Criterios para la selección de contenidos

Near the beginning of the first chapter of e Silmarillion, there is a description of the birth of two trees, which come to be known as the Two Trees of Valinor:

And when Valinor was full-wrought and the mansions of the Valar were established, in the midst of the plain beyond the mountains they built their city, Valmar of the many bells.

Before its western gate there was a green mound, Ezellohar, that is named also Corollairë; and Yavanna hallowed it, and she sat there long upon the green grass and sang a song of power, in which was set all her thought of things that grow in the earth.

But Nienna thought in silence, and watered the mound with tears. In that time the Valar were gathered together to hear the song of Yavanna. . . .

And as they watched, upon the mound there came forth two slender shoots; and silence was over all the world in that hour, nor was there any other sound save the chanting of Yavanna.

Under her song the saplings grew and became fair and tall, and came to flower; and thus there awoke in the world the Two Trees of Valinor. Of all things which Yavanna made they have most renown, and about their fate all the tales of the Elder Days are woven. (Silm, 38)

One of the first things we must note is the mythic significance of this event, which is implied by the fact that all of the Valar—the most pow-erful beings of Middle-earth⁴—devote their full attention to this event, and “silence was over all the world in that hour.” is significance is also made explicit in the closing line of the paragraph: woven about the fate of these two trees are “all the tales of the Elder Days.” is might seem to

be a surprising statement to make about a pair of trees. However, these trees not only have a central place in the physical layout of the undying city of Valmar, the capital of Valinor; they are also central to the early chronology of events in the mythic Elder Days of Middle-earth. It is a quest for the famed Silmarils, made from the light of the Two Trees, that drives the High Elves out of Valinor to return in exile to Middle-earth.

is exile eventually results in the establishment of the Elvish king-doms of western Middle-earth that remain in the ird Age—chiefly Lothlórien and Rivendell, but others as well—and, later, the founding of the kingdoms of Men in Gondor and Arnor. e famed White Tree of Gondor, replanted by Aragorn when he becomes king at the end of e Return of the King, is a descendent of the Two Trees of Valinor, and Aragorn’s planting of it evokes the memory of Yavanna’s primeval planting in the long-past mythic period. It is the light of the Two Trees of Valinor that lives in the star of Eärendil as well as in the Phial of Galadriel—the “star-glass” borne by Frodo.

As a philologist, Tolkien was interested in the sources and signifi-cance of names, and in his own works he showed the importance of people, places, objects, and other things by the patterns of their naming.

“It gives me great pleasure, a good name,” Tolkien said in a 1971 BBC radio interview. “I always in writing start with a name. Give me a name and it produces a story, not the other way about normally.” In Tolkien’s works, the most important things usually have many names. Gandalf, for example, is given the names Mithrandir, arkûn, Olórin, Incánus, and others. Some things are of such universal significance—and, by vir-tue of the number of people and races to whom they are significant, so multifaceted in meaning and nuance—that many names are required.

is is the case with the Two Trees. “Telperion the one was called in Valinor, and Silpion, and Ninquelótë, and many other names; but Laurelin the other was, and Malinalda, and Culúrien, and many names in song beside” (Silm, 38). Even the hillock on which the trees grow has two names, Ezellohar and Corollairë, both of which mean in Elvish

“ e Green Mound”; Galadriel’s realm of Lothlórien is also named Laurelindórenan a er the younger of the two trees. All these names are evidence of the historic importance and of the deeper mythic quali-ties associated with the things they describe. Arguably, the Two Trees are the most mythically significant symbols in all of Tolkien’s writings about Middle-earth.

is leads us to the issue of what these two trees are, what they rep-resent, and why they are so prominent in the history and mythology of Middle-earth and in the environmental themes explored in this book.

In Tolkien’s ecology, the living world is not the only aspect of creation that is important. Mountains and rivers, seas and islands, the winds and skies, and the stars and stones are all part of nature. For this reason, the Valar—the godlike ruling powers—have their di erent identities bound up with di erent aspects of nature and with care for its various compo-nents. One might say that the Valar are stewards of Arda,⁵ or of various aspects of its substance. Manwë, the king of the Valar, is associated with the winds of Middle-earth, Varda with the stars, Aulë with the material substance of the earth, and Ulmo with the waters. Living things, how-ever, have a special role and a special importance—partly because man, the mythmaker, is a living being, and partly because the author himself was a man.⁶ Among the Valar, Yavanna is the one most concerned with living things. She is called the “Giver of Fruits”; she is “the lover of all things that grow in the earth, and all their countless forms she holds in her mind, from the trees like towers in forests long ago to the moss upon stones or the small and secret things in the mould” (Silm, 27). To Yavanna, living beings in the biosphere can be divided into two groups, which she calls olvar (plants) and kelvar (animals). As illustrated by the earlier quotation, Yavanna pours “all her thought of things that grow in the earth” into the making of the Two Trees. It can be said, then, that these trees embody all living things in Arda at that time, a time so early in the cosmic history of Middle-earth that Men and Elves have not yet been brought into being. e timing here makes a great deal of di er-ence, for—read in this light—the trees must be said to embody the liv-ing essence of the biosphere, the natural world apart from Men.

