Trees in Tolkien’s Middle-earth, Part I

[This essay assumes the reader’s familiarity with, at the very least, The Lord of the Rings books or movies. The more you’ve read, the more you’ll get out of it.]

Introduction

Trees are prominent figures in the geographic and narrative landscapes of J.R.R. Tolkien’s Middle-earth. Particular species are accurately described in the settings where characters live and travel. A special lineage of trees is older and more venerable than that of any royal house of men. Time itself is measured from the initial flowering of a pair of hallowed, light-bearing trees. On the maps included at the fronts of the books, forests are as prominent as mountains and rivers; they are primary features, not mere background. If you’re a lover of trees and forests, Tolkien’s books offer immense enjoyment besides the well-crafted storytelling. If you’re not one yet, they might make you one.

Tolkien himself was an adamant tree lover. In a 1955 letter to his publisher, he wrote:

I am (obviously) much in love with plants and above all trees, and always have been; and I find human maltreatment of them as hard to bear as some find ill-treatment of animals.

In a 1968 BBC interview, he said:

I have always for some reason, I don’t know why, been enormously attracted by trees. All my works are full of trees. I suppose I have actually in some simple-minded form of longing; I should have liked to make contact with a tree and find out what it feels about things.

In an Oct. 1944 letter to his son, Christopher, Tolkien made it plain that trees are more important to him than anything manufactured by humans:

It is not the not-man (e.g. weather) nor man (even at a bad level), but the man-made that is ultimately daunting and insupportable. If a ragnarök would burn all the slums and gas-works, and shabby garages, and long arc-lit suburbs, it [could] for me burn all the works of art—and I’d go back to trees.

He waxed poetic to Christopher in December of that same year about the trees in his neighborhood after a fresh snowfall:

When a gleam of sun (about 11) got through it was breathtakingly beautiful: trees like motionless fountains of white branching spray against a golden light and, high overhead, a pale translucent blue.

Most of the trees that Tolkien names are real ones found in the world today, often commonly. After all, Tolkien presents Middle-earth as our own earth in an earlier time. According to Flora of Middle-Earth: Plants of J.R.R. Tolkien’s Legendarium by Walter Judd and Graham A. Judd (a father and son), the real trees Tolkien mentions throughout his books are: Alders, Ashes, Bay, Beeches, Cedar, Elms, Firs, Hawthorns, Hazels/Filberts, Holly, Larches, Lindens, Oaks, Pines, Poplars, Rowan, Willows, and Yews. If you live in the temperate north, you’ve seen many if not all of these trees yourself. Further, the ecologies in which Tolkien trees are realistic and appropriate for the species, as botanists who have studied his works have observed. This verisimilitude grounds Middle-earth’s fictive locales in familiarity, providing a connection between here and there, or if you prefer, between now and then.

Tolkien’s mythological trees have traits that no real trees do, but they are not merely fanciful. They convey meaning as incarnations of the natural laws of Middle-earth itself and inhabit a through-line that runs from The Silmarillion to The Return of the King. They are not characters the way an Elf or Dwarf or Human might be, but some are named like individuals and play significant narrative roles, their fates reflecting that of the society they’re embedded in.

The topic of trees in Middle-earth is too big for one essay, so I am envisioning at least three. This first one is about mythological trees that are central to the entire legendarium in terms of plot and resonance. Future posts will cover important trees and forests and (of course) the Ents.

Part I: Trees Divine & Royal

The beginning days

The first trees in Middle-earth grow before the sun and the moon, when creation is lit by two lamps on towering pillars. The world’s only inhabitants are divine beings called the Valar and the Maiar (singular Vala and Maia), who are comparable to gods and goddesses and to angels. Yavanna, a chief Vala, makes all plant life, as is told in the book, The Silmarillion:

Then [after the lamps started shining] the first seeds that Yavanna had sown began swiftly to sprout and to burgeon, and there arose a multitude of growing things great and small, mosses and grasses and great ferns, and trees whose tops were crowned with clouds as they were living mountains, but whose feet were rapped in a green twilight.

