Lothlórien: “The air of timeless Elvish enchantment”

Among all the forests in J.R.R. Tolkien’s Middle-earth legendarium—Mirkwood, the Old Forest, Fangorn, and all the other woods named and unnamed—Lothlórien is singular for being more Elvish manifestation than natural ecosystem. The prevailing tree is the mallorn, which is not only an invention of Tolkien, but is an introduced species (proponents of today’s “invasive plant” narrative would orcishly call for its elimination) and further, the “Golden Wood” as a protected haven and a place of enchantment was brought into being and sustained by the Lady Galadriel through the power she wielded.

Lothlórien, aka Lórien, is located between the confluence of two rivers: the Anduin to the east and the Celebrant, aka the Silverlode, along the southwest, in an angle of land called the Naith, which is Elvish for “spear point.” I’m not including a Middle-earth map here for copyright reasons, but you can look at one here; Lothlórien is in almost the exact center. Elves have dwelt there for many millennia, since before the Sun and Moon. Dwarves also lived in the vicinity for about as long in the nearby Mines of Moria, originally known as Khazad-dûm, in the Misty Mountains, a day’s journey to the northwest. But it wasn’t always the special place the Fellowship visits on their way south.

Galadriel and Celeborn with their daughter Celebrían (who later married Elrond, and was the mother of Arwen, Aragorn’s true love) first visit Lothlórien (then known as Lórinand) in the Second Age around the year 1350. They don’t move there permanently and take up the title of Lady and Lord until the year of 1981 of the Third Age, about 3200 years later, when the Balrog appeared in Khazad-dûm, leading to that kingdom’s fall (and its renaming to Moria, which means “The Black Pit”), an event that disrupts the general area. Of the Elves then living in Lórinand, some flee, and the remaining ones gratefully accept Galadriel and Celeborn’s leadership and protection.

In The Lord of the Rings (LotR), the Fellowship first views Lothlórien in the distance shortly after they escape Moria, and are gazing down from the eastern slopes of the Misty Mountains. Aragorn tells them:

‘I shall take you by the road that Gandalf chose, and first I hope to come to the woods where the Silverlode flows into the Great River – out yonder.’ They looked as he pointed, and before them they could see the stream leaping down to the trough of the valley, and then running on and away into the lower lands, until it was lost in a golden haze.

It’s mid-January but the golden hue is from the forest’s autumn foliage, which persists all winter. The haze also indicates the seclusion of the realm, materially and otherwise.

I. The botany of Lothlórien

Mallorn trees

The most prominent species of plant in Lothlórien is the mallorn tree (plural mellyrn). The word is Sindarin Elvish for “gold tree.” Unlike many places, people and things in Middle-earth that have different names in other languages, mallorn is the only name given in LotR, which follows since it grows nowhere else.

The most detailed description of mellyrn given in LotR is from Legolas:

There are no trees like the trees of that land. For in the autumn their leaves fall not, but turn to gold. Not till the spring comes and the new green opens do they fall, and then the boughs are laden with yellow flowers; and the floor of the wood is golden, and golden is the roof, and its pillars are of silver, for the bark of the trees is smooth and grey.

The mallorn sounds like the ultimate tree-house tree in this passage where Frodo climbs up a rope ladder into one:

The branches of the mallorn-tree grew out nearly straight from the trunk, and then swept upward; but near the top the main stem divided into a crown of many boughs, and among these they found that there had been built a wooden platform.

Indeed an entire city, Caras Galadhon (literally “City of Trees”), is built in mellyrn:

There rose to a great height a green wall encircling a green hill thronged with mallorn-trees taller than any they had yet seen in all the land. Their height could not be guessed, but they stood up in the twilight like living towers. In their many-tiered branches and amid their ever-moving leaves countless lights were gleaming, green and gold and silver.

Caras Galadhon imagined by hobbits by MirachRavaia. The artist writes: “Frodo, Sam, Merry or Pippin were telling stories about their journeys. This is what their listeners imagined when they described the houses on the trees.”

