Lothlórien

Within the narrative of the War of the Ring the wood carries a different name in almost every tongue that speaks of it. Its own people and the Elves elsewhere in Middle-earth used the Sindarin forms Lothlórien and, more briefly, Lórien; travellers from Gondor and the northern lands knew it chiefly as the Golden Wood, a plain descriptive name drawn from the mallorn trees whose leaves turn gold in autumn and hang on the bough until spring. The Rohirrim called it Dwimordene, a word of their own speech built on the element for phantom or spectre — the same element that names the Dwimorberg, the haunted mountain beneath which the Paths of the Dead run — and the name records their suspicion of the place rather than any knowledge of it. Treebeard preferred a much older and longer form, Laurelindórenan, which he glossed roughly as the valley of singing gold, and he observed drily that the Elves had shortened their own name for the land, as though the thing named had itself grown smaller.

The Sindarin name divides into two parts. The first, loth, is the ordinary word for blossom or flower, the same element that stands in names such as Nimloth; the second is Lórien, which is not a Sindarin formation at all but the by-name of the Vala Irmo, taken from the gardens of rest and dream that he keeps in Valinor. The compound therefore joins a flowering wood to a place of sleep and vision, and something of that doubled sense clings to the land as visitors describe it. Inside the realm the Elves used narrower names of their own: the tongue of land between Celebrant and Anduin was the Naith, the spearhead, or Egladil, the Angle, and the tree-city at its heart was Caras Galadhon.

Christopher Tolkien's editorial account of his father's later writings on Galadriel and Celeborn preserves earlier layers of the naming. There the country appears as Lindórinand, understood as the vale of the land of the singers, a name given by the Silvan folk who dwelt there; a later form, Lórinand, shifted the sense toward gold and belongs to the period after mallorn trees were established in the wood. The change to Lórien, with its deliberate echo of the Valinorean gardens, is presented as a reshaping made under Galadriel's influence, so that the name of the realm came to state what its rulers intended it to be. These reconstructions are drafts rather than settled text, and the forms in them do not all agree with one another; the published narrative keeps only Lothlórien and Lórien.

Lothlórien lay on the eastern side of the Misty Mountains, and the ordinary approach to it from the west was over or under that range. The Fellowship reached it by the Dimrill Dale beneath the Redhorn, where the mountain water gathers into the stream the Elves called Celebrant and the Dwarves knew as the Silverlode; the river runs down out of that valley and along the northern edge of the wood before turning to meet the Great River. The realm proper occupied the angle of land enclosed by those two waters, so that its heart could be entered only by crossing one of them, and the Elves kept the northern eaves and the riverbanks under constant watch by wardens posted in the trees. Southward the forest gave out onto the open grasslands between the Silverlode and the Limlight, the field where the Riders of the North first came to the aid of Gondor. Eastward, beyond Anduin, the land fell away flat and treeless, and above it in the south of Mirkwood stood the hill on which Dol Guldur had been raised, a near neighbour whose shadow the wood faced across the river.

Inside, the country was a woodland of mallorn trees standing over smooth grass, without undergrowth or made roads, and with two flowers growing there that travellers found nowhere on their journey: the small white niphredil and the golden elanor, which flowered together out of season. The ground rises in places into low green mounds; the greatest of them, Cerin Amroth, was crowned by a double ring of trees, the outer white-flowered and the inner golden, with a single high mallorn at the centre. There were no houses of stone. The Elves lived on platforms fixed among the boughs, reached by ladders, and their chief dwelling stood on a hill girdled by a green wall and a dry moat, with a single gate on the southern side and lamps burning green, gold and silver among the branches above. The wood held nothing that was ruined or diseased, and its people held that no evil thing had passed within its bounds.

The later writings edited by Christopher Tolkien give the mallorn a history that ties the wood to the West. The tree grew first on Tol Eressëa, was carried to Númenor, and long afterwards took root east of the Sea only in this one country, where the soil and the power that guarded it allowed it to thrive; earlier attempts to grow it in the coastlands had failed. The same material sets the mound at Cerin Amroth in the time before Galadriel and Celeborn held the realm, as the dwelling of the king from whom it takes its name, and describes a Silvan population whose settlement of the wood was older than the lordship exercised over it.

