Tol Eressëa

Tol Eressëa is a Quenya name, and its two elements are both glossed in the list of name-elements that accompanies The Silmarillion. The first word, tol, denotes an island, particularly one that rises steeply from surrounding water. It appears in Sindarin place-names of Beleriand as well, as in Tol Sirion and Tol Galen. The second word, eressëa, is an adjective meaning lonely or solitary. It derives from the root er, which carries the sense of one or alone and also underlies the name of Eru, the One. Taken together, the name describes an island set apart by itself, and the common English rendering, the Lonely Isle, translates it closely.1

The Silmarillion ties the name to the island's position rather than to any quality of its inhabitants. After the island was made fast to the sea-floor in the Bay of Eldamar, it remained there without companion, visible from the shores of Aman yet separate from them. The Eldar named it for that isolation, so the name records a fixed feature of the landscape and not a later judgement on its history. In the account of Númenor, the shortened form Eressëa is used on its own, and the island is spoken of chiefly as the source of the flowers and fountains that the Eldar brought as gifts to the Edain. The haven on its eastern shore, Avallónë, carries a name of its own and should not be confused with a name for the island as a whole.2

The diaeresis in Eressëa follows the spelling convention set out in the appendices to The Lord of the Rings. It marks a vowel that is sounded separately and does not merge with the vowel next to it into a diphthong. The name therefore ends in two distinct syllables, and the final vowel is pronounced rather than left silent, as it would be in English spelling. German editions usually drop the diacritic and print Tol Eressea, but the pronunciation is unchanged. They translate the epithet as Die Einsame Insel.3

Tol Eressëa is an island of the Undying Lands. It did not rise where it now lies but was moved there. In the days after the awakening of the Elves it stood by itself in the middle of the Great Sea, far from the coasts of both Middle-earth and Aman. Ulmo tore it loose from its foundations and used it as a vast vessel to carry the Vanyar and the Noldor westward across the ocean. While the island was drawn toward the shores of Beleriand, its eastern end ran aground in the shallows off the mouths of Sirion and broke away. That fragment remained behind as the Isle of Balar, so the two islands were once a single body of land.1

The island's lasting position is in the Bay of Eldamar, the great inlet on the eastern coast of Aman below the Pelóri. It stands far out in the bay, close enough to be seen from the mainland shore where the Teleri later built Alqualondë. Its two coasts faced different directions and fared differently. Through the Calacirya, the one deep pass in the mountain wall, the light of the Two Trees flowed eastward and fell on the island's western shore. That side grew green and fair, and the first flowers to bloom east of the mountains grew there. The eastern coast looked out on the open sea and the darker waters beyond.2

Its setting changed in later ages. When the Valar fortified Valinor after the flight of the Noldor, they set a chain of Enchanted Isles across the Shadowy Seas, running from north to south, and a ship sailing west would meet them before it could reach Tol Eressëa. In the Second Age the island was the part of the Undying Lands nearest to Númenor. From the summit of the Meneltarma, a watcher with keen eyes could sometimes make out the white tower of its haven far to the west. At the Downfall of Númenor, Aman and the island were taken out of the circles of the world. From then on they could no longer be reached by sailing across the bent seas of the round Earth, only by the Straight Road.3

The island's history as a dwelling-place begins with the third and last host of the Eldar to make the Great Journey. After the Vanyar and the Noldor had been brought over the sea and set down in Aman, Ulmo returned for the Teleri, who had lingered on the coasts of Beleriand. As the island drew near the shores of the Blessed Realm, the Teleri asked to remain within sound of the open sea. Ulmo was the more willing to grant this because he had never been glad of the summons that took the Elves out of Middle-earth. At his word, Ossë fixed the island to the floor of the bay, and so it came to rest where it has stayed ever since.1