Like the White Tree of Gondor [see part 1 of this series], mallorn trees are brought to Middle-earth from Valinor (the land of the gods) via Numenor (Tolkien’s version of Atlantis). The King of Numenor gives seeds to Gil-galad, the Elven High King in Lindon, but they won’t germinate there, probably due to the chilly northern climate by the sea, so he passes some along to Galadriel. Though it’s unmentioned, we can presume that Galadriel already knew and loved the tree from her time in Valinor, a place she misses at times. (Unfinished Tales also mentions mallorn trees as growing in the First Age in the city of Gondolin in the land of Beleriand, a land mass since drowned under the sea.) She successfully plants them in Lórinand, probably during the Second Age given their enormous size in the Third Age, when they are big enough to support large structures in their branches. That the mallorn is fit for some climates but not others is a nice touch of ecological verisimilitude from Tolkien.

The Fellowship arrives at the eaves of Lothlórien at night and hears “an endless rustle of leaves like poplars in the breeze,” a sound familiar to many readers. Incidentally, the genus of various poplar trees (including Cottonwoods and Aspens) is Populus, the Latin word for “people,” which metaphorically describes how the leaves are almost always moving and nearly never silent, like a crowd.

The members of the Fellowship sleep in platforms called flets that night to avoid the marauding orcs pursuing them from Moria. In the morning they enjoy their first glimpse of the forest:

As the light grew it filtered through the yellow leaves of the mallorn, and it seemed to the hobbits that the early sun of a cool summer’s morning was shining. Pale-blue sky peeped among the moving branches. Looking through an opening on the south side of the flet Frodo saw all the valley of the Silverlode lying like a sea of fallow gold tossing gently in the breeze.

This calls to mind another previous name for Lothlórien, Laurelindórenan, which translates as “Land of the Valley of Singing Gold.” The many changes and additions of names for places and characters over the course of Middle-earth’s long timeline often overwhelms first-time readers, so I’ve tried to minimize those details in this series, but in this case it’s relevant. Lothlórien is “Dreamflower” as translated by Treebeard, and the it was Galadriel who renamed it.

But Lothlórien is not the only place where we see a mallorn. Galadriel gives Sam a small wooden box with soil from her garden and a single mallorn nut, which he manages to hold on to through all the harrowing dangers that follow, and he plants the nut in the Shire when they return, in the spot where Bilbo’s Party Tree stood before it is cut down by Saruman’s henchmen. In the Spring, “a beautiful young sapling leaped up: it had silver bark and long leaves and burst into golden flowers in April.”

This is more ecological verisimilitude, as the Shire, though at the same latitude of Lindon, is apparently far enough inland to escape the climatic marine influence. If you’ve only seen the movie, this episode will be unfamiliar, as Peter Jackson left out the chapter, “The Scouring of the Shire,” in which the Hobbits find that in their absence, Saruman had taken over and trashed much of their homeland, chopping down hundreds of trees, demolishing homes, and erecting ugly buildings and industrial structures. In the movie, Galadriel just gives Sam rope. (The essential narrative role of “The Scouring of the Shire” in terms of Tolkien’s vision is a topic for another essay.)

Eleanor and niphredil

Lothlórien is also home to two species of flower that Tolkien invented:

At the feet of the trees, and all about the green hillsides the grass was studded with small golden flowers shaped like stars. Among them, nodding on slender stalks, were other flowers, white and palest green: they glimmered as a mist amid the rich hue of the grass.

The golden flower is called elanor, and the white one niphredil. They were obviously important to Tolkien, as he mentions both several times in the text. Aragorn lovingly holds a bouquet of elanor as he relives a memory of Arwen in the same spot, and Galadriel mentions them in a song. Sam names his first born child, a golden-haired daughter, Elanor in tribute to the beauty of Lothlórien. Tolkien describes elanor and niphredil as “my best inventions” as mythological plant names in a 1944 letter to his son, Christopher.