The wood was peopled long before it was ruled. Its inhabitants were Silvan Elves of Nandorin descent, kindred of the Teleri who had turned aside from the westward march and never crossed the Misty Mountains, and their settlement of the land between Celebrant and Anduin belongs to a period the histories do not fix by year. The published chronology gives the realm no foundation date at all; what it does record is the event that later determined its fate, for in the Second Age the Rings of Power were made in Eregion and Nenya, the ring of adamant, came to Galadriel. While Sauron held the One the Three were kept hidden and unused, and only after the One was taken from him did their virtue come into play. The posthumously edited material on Galadriel and Celeborn describes their passage east of the mountains and the slow acceptance of a lordship from the West by a Silvan people who had governed themselves; Tolkien reworked that history repeatedly, and the surviving versions disagree over when the two came to the wood and where they had dwelt before.

The Third Age brought two neighbours that shaped everything afterwards. About the year 1050 a shadow settled on the great forest across Anduin, so that men began to call it Mirkwood, and the stronghold raised there faced Lórien across the river for the remainder of the Age. Then in 1980 the Dwarves of Moria, digging deep, woke the Balrog beneath the mountains; in the following year they abandoned Khazad-dûm, and the disturbance reached the wood on the eastern side. Many of the Silvan Elves left Lórien and went south, and in that same year Amroth, who was king of the realm, and Nimrodel, for whom the stream on its northern border is named, were both lost. Legolas told the fragmentary story to the Fellowship as they walked beside that water, and treated it as a grief the wood itself still carried.

For the next thousand years the realm appears in the chronicles chiefly as a place others travelled to or watched. The White Council was first formed in 2463, and Galadriel's part in it kept Lórien tied to the wider strategy against the Necromancer. In 2509 Celebrían, wife of Elrond, was waylaid by Orcs in the Redhorn Pass while journeying to the wood, and the wound she took there led to her departure over Sea. In 2941 the Council at last drove Sauron from Dol Guldur, but the relief was brief: ten years later he declared himself openly in Mordor and sent three of the Nazgûl to reoccupy the tower across the river. In 2980 Aragorn came to Lórien and met Arwen again there, and on the mound of Cerin Amroth the two plighted their troth, a private event in a wood otherwise given over to watchfulness.

The realm's part in the War of the Ring falls into two short seasons. The Fellowship crossed the Silverlode two days after Gandalf's fall at the Bridge of Khazad-dûm on 15 January 3019, reached Caras Galadhon on the evening of the seventeenth, and remained until the sixteenth of February, when they were sent down Anduin in the Elven boats. Barely three weeks later the wood was attacked. Forces out of Dol Guldur assailed it on 11 March, again on the fifteenth, and a third time on the twenty-second; each assault was thrown back with loss to the attackers, and the borders held, though the fighting cost the defenders as well. The chronology records these engagements plainly and without narrative, so that the defence of Lórien belongs to the account of the war rather than to the story told in the main text.

With the Ring destroyed, Lórien moved from defence to attack. On 28 March Celeborn led his people across Anduin, and the pulling down of Dol Guldur began; Galadriel broke its walls and opened its pits, and the southern forest was cleansed of what had held it. On 6 April Celeborn and Thranduil met in the wood between their two realms and set its future order. Mirkwood was renamed Eryn Lasgalen, the Wood of Greenleaves; Thranduil took the northern part as far as the mountains within it, Celeborn took the southern wood below the Narrows and called it East Lórien, and the wide country between was given to the Beornings and the Woodmen. For a short while, therefore, the Golden Wood was larger than it had ever been.

The expansion did not outlast the power that made the realm possible. On 29 September 3021 Galadriel went to the Grey Havens with Elrond, Gandalf and the Ring-bearers and passed over Sea, and with her went Nenya and the preservation it had worked; the Third Age ended with that sailing. Celeborn stayed on for a time, but the wood emptied as its people took ship or went east and south. When Arwen came back to Lórien in the year 121 of the Fourth Age, after Aragorn's death, she found Galadriel gone, Celeborn gone, and the land silent; she dwelt alone beneath the fading trees until winter, and then lay down on Cerin Amroth, where her grave remains. Celeborn afterwards left for Imladris to live with the sons of Elrond, and the chronicle notes that when he departed the last living memory of the Elder Days in Middle-earth went with him.