Yavanna herself sometimes takes the form of a tree:

Some there are who have seen her standing like a tree under heaven, crowned with the Sun; and from all its branches there spilled a golden dew upon the barren earth, and it grew green with corn; but the roots of the tree were in the waters of Ulmo, and the winds of Manwë spoke it in its leaves.

“Corn” here is an archaic English word that predates the introduction of what we now call Corn (Zea mays) from the Americas, and refers to any grain crop like wheat, oats and rye.

The Two Trees of Valinor

This lamp-lit era of the world does not last long because the towers are soon demolished by Melkor, an evil Vala, whose successor in later ages is Sauron, a Maia and the Dark Lord in The Lord of the Rings [LotR]. The other Valar then retreat across a wide ocean to the westernmost continent where they raise high jagged mountains in defense. After setting up their gardens and dwellings there, Yavanna sings into existence the Two Trees of Valinor:

The one had leaves of dark green that beneath were as shining silver, and from each of his countless flowers a dew of silver light was ever falling, and the earth beneath was dappled with the shadows of his fluttering leaves. The other bore leaves of a young green like the new-opened beech their edges were of glittering gold. Flowers swung upon her branches in clusters of yellow flame, formed each to a glowing horn that spilled a golden rain upon the ground and from the blossom of that tree there came forth warmth and a great light.

The silver tree is named Telperion, and the golden one Laurelin. The light of each tree waxes and wanes over a period of seven hours, and is dark for five, but they are off-set from one another and overlap for one hour twice, during the sixth and twelfth hours of the day. (These are “Valian hours” which are seven of our hours, so each “day” is 84 hours long.) This era when the Two Trees exist is the “Bliss of Valinor” and lasts many thousands of years (over 14,000 in fact).

During this period, the Elves, also known as “the Firstborn,” awake in the far east of Middle-earth. The Valar invites them to Valinor, and many, though not all, choose to make the journey. The light of the Trees is so powerful that it bestows these Elves and their progeny with greater wisdom and physical vitality than those left behind, who live only under starlight. Galadriel is born there at this time. As is told in Unfinished Tales, her golden hair is considered “a marvel unmatched” and it is believed that “the light of the Two Trees had been snared in her tresses.”

Another Elf born in this period was Fëanor, considered the greatest craftsman of all time. He made the Palintiri, the crystal-ball like “seeing stones” in LotR. His most impressive work is in fashioning the Silmarils, which are three self-illuminating gems that shine with the blended light of the Two Trees.

Incidentally, Galadriel’s hair might have been Fëanor’s inspiration for the Silmarils. He requests a strand three times, but she refuses him each time. This is in part why Gimli’s request for the same in LotR is met with such an aghast reaction. After all, if the mighty Fëanor was turned down, how dare this Dwarf ask?

Melkor was consumed with jealousy and hatred of all things beautiful, so with the help of a monstrous spider named Ungoliant, he destroys the Two Trees and steals the Silmarils, and then hides himself in his underground fortress in the north of Middle-earth, east of the sea from Valinor, where he is thereafter known as Morgoth. At Fëanor’s bidding, two hosts of Elves leave Valinor to make war with him there, and The Silmarillion is largely an accounting of the events that follow, both glorious and tragic (with far more of the latter).

In the immediate aftermath of the death of the Two Trees, Yavanna and another Vala, Nienna, weep over the withered trunks, beseeching them to come alive again. Telperion bears one more flower and Laurelin one more fruit, before both die utterly. The Valar enclose the flower and the fruit each in their own vessels and set them to traverse the skies, each with a Maia to steer them. Thus ware born the silvery moon and the golden sun. The Maia of the moon is male, and being drawn to the beauty of the Maia of the sun, who was female, his vessel comes too close and is scorched; hence the dark marks on the moon’s surface. In the measurement of time the Days of the Trees were over, and the Days of the Sun began.