Relations to real plant species

In a 1956 letter to H. Cotton Minchin, Tolkien remarked, “Botanists want a more accurate description of the mallorn, of elanor, niphredil.” Indeed they still do as Tolkien never provided much.

In Unfinished Tales, we learn about mallorn trees that their branches are “somewhat upswept after the manner of the beech,” the leaves are “like those of the beech but greater” and the flowers are clustered like cherry blossoms. According to Flora of Middle-Earth (a book by father and son team, Walter S. Judd and Graham A. Judd), a colored pencil drawing of Lothlórien by Tolkien shows that mallorn trees have “alternate leaves, flowers with five elliptic to obovate petals, developed a fairly superficial root system, and occurred in dense, almost parklike groves with very little undergrowth.”

The beech most familiar to Tolkien would have been the Common Beech (Fagus sylvatica).

Is there one real species of tree like the mallorn? No. Though likened to beeches in form and foliage, beech trees have male and female catkins, and the five-petaled flowers are clearly “perfect” in botanical jargon, meaning they contain both male and female reproductive parts. Such flowers would be borne by plants in an entirely different order than that of beeches. “Order’ is the next level up from “family” in the classification structure. Plant species in different orders are not customarily considered to be “related.” Flora of Middle-Earth makes no stab at plant family but speculates that mellyrn could be in the order Ericales, of which Rhododendrons and Tea (genus Camellia) are well-known members.

So ultimately the mallorn is just a mallorn; not wholly alien but without any analog in our own time.

Tolkien is more specific about elanor and niphredil. Writing to Amy Ronald in 1969 in reference to the book, Wild Flowers of the Cape Peninsula, he says:

I have greatly enjoyed the Cape Flower Book. Quite fascinating in itself and in its general botanical and indeed paleo-implications. I have not seen anything that immediately recalls niphredil or elanor or alfirin: but that I think is because those imagined flowers are lit by a light that would not be seen ever in a growing plant and cannot be recaptured by paint. Lit by that light, niphredil would be simply a delicate kin of a snowdrop; and elanor a pimpernel (perhaps a little enlarged) growing sun-golden flowers and star-silver ones on the same plant.

Here I made some hue adjustments to go for a mix of “sun-golden” and “star-silver” blossoms. Perhaps this is a very rough approximation of what Tolkien was picturing:

II. “The air of timeless Elvish enchantment”

Tripping Hobbits?

Lothlórien is physically located in Middle-earth but is not, so to speak, entirely present there, or is super present, depending on how you look at it. As readers, we experience this mostly through the sensations of Frodo and Sam. This passage is from Frodo’s point of view:

As soon as he set foot upon the far bank of Silverlode a strange feeling had come upon him, and it deepened as he walked on into the Naith: it seemed to him that he had stepped over a bridge of time into a corner of the Elder Days, and was now walking in a world that was no more. In Rivendell there was memory of ancient things; in Lórien the ancient things still lived on in the waking world. Evil had been seen and heard there, sorrow had been known; the Elves feared and distrusted the world outside: wolves were howling on the wood’s borders: but on the land of Lórien no shadow lay.

This is his sightless experience, as everyone in the Fellowship is blindfolded when they are initially brought into Lothlórien. The Elves there have a distrust of Dwarves (some for the awakening of the Balrog in Khazad-dûm, others perhaps for a grudge going back literally 6500+ years) so they required Gimli to be blindfolded. When Gimli resists this measure, Aragorn decrees that everyone in the Fellowship would have to suffer the indignity, including himself, even though he is well-known and welcome there. After several hours of marching, word reaches them that the precaution is unnecessary, so everyone’s eyes are freed in a place called Cerin Amroth. Frodo’s first impression at that point:

It seemed to him that he had stepped through a high window that looked on a vanished world. A light was upon it for which his language had no name. All that he saw was shapely, but the shapes seemed at once clear cut, as if they had been first conceived and drawn at the uncovering of his eyes, and ancient as if they had endured for ever. He saw no colour but those he knew, gold and white and blue and green, but they were fresh and poignant, as if he had at that moment first perceived them and made for them names new and wonderful. In winter here no heart could mourn for summer or for spring. No blemish or sickness or deformity could be seen in anything that grew upon the earth. On the land of Lórien there was no stain.

