Valinor

The name Valinor is Quenya, the High-elven tongue of the Noldor and Vanyar, and it is transparent in that language: it joins the element val-, denoting power and preserved in Valar, Valier and Valaquenta, to the element for land that appears also in Númenor and, in its Sindarin shape, in Doriath and Dorthonion. The sense is therefore simply the land of those Powers who took it for their dwelling, and the longer Quenya form Valinórë stands behind the shortened name in common use. The naming follows the fact rather than preceding it: after the Valar withdrew from the wide lands of Middle-earth and established their domain in the western continent, the region they settled and fenced took its name from them. Strictly, Valinor is not identical with Aman but is a region within it, the inner land lying east of the Encircling Sea and west of the mountain wall, so that the two names are not interchangeable even where later usage blurs them.

Beside the proper name stand several descriptive titles, each recording a different aspect. The Blessed Realm speaks of the land's condition under the keeping of the Valar; the Guarded Realm points to its defence and its closure against approach from the east. Neighbouring names are often confused with it: Eldamar, Elvenhome, is properly the coastal country of the Eldar with its hill and haven, not the inner land of the Valar, and Valimar or Valmar is the city of the Valar within Valinor rather than the region itself. In Middle-earth, where the name was preserved chiefly in Elvish memory and in the traditions the Edain received from the Eldar, the land was more often spoken of by direction than by name, as the West or the Uttermost West, a usage that survived long after knowledge of the place had grown dim.

The most consequential of the by-names was one that its makers misunderstood. Among the Númenóreans the western lands came to be called the Undying Lands, a phrase that attributes to the country what belongs properly to its inhabitants, since it was the Valar and the Eldar who were deathless and not the soil on which they walked. Tolkien treated the error as a doctrinal one rather than a linguistic slip, and returned to it in his letters when explaining the shape of the Númenórean tragedy: a mortal people had come to believe that residence could confer a nature it cannot give. The name is thus a witness to a state of mind, and later writers of Númenor and Gondor used it with a caution the earlier usage had lacked.

Valinor forms the inner and greater part of Aman, the westernmost of the great lands, which is sundered from Middle-earth by the breadth of Belegaer, the Great Sea, and washed on its farther side by Ekkaia, the Encircling Sea. Its outline was determined by war rather than by nature. When the Two Lamps were thrown down and the ordering of the earth was broken, the Valar removed westward over the sea and reared the Pelóri along the eastern coasts of Aman as a rampart, the loftiest mountains of the world; later, when they closed the land against approach, they raised those walls sheer and unbroken to north and south alike. Taniquetil stands highest of that range and highest of all peaks, and upon its summit are the halls of Manwë and Varda, from which the whole land and the seas beyond lie open to sight.

Behind that fence the country falls away into a wide plain that slopes westward from the mountains toward the Outer Sea. In it lies the city of the Valar with its many bells and its western gates, and before those gates rises a low green mound where the Two Trees were set and where their light was first kindled. The dwellings of the Powers are distributed through the land according to their natures: the mansions and forges of Aulë in the central regions, the woods of Oromë and the fields and pastures of Yavanna, and the gardens of Lórien with their still lake and island. Westernmost of all, upon the shore where the land meets the Encircling Sea, stand the halls of Mandos, and beyond them Nienna keeps a house that looks outward from the confines of the world.

Only one breach opened in the mountain wall. Near the middle of the range the Valar cleft a ravine, the Pass of Light, and through it the radiance of the Trees fell eastward upon the coastlands; within the gap stood a green hill crowned by the city of the Noldor, looking out over the bay and its shore, where an island had been anchored offshore for the Elves who came late over the sea. North of the settled land stretched a cold and empty march running toward the grinding ice, and southward a narrow, sunless country lay between the sheer eastern faces of the mountains and the water, shunned and little visited. Eastward, in the waters between Aman and the Hither Lands, shadow and enchanted isles were afterwards set to entangle any ship that sought the coast.

Valinor was founded in the aftermath of a defeat. The Valar had first set their dwelling upon the isle of Almaren, in the midst of a great lake in the middle regions of the world, but when Melkor overthrew the Lamps the isle was ruined and the ordering of the earth undone; rather than fight again over lands where the Children of Ilúvatar were still to awaken, the Powers passed westward over the sea and made their realm anew. There the folk of Aulë built Valmar, and Yavanna set the seeds of all growing things in the soil of the plain. The kindling of the Two Trees, which Yavanna brought forth by song and Nienna quickened with her tears, opened the long age that was afterwards reckoned by their waxing and waning; for that period the narrative traditions preserve no numbered chronology of the kind kept in Middle-earth, and dated year-count begins only with the first rising of the Sun.