This is more than just a story about salvaging beauty from destruction. For Tolkien, it’s an expression of how Middle-earth functions; specifically, history is an inevitable fall, in steps, from the divine to the mundane. In a 1951 letter to publisher Milton Waldman, he writes:

As far as all this has symbolical or allegorical significance. Light is such a primeval symbol in the nature of the Universe, that it can hardly be analysed. The Light of Valinor (derived from light before any fall) is the light of art undivorced from reason, that sees things both scientifically (or philosophically) and imaginatively (or subcreatively) and ‘says that they are good’ – as beautiful. The Light of Sun (or Moon) is derived from the Trees only after they were sullied by Evil…

A marked difference here between these legends and most others is that the Sun is not a divine symbol, but a second-best thing, and the ‘light of the Sun’ (the world under the sun) become terms for a fallen world, and a dislocated imperfect vision.

In the bloody wars that are waged in Middle-earth in the following centuries, two Silmarils are lost but one becomes a new star. Eärendil (who happens to be Elrond’s father) sails to Valinor with the jewel on his brow, successfully seeking the help of the Valar against Morgoth, who is defeated and banished from the world (at least until a Final Battle at the end of time). Still wearing the shining Silmaril on his brow, Eärendil takes to sailing his ship in the heavens. Next time you see Venus, remember this story, as that’s clearly the “star” Tolkien meant:

Far he journeyed in that ship, even into the starless voids; but most often he was seen at morning or at evening, glimmering in sunrise or sunset, as he came back to Valinor from voyages beyond the confines of the world.

In LotR, Galadriel gives Frodo a crystal vial containing water from her fountain reflecting the light of this very star. Frodo brandishes it in front of Shelob, the giant spider in the tunnels on the border of Mordor:

Slowly his hand went to his bosom, and slowly he held aloft the Phial of Galadriel. For a moment it glimmered, faint as a rising star struggling in heavy earthward mists, and then as its power waxed, and hope grew in Frodo’s mind, it began to burn, and kindled to a silver flame, a minute heart of dazzling light, as though Eärendil had himself come down from the high sunset paths with the last Silmaril upon his brow. The darkness receded from it, until it seemed to shine in the centre of a globe of airy crystal, and the hand that held it sparkled with white fire.

Shelob’s eyes are pained by the light:

No brightness so deadly had ever afflicted them before. From sun and moon and star they had been safe underground, but now a star had descended into the very earth.

Tolkien is bringing ancient events full circle here, with irony. Shelob is daunted but she is the offspring of Ungoliant, who helped kill the Two Trees. The “star” that descends into her tunnel shines with their light.

A little later, Samwise uses the Phial to gain entrance to an orc tower where Frodo is being held captive. The gate is blocked by the will of “the Watchers” a pair of statues on either side inhabited by “some dreadful spirit of evil vigilance” but when he holds up the Phial, the energy wavers for long enough that he can dash in. On the way back out with the rescued Frodo, he uses the Phial again, and this time the gate’s arch crumbles under the strain.

The potency of the light of the Two Trees is especially impressive in the case of the Phial, where it’s thrice diluted, first into a gem that becomes a star, then as a reflection of that star, then as water that captures the reflection. That’s multiple layers of “dislocation” and “imperfection.” Frodo takes the Phial with him when he sails from Middle-earth at the end of The Return of the King, returning the light to its source in Valinor.

The lineage of the White Tree of Gondor

The tale of the Two Trees of Valinor has another side shoot that runs all the way to Aragorn’s kingship, and that is through the White Tree of Gondor. As Tolkien tells in The Silmarillion, after the Elves arrive in Valinor, but before the Two Trees are destroyed by Melkor and Ungoliant, Yavanna makes a tree “in the image of” Telperion, and gifts it to the Elves who live in the city of Tirion. The tree, named Galathilion, is also silvery but does not shine with its own light. It produces many seedlings, one of which is given to the Elves living on the island of Tol Eressëa, just off-shore from Valinor, where it thrives. They name it “Celeborn” which means “silver tree” (and yes, that’s also the name of Galadriel’s husband) and also call it the White Tree. In The Fellowship of the Ring, this is the tree represented on the Doors of Durin at Moria’s west gate, as Legolas mentions.