The vibe is evocative of Valinor, the deathless land of the gods and angels, as described in The Silmarillion: “there naught faded nor withered, neither was there any stain upon flower or leaf in that land, nor any corruption or sickness in anything that lived.”

This is not the first time that an encounter with Elves has given the Hobbits otherworldly sensations. At the beginning of their journey, while still in the Shire, Frodo, Sam and Pippin run into Elves led by Gildor (who is possibly of the same house as Galadriel) at night: “They bore no lights, yet as they walked a shimmer, like the light of the moon above the rim of the hills before it rises, seemed to fall about their feet.” After learning that the Hobbits are being pursued by a Black Rider, the Elves insist that they join them for the evening, and they set out together for a woodland hall. This is Sam’s first encounter with Elves and he “walked along at Frodo’s side, as if in a dream, with an expression on his face half of fear and half of astonished joy” [my emphasis]. Pippin’s reaction was similar: “his mind was filled with the light upon the elf-faces, and the sound of voices so various and so beautiful that he felt in a waking dream” [my emphasis].

The experience deeply affects Sam—“it remained in his memory as one of the chief events of his life”—and the next day Frodo notices when he asks him if he still likes Elves, now that he has met some:

‘They seem a bit above my likes and dislikes, so to speak,’ answered Sam slowly. ‘It don’t seem to matter what I think about them. They are quite different from what I expected – so old and young, and so gay and sad, as it were.’

Frodo looked at Sam rather startled, half expecting to see some outward sign of the odd change that seemed to have come over him. It did not sound like the voice of the old Sam Gamgee that he thought he knew. But it looked like the old Sam Gamgee sitting there, except that his face was unusually thoughtful.

Sam adds: “After last night I feel different. I seem to see ahead, in a kind of way.”

That Elves can experience precognition is suggested implicitly and stated explicitly throughout Tolkien’s works. It seems here that Sam was able to catch that wavelength just by being in Elven presence for a few hours. Galadriel herself states to the Fellowship that she knows “what was and is, and in part also what shall be.” Elrond is known for his prescience—“to what [Frodo] will come in the end not even Elrond can foretell” Gandalf reflects—and for literally prophesying.

Speaking of Elrond, Rivendell is the other location where the Hobbits are immersed in an Elvish atmosphere. “Merely to be there was a cure for weariness, fear, and sadness.” In the Hall of Fire, Frodo sits by himself and listens to the music. What he experiences is worth quoting at length:

At first the beauty of the melodies and of the interwoven words in elven-tongues, even though he understood them little, held him in a spell, as soon as he began to attend to them. Almost it seemed that the words took shape, and visions of far lands and bright things that he had never yet imagined opened out before him; and the firelit hall became like a golden mist above seas of foam that sighed upon the margins of the world. Then the enchantment became more and more dreamlike, until he felt that an endless river of swelling gold and silver was flowing over him, too multitudinous for its pattern to be comprehended; it became part of the throbbing air about him, and it drenched and drowned him. Swiftly he sank under its shining weight into a deep realm of sleep.

There he wandered long in a dream of music that turned into running water, and then suddenly into a voice. It seemed to be the voice of Bilbo chanting verses.

To the contemporary reader, all of this—the dream-like consciousness around Gildor’s company, the synesthetic experience of music in Rivendell, the preternatural colors and the sensation of being out-of-time in Lothlórien—might ring as psychedelic, as if the Hobbits were tripping.

