared great suffering, functions as the clearest counter-image to Morgoth's and Sauron's rule by domination, making the Valar's restraint, not their power, the quality by which the story ultimately asks them to be judged.

In the earliest form of the mythology, The Book of Lost Tales, the beings later called the Valar were most often named simply the Gods, a term Tolkien used freely at a stage when the pantheon was closer in flavor to Greek or Norse myth than to the more restrained cosmology of the later Silmarillion tradition; Melkor himself appears there under the name Melko. The company of Gods was also less fixed and more numerous than the eventual fourteen: among the figures dwelling in Valinor were Makar and his sister Meássë, a grim pair given over to the love of battle and its slaughter, who held themselves somewhat apart from the other Valar and were never reckoned among the great among them. Makar and Meássë were dropped from the legendarium entirely as Tolkien's conception matured, leaving no trace of a war-god or war-goddess among the Valar as later published.

The boundary between Valar and Maiar was likewise not sharply drawn from the start. In the Lost Tales, spirits such as Ossë and Uinen, who in the finished Silmarillion serve Ulmo as Maiar, were counted more loosely among the company of the Valar themselves, and the later formal division into fourteen great Valar with a separate order of lesser Ainur beneath them emerged only gradually across the successive prose Silmarillion texts. Even after that hierarchy had settled, Tolkien continued to reconsider the Valar's nature in his late writings gathered as Myths Transformed, where he weighed giving them a more distant, less overtly anthropomorphic and physically limited relation to Arda than the earlier tales had assumed, revisions he left unfinished and never carried into a published text.