Celeborn’s bark is white and smooth, its leaves are green on top and silvery underneath, and its large flowers are white-petaled, pendulous, and become fragrant in the evening. Tolkien never says if a real species of tree inspired the White Tree. Some speculate that it’s in the Magnolia family because of the large white flowers; others compare it to a Cherry tree because of early blossoming. I took a deep dive into this subject and couldn’t find much more than this, I’m sorry to report.

After Morgoth’s defeat, the Men (also known as the “Second Born”) who had helped the Elves in the wars of the Silmarils are rewarded with a new land for themselves: an island called Númenor in the middle of the ocean between Middle-earth and Valinor. The Men who sail there are guided by the star of Eärendil. The first ruler of Númenor is Elrond’s twin brother Elros. As sons of Eärendil, who was half-Elven, the twins are both granted the privilege of choosing to live either as mortal Man or immortal Elf. Elrond chooses to be an Elf (which is why he is still alive in the time of the War of the Ring, over 6000 years later) but Elros picks Man, and though he dies, he is blessed with a long life of 500 years.

In the early days of Númenor, Elves from Tol Eressëa bring many plants from Valinor, including a seedling of Celeborn. It is planted in the royal court, is named “Nimloth,” is also known as the “White Tree,” and is tended dutifully by generations of kings and queens as a living symbol of their close tie to the Elves. Eventually though, following the core Tolkien theme of “the fall,” the Númenoreans become corrupted, their friendship with the Elves becomes strained, and they neglect the tree. We are now 3000 years into Númenor’s history.

Meanwhile, Sauron, who had been Morgoth’s lieutenant but had escaped the Valar when they triumphed, arises to power in Middle-earth, conquers vast swathes of territory, and declares himself “King of Men.” The king of Númenor, Ar-Pharazôn, himself an overly proud individual, resents Sauron’s claim and sails to Middle-earth with an enormous army to make war on him. So powerful is Númenor at this time that Sauron surrenders and allows himself to be brought to Númenor as a captive. Being a devious sweet-talker, he eventually rises in favor and becomes one of Ar-Pharazôn’s closest advisors. He convinces the king that the Elves and the Valar are Númenor’s enemies, persuades him to build a temple to Morgoth, and urges him to cut down Nimloth. Isildur—the same one who will later cut the One Ring from Sauron’s hand in Mordor but refuse to destroy it in the Cracks of Doom—learns of the threat to Nimloth, sneaks into the courtyard at night in disguise and harvests the last fruit from its branches. He narrowly eludes capture but is seriously injured and remains bedridden from his injuries for months. But the fruit is planted and when it sprouts in the spring, Isildur is healed.

The day after the rescue of the fruit, Sauron has Nimloth felled and taken to the temple.

And the first fire upon the altar Sauron kindled with the hewn wood of Nimloth, and it crackled and was consumed; but men marveled at the reek that went up from it, so that the land lay under a cloud for seven days, until slowly it passed into the west.

Nimloth had lived nearly 3300 years. That the smoke drifted west is significant and its arrival in Valinor would have brought a sad message to the Elves of Tol Eressëa and the Valar.

Not too many years later, Sauron pushes Ar-Pharazôn into an attempted invasion of Valinor. The godly response upon arrival of the fleet is the destruction all the ships, the burial of all troops, and the submerging of Númenor. To top it all off, Valinor is removed from the planet “into the realm of hidden things” so it can never be attacked again. Isildur, along with his brother Anarion and their father Elendil—all of whom had avoided being drafted for the invasion—escape the destruction of Númenor, taking with them the sapling of the White Tree.