The realm's first war was fought far from its borders. When it was learned that the Quendi had awakened beneath the stars and that Melkor was already at work among them, the Valar took counsel and assailed his northern strongholds; Utumno was broken open, and Melkor was bound and brought as a captive to the West, where he was judged before the gates of Valmar and sentenced to confinement in the halls of Mandos for three ages. The Valar then summoned the Elves to dwell in the light, and of the three kindreds who set out most came at length over the sea, though the Teleri delayed long upon the eastern shores. The years that followed were the height of the land's peace and its richest season of making: the Noldor learned craft of Aulë and increased in lore, and Fëanor wrought the Silmarils and filled them with the blended light of the Trees. At the end of his term Melkor sued for pardon, and Manwë, who could not conceive of a malice like his own, released him on parole.

That clemency undid the age. Melkor moved among the Noldor with counsel and rumour until suspicion divided the house of Finwë; weapons were forged in secret, and when Fëanor drew sword upon his half-brother he was banished from the city for twelve years and withdrew north to Formenos with his father and the Silmarils. Unmasked at last, Melkor fled to the sunless country south of the mountains and made a league with Ungoliant. At a festival held upon the high mountain, when the greater part of the people were gathered away from the plain, the two came upon the Trees: Melkor pierced them and Ungoliant drained their light and sap, and an unlight spread that even the Valar could not pierce. Melkor then broke into Formenos, killed Finwë at the door, and carried off the jewels. Fëanor refused the Valar's request to surrender the Silmarils for the healing of the Trees, swore his oath, and led the greater part of his people into exile; on the way they slew the Teleri at their haven and seized their ships, and upon the northern shore the doom of Mandos was spoken against them.

The Trees could not be restored, but Telperion bore one last flower and Laurelin one last fruit, and from these the Valar made the Moon and the Sun and set them to travel above the world; the First Age is reckoned from the Sun's first rising, and thereafter the light of Valinor was preserved chiefly in the Silmarils and in the memory of those who had seen it. Grieved by the kinslaying and the rebellion, the Valar shut the land against approach, and for many lives of Men no embassy from the Hither Lands came through. The prohibition held until Eärendil, bearing a Silmaril, passed the shadows and became the first mariner out of Middle-earth to set foot upon that shore, where he spoke as an advocate for both kindreds and was heard. From that plea came the host of the West, which broke Angband, ended the First Age with the ruin of Beleriand, and thrust Morgoth out beyond the confines of the world.

In the age that followed, the Valar raised an island in the Great Sea as a dwelling for the Edain who had aided them, set within sight of the Blessed Realm from its westward height, and bound its people by a ban forbidding them to sail west out of sight of their own coasts. For long the Eldar of the island near Valinor came to Númenor with gifts and counsel, but as the Númenóreans grew great they came to resent the limit set upon their lives and to read the Ban as envy. Sauron, brought captive to the island, worked upon that grievance until Ar-Pharazôn built the Great Armament and sailed west to take deathlessness by force. In S.A. 3319 he landed upon the shores of Aman and pitched his camp about the green hill of the Elves; the Valar thereupon laid down their government of Arda and called upon Ilúvatar. The world was changed: Númenor was drowned, the invading host was buried beneath falling hills, and Aman with Valinor was taken out of the reach of mortal ships altogether.

Removal was not destruction. Valinor endured unchanged in itself, but the seas were bent and the lands of the Powers no longer lay upon the round earth that mariners could sail; only the Straight Road remained, granted to the Elves and to a very few besides, and Tolkien described the alteration in these terms when explaining the shape of his mythology to a publisher. Through the Third Age the ships of the Eldar left the Grey Havens by that road, so that the traffic westward continued while the way itself stayed hidden from the ships of Men. In T.A. 3021 the keepers of the Three Rings took ship from Mithlond with the Ring-bearers, and the Red Book records that departure as the end of the Third Age in Middle-earth; the Ring-bearer of the Shire was permitted to follow later, by grace rather than by right. After the passing of Elessar, Legolas built a ship in Ithilien and sailed down Anduin and over the sea, and by the tradition of Gondor Gimli went with him, the last recorded crossing in the annals.

Authority in Valinor rested with the Valar, and among them Manwë held the chief place as vicegerent of Ilúvatar within Arda, with Varda beside him. Rule was collegial rather than absolute: weighty matters were settled in council, the Powers seated upon thrones in a ring set apart for judgement, and Mandos, their doomsman, pronounced sentence only at Manwë's bidding. Ulmo stood apart from that order, keeping to the outer waters and seldom attending the assemblies. Beneath the Valar served the Maiar, spirits of the same order but lesser in might: Eönwë was herald of Manwë, Ilmarë handmaid of Varda, and in the gardens of Lórien dwelt Melian and Olórin, who learned pity of Nienna.