In this regard, it is interesting to note Tolkien’s language. Although the event is one in which Yavanna makes or creates the trees, the narra-tor also describes the trees as awakening—as if to imply that they had a life already, prior to Yavanna’s song of creation, which her singing sim-ply arouses from dormancy. Even the very mound on which the trees grow is said to be “hallowed”—that is, made holy—by their presence.

is mound is covered, we are told, with “green grass,” and in Tolkien’s writing, references to green, to grass, and especially to green grass suggest—

like trees—important mythic symbolism.⁷ Even the color green alone is powerful; in the first chapter of the Quenta Silmarillion, for example, we

read that “the new-made green was yet a marvel in the eyes of the mak-ers; and they were long content” (Silm, 36). e mythic importance of green grass carries over into e Lord of the Rings. When he first meets the figure of Aragorn crossing the plains of Rohan, Éomer exclaims in surprise, “Dreams and legends spring to life out of the grass.” He later asks, “Do we walk in legends or on the green earth in daylight?” to which Aragorn replies, “ e green earth, say you? at is a mighty mat-ter of legend though you tread it under the light of day!” (III/ii).

In addition to the description of the trees as “fair,” meaning “beau-tiful to the eye,” subsequent paragraphs depict them in greater detail.

Two of the most striking features of the trees are the color of their leaves and flowers and the fact that they emit a light or radiance of their own.

Telperion has leaves of silver and gives o a “dew of silver light” ever falling from its countless flowers. Laurelin has leaves whose edges are

“glittering gold,” whose flowers are like “clusters of yellow flame” spill-ing “a gold rain upon the ground,” givspill-ing forth “warmth and great light.”

We read:

In seven hours the glory of each tree waxed to full and waned again to naught; and each awoke once more to life an hour before the other ceased to shine. us in Valinor twice every day there came a gentle hour of so er light when both trees were faint and their gold and silver beams were mingled. Telperion was the elder . . . and that first hour in which he shone [was named]

the Opening Hour, and [the Valar] counted from it the ages of their reign in Valinor. . . .

But the light that was spilled from the trees endured long, ere it was taken up into the airs or sank down into the earth; and the dews of Telperion and the rain that fell from Laurelin Varda hoarded in great vats like shining lakes, that were to all the land of the Valar as wells of water and of light. us began the Days of the Bliss of Valinor; and thus began also the Count of Time.

(Silm, 38–39)

e overall imagery is fourfold: warmth, light, beauty, and—from the comparison to gold and silver, as well as their prominent place in Valinor—great worth or value. e word used by Tolkien here to capture all this is “glory,” with which the Bliss of Valinor is closely associated.

A er Laurelin and Telperion are created, but before they are destroyed, the Noldorin jewel-smith Fëanor ponders “how the light of the Trees, the glory of the Blessed Realm, might be preserved imperish-able.” Working in secret, summoning all his power, Fëanor creates out of crystal stronger than adamant the three great jewels known as the Silmarils. He encases in these jewels “the blended light of the Trees of Valinor, which lives in them yet, though the Trees have long withered and shine no more. erefore even in the darkness of the deepest trea-sury the Silmarils of their own radiance shone like the stars of Varda;

and yet, as were they indeed living things, they rejoiced in light and received it and gave it back in hues more marvelous than before.” Varda hallows the Silmarils, and it is foretold that “the fates of Arda, earth, sea, and air, lay locked within them” (Silm, 67). Two of these jewels are ulti-mately lost, but the one that remains becomes the beacon of Eärendil, the Morning Star.

e moment when the trees are destroyed by the giant spider Ungoliant—a figure of darkness or unlight whose name means “weaver of gloom”—is one of immeasurable grief and mourning for the Valar, a grief that “neither power nor wisdom” can assuage (Silm, 98). Yet this is not the end of the trees’ light; it lives on not only in the Silmarils but also in the light of the Sun and the Moon. Before the trees die and their lifeless stems are le to stand forever in Valinor as “a memory of van-ished joy,” Yavanna coaxes from the failing life of Telperion “one great flower of silver” and from Laurelin one final “single fruit of gold.” All the Valar then labor together and form the Moon and the Sun from this last silver leaf and golden fruit; Yavanna’s spouse Aulë, the mythic smith, forges vessels for them that Manwë, their king, hallows. Finally, Varda, the queen of the Valar and the one most revered by the Elves, puts the Moon and the Sun into the heavens to light the earth and thwart the works of Melkor done in darkness. “Isil the Sheen the [Elves] of old named the Moon, flower of Telperion in Valinor; and Anar the Fire-golden, fruit of Laurelin they named the Sun.” ere they remain as

“lamps of heaven, outshining the ancient stars” (Silm, 99). Forever a er, anyone on Middle-earth who looks into the sky and sees the sun and moon looks upon the ancient light of the Two Trees, and anyone who looks to the Morning Star as a symbol of hope sees their blended light shining from the surviving Silmaril.

us, just as the Days of Bliss of Valinor are counted by the light of

the trees, so too are the months in Middle-earth counted by the light of Telperion, now dwelling in the Moon, and the days are counted according to the movement of the Sun, the last remaining fruit of Laurelin. is may be the most significant indication of the impor-tance of the Two Trees. Moreover, even in the mind of Yavanna, who gives birth to her, Laurelin is somehow representative of all nature.

She now becomes a source of nourishment for all the olvar, the plant life of the world, on which the kelvar, including Elves and Men, physi-cally depend.

Environmentally, there is much that can be made of this. It is worth noting in summary that (1) e Silmarillion begins with these powerful images of nature, (2) the glory and bliss of Valinor are closely associated with these trees, and (3) the Two Trees are closely associated with all of life itself. But as we noted earlier, it is particularly noteworthy that the Children of Ilúvatar—the name given collectively to Men and Elves—

have not yet appeared in Middle-earth. us, in Tolkien’s mythology, the beauty and value of Yavanna’s works of creation are independent of any practical or utilitarian purposes they may have for Men or Elves. eir importance inheres in nature for its own sake. Even if the Children of Ilúvatar had never appeared, the trees would be seen—by the Valar, the Ainur, and Ilúvatar—as things of value, beauty, goodness, and glory, and upon their passing, even the fact of their existence would have been seen as good.