For a long age the Teleri lived on the island and nowhere else. Ossë often visited them there, and his company deepened their love of the sea and of the music of the waves. The distance that the water set between them and their kin on the mainland had lasting effects, and their speech in these years grew apart from the tongue of the Vanyar and the Noldor. In time, however, the Teleri came to desire the light of the Trees and the sight of their kin in Tirion. Ulmo gave way, and Ossë taught them the craft of building ships. When the vessels were finished, the Teleri were drawn across the bay by swans and settled on the shore, where they raised Alqualondë, and the island was left to become a home for Elves of later arrivals. During these same years Yavanna's gift of Galathilion, the image of Telperion that grew in Tirion, produced seedlings, and one of them was planted on Tol Eressëa, where it flourished and was named Celeborn.2

The island's role changed after the War of Wrath at the end of the First Age. Many of the Eldar who had lived in Beleriand, among them Noldor who had been in exile, were given pardon and permitted to go into the West. Most of them did not return to Valinor itself but made their homes on Tol Eressëa. From there they could look toward Aman and also back toward the lands they had left. The island thus became the gathering-place of Elves who came from Middle-earth, a function it retained through the later ages.3

During the Second Age the island was the Blessed Realm's point of contact with the Edain of Númenor. Because they were bound by the Ban of the Valar, the Númenóreans could not sail westward beyond sight of their own coasts, so it was the Eldar of Eressëa who made the voyage east to them in ships from the haven of Avallónë. Among the gifts they brought, a seedling of Celeborn was planted in Númenor and grew into Nimloth, the White Tree of the King's Court. As the kings grew estranged from the Elves and came to resent the Ban, these visits became rare. In the end they continued only as secret landings among the Faithful in the western parts of the land. In the year 3319, the armada of Ar-Pharazôn sailed past the Ban and surrounded Tol Eressëa on its way to Aman, and the Eldar grieved as the great fleet cut off the light of the setting sun. The Downfall followed the landing on the shores of Aman, and the island was taken beyond the reach of ordinary ships, as noted above.4

The island survived the changing of the world, and the Elves continued to live there. According to the traditions of mariners that close the account of Númenor, the Elves could still take their ships along the Straight Road and come to the old West, reaching Tol Eressëa first and perhaps Valinor beyond it. Elven departures from the Grey Havens in the Third Age followed this road. On 29 September in the year 3021 of the Third Age, which is 1421 by the Shire Reckoning, Elrond and Galadriel sailed from Mithlond with the last ship of their company, and Bilbo and Frodo went with them, having been granted passage over the Sea. That departure marked the end of the Third Age. For the peoples of Middle-earth afterward, the island lay wholly beyond the circles of the world, and they could reach it only by that single road.5

The first people of Tol Eressëa were the Teleri, the third and largest kindred of the Eldar, remembered also as the Sea-elves for their abiding love of water and shore. When Elwë was lost in the woods of Beleriand, most of his people chose his brother Olwë as their lord, and it was under Olwë that they were ferried west and later lived on the island. The texts give Olwë no crown or seat that belongs to the island in particular. His kingship was of a people rather than a territory, and it moved with that people when they crossed to the mainland and founded their city on its shore. The island itself lay within the realm of the Valar. Among them, Ulmo and Ossë, powers of the sea, took the closest interest in its inhabitants.1

No ruler of Tol Eressëa is named for any later age either. The Elves who came from Beleriand after the overthrow of Morgoth were of mixed descent, Noldor as well as Sindar and others who had shared the long wars. The Silmarillion describes the island they settled as a place of welcome and healing, but it does not describe it as a kingdom. Its standing among its neighbours followed from that position. It belonged to Aman and remained under the Valar, yet it lay at the outer edge of their realm, and its people served as the Blessed Realm's intermediaries with those who lived east of it. In the Second Age this role made the Eldar of Eressëa friends and teachers of the Edain, and the Faithful of Númenor, who took the name of Elf-friends, went on honouring that bond after their kings had broken with it.2

Most of them did not return to Valinor itself but made their homes on Tol Eressëa.