The folk of the wood were known as the Galadhrim, the tree-people, and among themselves they kept a speech that struck the travellers as unfamiliar; Frodo, listening on the border, could make nothing of it, and the appendix on languages records that the Sindarin used in the realm carried an accent that Elves of the western shores would have thought countrified. Few of the wardens had any of the Common Speech at all. Haldir, who challenged the Fellowship at the northern eaves with his brothers Rúmil and Orophin, had learned it because his duty required dealings with strangers, and he said plainly that his people had grown unwilling to have such dealings, keeping to the heart of the forest and letting old ties with their kindred elsewhere lapse. That reserve fell hardest on Gimli. The wardens would admit a Dwarf only blindfolded, and the quarrel was settled when Aragorn required that the whole company go hooded together, an arrangement lifted only when word came from the city that all might walk free.

Authority in the realm rested with Celeborn and Galadriel, who were addressed as Lord and Lady of the Galadhrim rather than as king and queen, and who received the Fellowship seated side by side beneath the great tree of Caras Galadhon. The division of their offices is visible in small things. Celeborn spoke first, questioned the company about their road, and gave the practical counsel about the passage down Anduin and the choice between the two banks; Galadriel's part lay in perception and in the testing of each guest, and she checked her husband when his anger at the waking of the evil in Moria fell on Gimli, so that he withdrew the reproach. Their household was tied by marriage to Imladris, for Celebrían, whose loss to the mountain Orcs the chronicles record, was their daughter and Elrond's wife, which made Arwen and her brothers grandchildren of the wood. Neighbouring peoples kept their distance: the Riders of the Mark would not ride under the eaves, and even a captain of Gondor entered the land with open misgiving.

The posthumously edited material sets this lordship at the end of a longer pattern. There the Silvan Elves east of the mountains are shown accepting rulers drawn from another kindred, princes of Sindarin descent, in Lórien as in the woodland kingdom north of it, so that the government of the realm and the ancestry of its people were never the same thing. Amroth, whose loss the annals mark, is given a father in that account, Amdír, who led the Elves of the wood to the Last Alliance and was killed in the battle on the Dagorlad; the same passages present Celeborn and Galadriel's later position as a guardianship taken up over a people who survived their kings, and describe the wood's dealings with Thranduil's realm as slight and its Silvan folk as reluctant to be drawn into wars fought beyond their own borders. Tolkien wrote these histories more than once and did not reconcile them, so the sequence of rulers is best treated as an outline rather than a settled list.

In the shape of the narrative the wood is the pause that follows a disaster. The company comes down out of the mountains having just lost its guide, with Frodo and Sam wounded and Gimli bereaved of the hope he had carried into Moria, and the first thing the land does is take the hurt out of them. Sleep, food and the quiet of the trees do the work that no counsel could, and the halt is long enough that when they leave they cannot agree among themselves how long it was; Sam works the reckoning of the moon over in his head and gets no satisfaction from it. Frodo, brought blindfolded to the mound at the heart of the realm and then allowed to see, feels that he has crossed into an older world still living rather than into a memory of one, and it is here that he first perceives the shape of things through Elvish eyes. The stop is also structurally necessary: it stands between the dark under the mountains and the breaking of the Fellowship on the far bank of the river, and it is the last place where the nine are still nine.

What the wood chiefly does to the company, though, is examine it. On the first evening each of them feels a wordless questioning, an offer held out of something desired in exchange for abandoning the errand, and afterwards no one but Boromir will say what was proposed, which itself marks him. Later Frodo and Sam are shown the Mirror, and what they are given there is not guidance but a set of possibilities without instruction: Sam sees his own country being torn up and has to choose between running home and going on. The testing then reverses. Frodo offers the Ring outright, and the Lady's refusal of it, after she has imagined for a moment what she would become, is one of the few occasions in the book where a great power declines the thing it has long wanted. Gimli's part runs the other way, from the suspicion he meets at the border to the courtesy he is shown in the city, and his changed temper afterwards is the plainest evidence the tale gives that the realm alters those who enter it.