In Middle-earth, Isildur plants the tree in Gondor, in Minas Ithil (“the tower of the moon”), sister city to Minas Anor (“the tower of the sun”). But only nine years later, Sauron, who also escaped the downfall of Númenor, attacks Minas Ithil and burns the tree. Isildur survives and flees with a seedling of the sapling. After the twelve-year War of the Last Alliance ends with Sauron’s defeat, Isildur plants the White Tree in Minas Anor.

That tree, the second, lives 1634 years until it succumbs to the Great Plague that comes out of the east and also kills many citizens of Gondor. In retrospect, this event signaled that Sauron was rising again, quietly, in the shadows.

During the life of the third White Tree, Minas Anor is renamed Minas Tirith (“tower of guard”). That tree dies after 1232 years, about 150 years before the main events of LotR, and is left to stand “until the king returns.”

In the first chapter of The Return of the King, when Gandalf and Pippin arrive in Minas Tirith, we encounter the White Tree in both representation and reality:

Upon the black surcoats [of the guards] were embroidered in white a tree blossoming like snow beneath a silver crown and many-pointed stars. This was the livery of the heirs of Elendil, and none wore it now in all Gondor, save the Guards of the Citadel before the Court of the Fountain where the White Tree once had grown.

Already it seemed that word of their coming had gone before them; and at once they were admitted, silently, and without question. Quickly Gandalf strode across the white-paved court. A sweet fountain played there in the morning sun, and a sward of bright green lay about it; but in the midst, drooping over the pool, stood a dead tree, and the falling drops dripped sadly from its barren and broken branches back into the clear water.

Pippin glanced at it as he hurried after Gandalf. It looked mournful, he thought, and he wondered why the dead tree was left in this place where everything else was well tended.

Seven stars and seven stones and one white tree.

The words that Gandalf had murmured came back into his mind.

The poem earlier recited was:

Tall ships and tall kings
Three times three,
What brought they from the foundered land
Over the flowing sea?
Seven stars and seven stones
And one white tree.

The “tall kings” are Elendil, Anarion and Isildur, the “foundered land” is Númenor, the “seven stones” are the Palintiri, and we’ve just gone over the “white tree.” With these six brief lines, Tolkien is alluding to an immense back story that is unknown not just to Pippin in that moment, but mostly to first-time readers of the LotR as well.

A few chapters later, a representation of the White Tree makes a dramatic appearance at the battle of the Pelennor Fields, at Minas Tirith. A fleet of enemy ships is sighted coming up the river, and everyone at first believes that defeat is near. But then,

upon the foremost ship a great standard broke, and the wind displayed it as she turned towards the Harlond. There flowered a White Tree, and that was for Gondor; but Seven Stars were about it, and a high crown above it, the signs of Elendil that no lord had borne for years beyond count. And the stars flamed in the sunlight, for they were wrought of gems by Arwen daughter of Elrond; and the crown was bright in the morning, for it was wrought of mithril and gold.

Thus came Aragorn son of Arathorn, Elessar, Isildur’s heir, out of the Paths of the Dead, borne upon a wind from the Sea to the kingdom of Gondor…

Everyone on the battlefield, friend and foe alike, is shocked by this reveal, as is the reader, who is given no hint about this turn of events beforehand.

From the days of Númenor onward, the line of White Trees is intimately intertwined with the fortunes and failures of the kings and then the stewards. Aragorn is fully aware of this and after the One Ring has been destroyed and he has been crowned king—but before Arwen arrives for their marriage—he frets to Gandalf about the lack of a living White Tree in Minas Tirith. But Gandalf, who has just taken him to a secret spot on the mountain above the city, assuages his concern:

‘Turn your face from the green world, and look where all seems barren and cold!’ said Gandalf.

Then Aragorn turned, and there was a stony slope behind him running down from the skirts of the snow; and as he looked he was aware that alone there in the waste a growing thing stood. And he climbed to it, and saw that out of the very edge of the snow there sprang a sapling tree no more than three foot high. Already it had put forth young leaves long and shapely, dark above and silver beneath, and upon its slender crown it bore one small cluster of flowers whose white petals shone like the sunlit snow.