In his letters Tolkien also considered the mortals who were allowed to make the voyage at the end of the Third Age. He treated the passage of Bilbo and Frodo as a special grace intended to heal them. In his view it did not make them immortal, since they remained Men in kind and would in time leave the world by the path of their own race. On this reading the island received mortal guests for a season, but it did not become their home in the lasting way it was for the Elves.3

In The Silmarillion the island is first a tool of the plot and only later a setting. It carries the Elves across the sea, so the Great Journey reaches its end on a moving piece of land rather than by the Elves' own effort. It also marks the first division within the Eldar in the West. The Teleri stop halfway, and the island becomes the place where their preference for the sea over the light of the Trees takes visible form. Their long stay there prepares the way for their separate character and for the grief that later divides them from the Noldor. The island then fades from the foreground and returns at turning points, where it serves as the edge of the Blessed Realm that exiles, mariners and messengers reach first.1

In the account of Númenor the island carries more of the story's meaning. For the Edain it is the part of the West they can almost see, and the gifts that come from it keep their memory of the Eldar alive. The same nearness feeds a desire that the Ban forbids them to satisfy. The island therefore shows the reader both the blessing given to Men and the limit set upon it. As later kings come to resent that limit, the Lonely Isle, which had welcomed them, becomes a sign of what they believe has been kept from them.2

The Lord of the Rings never names the island in its narrative. It appears only as the unnamed goal of the final voyage. On his second night in the house of Tom Bombadil, Frodo dreams of a grey curtain drawn back and a green country beyond it. The book returns to that image in its last chapter, when the ship from the Havens nears the end of its journey, and the dream proves to have been a foresight. By leaving the destination unnamed, the story shows the West as Frodo experiences it, a distant shore reached only after long endurance, and does not map it for the reader.3

The island is one of the oldest fixed points in Tolkien's legendarium, and in the earliest drafts it had a different place in the design. In The Book of Lost Tales it is the setting of the frame story. The mariner Eriol reaches the Lonely Isle and comes to the town of Kortirion, where he is welcomed at the Cottage of Lost Play and hears the old tales of the Elves told to him. In these drafts the island is carried over the sea by Uin, the great whale in Ulmo's service, rather than by the Vala himself. The notes and outlines that Christopher Tolkien assembled show that the young Tolkien meant the island to become England in the end. Kortirion was identified with Warwick, and Tavrobel, another place on the isle, with Great Haywood in Staffordshire. The Lonely Isle was thus once imagined as the ancestral home of an English mythology and not only as a remote outpost of the West.1

The link to England was abandoned in later work, but the island kept its role as the landfall of the West. In the first drafts of the Númenor story, written in the 1930s, the name Avallon is applied to Tol Eressëa itself, explained as the land lying nearest to Valinor. Only in later revision did the name, in the form Avallónë, pass to the haven on its shore.2

None of the screen or radio adaptations of Tolkien's works names Tol Eressëa, and none shows the island as a place in its own right. In the novel it enters the story only as the unnamed end of the voyage from the Grey Havens, and the adaptations keep that reticence. Their treatment of it is therefore best traced through the departure scene and through the foreshadowing vision that points toward it. Peter Jackson's trilogy, released between 2001 and 2003, stages the sailing from the Havens at the close of The Return of the King and ends the journey at the quayside. Its most discussed change concerns the vision. Because the films leave out Tom Bombadil altogether, Frodo's dream in Bombadil's house has no place in them. The imagery of that dream is moved instead to the siege of Minas Tirith, where Gandalf, played by Ian McKellen, describes the passage into the West to Pippin, played by Billy Boyd, as a way of comforting him in the face of death. What the book gives as Frodo's private foresight thus becomes Gandalf's spoken account, and it is attached to the question of dying rather than to the end of Frodo's own road.1

The BBC radio dramatisation of 1981 also cuts the Bombadil chapters, and with them the dream that anticipates the last voyage. It does, however, keep the novel's ending and follows the departure from the Havens through to Sam's return home, so the West remains present only as the destination of the ship. Ralph Bakshi's animated film of 1978 breaks off long before this point and never reaches the Havens.2