The wood's influence continues to be felt long after the travellers have left it, chiefly through what they carry away. The grey cloaks hide them repeatedly on the road; the rope serves Sam at the cliff above the Emyn Muil; the bow given to Legolas brings down a winged shadow over the river; and the light Galadriel gives Frodo is what he holds up in the tunnel under Cirith Ungol and again before the Tower. The small box of earth entrusted to Sam works at the far end of the story, when the Shire is replanted after the scouring and a mallorn comes up in the Party Field. Against all this the book sets the reputation the realm has abroad: Éomer speaks of it as a place few enter and none leave unchanged, and Faramir, hearing that his brother passed through it, treats the fact as evidence that Boromir's judgement had been disturbed. The narrative lets both readings stand, so that the wood functions as a test of the observer as much as of the visitor.

Unlike Doriath or Gondolin, the Golden Wood has no ancestor in the earlier mythology; it was invented in the course of writing the second book of The Lord of the Rings, and the material printed in The Treason of Isengard shows it taking shape quickly and late. The outlines made while the Company was still under the mountains sketch the road beyond Moria without any settled notion of an Elvish kingdom in the angle of the rivers, and the lord and lady of the wood enter the manuscript with little preparation in what precedes it. Tolkien also used the halt as a vantage point for his own planning: a set of projections written at this stage carries the whole remaining course of the story forward from Lórien, and a good deal of what they foresee was afterwards abandoned. The wood's place between the two waters was fixed at about the same period on the first map drawn for the book, which Christopher Tolkien reproduces and discusses in the same volume; a number of the names standing on that map did not survive into the finished text.

The naming of the realm and its people continued to occupy Tolkien to the end of his life. In the late essay on Fëanorian pronunciation printed in The Peoples of Middle-earth he set out the Lady's several names — a mother-name meaning man-maiden, a father-name of noble sense given by her father, and the Telerin form, bestowed by her husband and referring to her hair, from which the familiar name derives — and insisted that it had nothing to do with the Sindarin word for tree, although the Elves of the wood, whose own name for themselves and for their city were both built on that word, read the resemblance as a meaning. The same late writing rehandles her husband's origin, making him a prince of the Teleri of Aman who came east with her rather than a kinsman of Thingol met in Beleriand, a version that cannot be reconciled with the histories on which the published account of the realm rests. These papers are working notes, not settled narrative, and they are best read as evidence of continuing revision rather than as a corrected history of the wood.

Ralph Bakshi's animated film reaches the wood but has little room for it. The halt is reduced to a brief episode, Galadriel is voiced by Annette Crosbie, and the long stay that occupies several chapters of the book is passed over in a few minutes of screen time; the departure from the realm leads more or less directly to the river journey, so that the parting gifts and their later uses drop out of a story that in any case breaks off after Helm's Deep. The BBC Radio 4 serial, running to twenty-six parts, has the space the film lacked and uses it: Galadriel is played by Marian Diamond, and the dramatisation keeps both the questioning of the company and the scene at the Mirror, together with the giving of gifts before the boats are launched. Of the older television adaptations neither has any occasion for the realm — the Rankin/Bass Hobbit precedes the events entirely, and the same studio's Return of the King takes up the story after the Fellowship has left the wood behind.

In Peter Jackson's trilogy the realm is held by Cate Blanchett as Galadriel and Marton Csokas as Celeborn, with Craig Parker as Haldir, and Galadriel is additionally given the voice-over that opens the first film, a framing role she has nowhere in the novel. The theatrical cut of The Fellowship of the Ring shortens the departure so that only Frodo's gift of light survives; the giving of the cloaks, the rope and the three hairs asked for by Gimli was restored in the extended version. The trilogy's largest invention concerning the wood comes in the second film, where Haldir leads a company of Lórien Elves to Helm's Deep and is killed there — an alliance with no basis in the book, which instead has the realm fighting three separate assaults on its own borders. Galadriel returns in the later Hobbit trilogy, at the White Council and at Dol Guldur, but her own country is not part of those films.