Not for a moment, though, am I suggesting that Tolkien was trying to represent a psychedelic state. Other than opium, which despite its vision-inducing effects (see Coleridge and “Kubla Khan”) is a narcotic not a psychedelic, mind-bending substances were virtually unknown in England during Tolkien’s composition of LotR, though this period was on the cusp, with psychiatrist Ronald A. Sandison beginning clinical trials of LSD at Powick Hospital in Worcestershire in 1952, the publication of Aldous Huxley’s The Doors of Perception shortly before The Fellowship of the Ring in 1954, and ethnomycologist R. Gordon Wasson’s introduction of psilocybin mushrooms to Western culture in a famous Life magazine article in 1957, two years after The Return of the King.

Rather, Tolkien was describing—or trying to describe—something else entirely. In a 1951 letter to editor Milton Walman, in which Tolkien summarizes the entire plot of LotR, he writes: “Aragorn leads them on through Lórien, a guarded Elvish land – at which point I make the perilous and difficult attempt to catch at close quarters the air of timeless Elvish enchantment.”

We can describe this “air” as transcendental or numinous and liken it to a religious experience. We can then go down the rabbit hole of Catholic mysticism (Tolkien was a devout Catholic) or any number of other leporine burrowings of an expressly theological bent in the vast scholarship devoted to the Middle-earth legendarium, much of it impenetrably wonky.

Or instead, we can just turn to Tolkien’s own words in his 1947 essay, “On Fairy Stories,” in which he writes:

The definition of a fairy-story – what it is, or what it should be – does not, then, depend on any definition or historical account of elf or fairy, but upon the nature of Faerie: the Perilous Realm itself, and the air that blows in that country. I will not attempt to define that, nor to describe it directly. It cannot be done. Faerie cannot be caught in a net of words; for it is one of its qualities to be indescribable, though not imperceptible. It has many ingredients, but analysis will not necessarily discover the secret of the whole [my emphasis].

Note here his use of “perilous” and “the air that blows in that country.” Surely this is what he was calling back to in his letter to Walman. For a textual avowal we can quote Aragorn on Lothlórien: “Here is the heart of Elvendom on earth,” where it’s no stretch to say that “Elvendom” stands in for “Faerie.”

So what the Hobbits encounter with Gildor’s company, in Rivendell, and most intensely in Lothlórien is something that “cannot be caught in a net of words.” Tolkien does “attempt” it nevertheless, and in my opinion the result is sublime, and with each re-reading my fascination increases. It’s interesting to note though that, as revealed in The History of Middle-earth series that his son Christopher collated and published, the otherworldly elements were not present in his first drafts. As Tolkien said in the Foreword to The Fellowship of the Ring: “This tale grew in the telling.”

All this indescribable, though not imperceptible-ness aside, we can examine how and why Lothlórien is so different than anywhere else in Middle-earth in LotR, and that centers on Galadriel.

The power of Galadriel

Returning to the moment when the Fellowship’s blindfolds are removed, Frodo’s attention turns to Sam:

Sam was now standing beside him, looking round with a puzzled expression, and rubbing his eyes as if he was not sure that he was awake. ‘It’s sunlight and bright day, right enough,’ he said. ‘I thought that Elves were all for moon and stars: but this is more Elvish than anything I ever heard tell of. I feel as if I was inside a song, if you take my meaning.’

Haldir looked at them, and he seemed indeed to take the meaning of both thought and word. He smiled. ‘You feel the power of the Lady of the Galadhrim,’ he said.

The Lady of the Galadhrim (“the tree Elves”) is Galadriel of course. Her pre-LotR backstory was in flux for Tolkien until his death. Arguably, no final “canonical” version ever quite came together, though it’s an open debate about “What Counts as “Canon” in the Lord of the Rings?”

at all. He continued to develop the legendarium in the years following LotR, so I tend to take his later writings, though unpublished in his lifetime, as the most up-to-date reflection of his vision. In those terms, the chapter in 1980’s posthumous Unfinished Tales, “The History of Galadriel and Celeborn,” is as close as we get to a final word. I mention this because if you’re familiar with The Silmarillion, some of the details that follow will be at odds with the story told there.