Then Aragorn cried: ‘Yé! utúvienyes! I have found it! Lo! here is a scion of the Eldest of Trees! But how comes it here? For it is not itself yet seven years old.’

And Gandalf coming looked at it, and said: ‘Verily this is a sapling of the line of Nimloth the fair; and that was a seedling of Galathilion, and that a fruit of Telperion of many names, Eldest of Trees. Who shall say how it comes here in the appointed hour? But this is an ancient hallow, and ere the kings failed or the Tree withered in the court, a fruit must have been set here… Here it has lain hidden on the mountain, even as the race of Elendil lay hidden in the wastes of the North. Yet the line of Nimloth is older far than your line, King Elessar.’

Aragorn transplants the tree in the traditional spot in the courtyard where shortly it blooms profusely. Not long after, Arwen arrives and they are married.

Metaphorically the sapling is like Aragorn and his lineage, as Gandalf points out. Simultaneously, the line of White Trees is literally a link between that royal line and the Elves. On another level, the White Tree, though beautiful, is “a dislocated imperfect vision” of its original inspiration or forefather, Telperion of the Two Trees of Valinor. Even so, it’s amazing that the tree Aragorn finds is only six generations descended from the one that Yavanna created tens of thousands of years previously, before the Sun and Moon.

A great tale that never ends

“Treelight” that shines in sunlight and moonlight by way of fruit and flower, and that sparkles in starlight by way of a gem; a line of trees whose fates are intertwined with a line of kings: with these arboreal elements, Tolkien draws out a long thread from deep time to Aragorn’s reign, passing through bliss and betrayal, disaster and glory. By centering living things whose essence can be passed on, whether by craft (the Silmarils) or by seed (the White Trees)—even if inevitably in a diminished form—Tolkien embeds his narrative in the vitality of nature. Other authors might pick magical man-made objects for a similar role, but all such could be burned as far as Tolkien is concerned.

The details of this grand mythology are not fully explicated in a straightforward linear form anywhere in LotR. Intriguingly, this mythology is at once both fundamental to the narrative’s underlying framework and unnecessary for the reader to comprehend to enjoy the storytelling. Hints are dropped in exposition, speech and song alluding to this history, and if the reader doesn’t really catch them (as I didn’t when I first read LotR as a young person), the plot is entirely compelling nonetheless. Still, the clues that are dropped can be tantalizing, and this is intentional. As Tolkien himself said:

Part of the attraction of the L. R. is, I think, due to the glimpses of a large history in the background: an attraction like that of viewing far off an unvisited island, or seeing the towers of a distant city gleaming in a sunlit mist.

The Silmarils are mentioned by Strider on Weathertop in a poem about Beren and Lúthien in the First Age, by Bilbo in Rivendell in a song about Eärendil, and by Sam when he and Frodo and Gollum are climbing up the mountains outside Mordor. In the most “meta” scene of the whole trilogy, Sam reflects on the nature of tales about adventures, asking “I wonder what sort of tale we’ve fallen into.” He goes on:

Beren now, he never thought he was going to get that Silmaril from the Iron Crown in Thangorodrim, and yet he did, and that was a worse place and a blacker danger than ours. But that’s a long tale, of course, and goes on past the happiness and into grief and beyond it—and the Silmaril went on and came to Eärendil. And why, sir, I never thought of that before! We’ve got—you’ve got some of the light of it in that star-glass that the Lady gave you! Why, to think of it, we’re in the same tale still! It’s going on. Don’t the great tales never end?

As LotR concludes, the great tale doesn’t fully end. Yes, Frodo departs from the Grey Havens and Sam settles into a happily-ever-after family life in the Shire, but in the new age of the world, Eärendil’s ship still sails the skies and a White Tree is growing in Gondor. In the heavens and on earth, the Two Trees live on, if only “imperfectly.” We can even imagine that we ourselves are in the same tale now when we look at what we call Venus, “glimmering in sunrise or sunset.”