The Elvish folk of the region were not one people but three kindreds, each under its own king. The Vanyar were dearest to Manwë and Varda, and their lord Ingwë, held by all the Eldar to be High King of the Elves, dwelt at the feet of the Powers upon the holy mountain, his people having left the city on the green hill for Valinor itself. The Noldor, whose bent was toward craft and lore, were the folk of Finwë and the friends of Aulë; the Teleri, latest to arrive and settled at their own haven, held rather to Ulmo and to Ossë under King Olwë. The kindreds were joined when Finarfin, youngest son of Finwë, wedded Eärwen, Olwë's daughter; and when Finwë was slain and most of the Noldor went into exile, Finarfin turned back and received from the Valar the lordship of those who remained in Tirion.

Relations eastward were shaped by these peoples as much as by the Powers. The kinslaying at the haven was long in healing, and when the host of the West was mustered the Teleri would not march in arms, though they consented to steer the ships; its strength came chiefly from the Vanyar and from the Noldor of Finarfin. Afterwards the exiles were pardoned and summoned home, and many of the returning Eldar dwelt upon the island off the coast rather than in the guarded land. Later still the Valar chose emissaries from among the Maiar and sent them east as the Istari, an intervention by counsel and not by war.

In the tales of the elder days Valinor functions less as a place the story visits than as the seat of authority to which it appeals. The great questions of Middle-earth are seldom settled where they are fought: word of trouble travels west, counsel is taken among the Powers, and what returns eastward is a summons, a judgement, or an army. The pattern gives the legends their peculiar shape, in which the decisive turn is often taken off-stage by persons the sufferers cannot see, and in which a single successful embassy can end an age. It also makes the land a moral test rather than a destination. Those who come to it uninvited come as claimants, and the narrative measures them by what they want from it; those who are received come as suppliants speaking for others.

In The Lord of the Rings the land never appears at all, and its absence is the point. It survives as invocation in moments of terror, when Elbereth is called upon by those who have never seen her hill; as song, in the lament sung at the parting from Lórien, where the singer weighs her own hope of return and finds it doubtful; and as an ache that wakes in Legolas at the crying of gulls and never afterwards leaves him. Against it the fair places of the Hither Lands are quietly measured, and are found to be memories rather than equals.

The book closes on a passage west, and Tolkien was careful about how it should be read. Frodo's crossing is granted as a mercy and a healing for wounds that could not be mended in the Shire, not as a reward and not as an escape from mortality; the West cures nothing it cannot cure, and the Ring-bearers remained mortal there. Read so, the dream of a green country beyond a curtain of rain, which comes to Frodo early in the journey and is answered at the last, belongs to the book's consolation rather than to its geography.

The land was present from the first stratum of the mythology, but in a form that later revision reduced considerably. In the earliest tales the western realm is described in a chapter devoted to the arrival of the Powers and their building, and the name Valinor there serves loosely for the whole western land, the later separation of the continent from the region within it not yet being fixed. The Valar of that period are more numerous and more domestic than they afterwards became: they have children, among them a son of Manwë named Fionwë Úrion, who survived the recasting only by demotion, reappearing at last as the herald of the published tradition, a spirit of the lesser order rather than a son. The silver tree bore the name Silpion beside Laurelin, and the city of the Elves and the hill on which it stood shared the single name Kôr, which was later divided between the green height and the town upon it. A separate chapter treats the closing of the land after the flight of the Noldoli, worked out at greater length and with a colder judgement than the later summary allows, with shadowy seas and enchanted isles contrived against approach and Ulmo dissenting from the decision; the Sun and Moon of that version are vessels with named steersmen, an arrangement Tolkien afterwards abandoned.

The later drafts were preoccupied less with the land's furniture than with its place in the shape of the world. A short cosmological treatise of the 1930s, accompanied by diagrams, set out the flat earth with the Outer Sea about it and the Walls of the World beyond, and drew the successive alterations the world suffered, including the round form that followed the ruin of the Númenóreans. The removal itself was reached from outside the older legendarium, through the time-travel frame in which the fall of the island was first written, and was rewritten again in a later version that tells the tale as Númenórean tradition rather than Elvish record, so that the western land is seen only through the memory of Men who had lost it. Latest of all are the essays in which Tolkien considered making the world round from its creation, which would have deprived the realm of the Trees as the origin of light and of much of its cosmological function; that material was never brought into agreement with the narrative, and the published account keeps the older scheme.