Galadriel was born in Valinor in the Days of the Two Trees [see part 1 of this series], making her over 8000 years old when the fellowship visits Lothlórien. Her parents are Finarfin and Earwen. Finarfin is the son of Finwë and Earwen the daughter of Olwë. Finwë, a Noldor Elf, and Olwë, a Teleri Elf, were among the very first generation of Elves who awakened in Middle-earth. As soon as the Valar (the gods) became aware of the Elves, they invited them Valinor, their earthly paradise, which was Tolkien’s version of Faerie. Not all the Elves heeded the call, but those who did, and who then lived in the presence of the Two Trees became wiser and more powerful than those who stayed behind.

Even in such a superlative place, Galadriel stood out for her beauty, wisdom and strength. Her mother called her Nerwen, which means “man-maiden” because of her height and physical ability. She was “a match for both the loremasters and the athletes of the Eldar [the Elves] in the days of their youth.” When we read that “from her earliest years she had a marvellous gift of insight into the minds of others” we are reminded of how she held the gaze of each member of the Fellowship in turn, and seemingly communicated with them telepathically. She was also strong-willed and proud, became restless in Valinor, and “had dreams of far lands and dominions that might be her own to order as she would without tutelage.” She moves to Alqualondë, the seaside city of her mother’s people who are ship-builders, intending to acquire a craft to sail to Middle-earth, and meets Celeborn. However she will need permission from the gods for such a journey.

Before she can formally ask, the Two Trees are destroyed by Morgoth who steals the Silmaril jewels and flees to Middle-earth. The Noldor Elves, furious at the theft, rebel against the Valar and vow to make war against Morgoth. Their first stop is Alqualondë where they ask the Teleri for ships, but when they are refused, they go on the attack and seize most of their vessels, killing many of their fellow Elves in the process. Galadriel and Celeborn are among the defenders, and manage to shield their own ship from destruction. What started as an unauthorized exodus by the Noldor becomes a banishment for their crimes. Galadriel chooses this timing for her own departure, and because the Noldor take the long way around, she arrives in Middle-earth first. But because of this timing, and her own lack of permission, she too comes under the banishment.

There she and Celeborn take up residence in the fortress of Menegroth in Doriath, an Elven forest kingdom ruled by Elwë (aka Thingol), brother of Olwë, her grandfather. Elwë’s wife is Melian, who is not an Elf but one of the Ainur, an angelic class just below the Valar. Well-known Ainur in LotR are Gandalf and the other wizards, Sauron, and the Balrog. Galadriel and Melian become close, and Galadriel “learned great lore and wisdom concerning Middle-earth” from her.

Doriath is protected by Melian’s supernatural power. Enemies cannot enter. Here we have a clear precursor of Lothlórien and one might assume Galadriel was not only inspired by the example, but gleaned knowledge of such matters from Melian.

But the stay in Doriath, as enriching as it is, comes to an end. As is told in The Silmarillion, Thingol is killed by Dwarves, a distraught Melian returns to Valinor, and Doriath is ransacked by Dwarves. Galadriel and Celeborn escape, but Celeborn is forever turned against Dwarves, as is seen in LotR, and only accepts Gimli with reluctance at Galadriel’s insistence.

The First Age ends with all of Beleriand destroyed in a final battle against Morgoth, submerged under the ocean. Galadriel is forgiven by the Valar and invited to return to Valinor, but she refuses, partly from her own pride, and partly because Celeborn also wants to stay.

The pair spend the first few centuries of the Second Age living here and there before settling in Eregion around the year 750, helping to establish a new Elven realm there. This is an area west of the Misty Mountains also known as Hollin that the Fellowship pass through on their way to Moria. In this Age, it is where the Noldor Elves enter into fruitful partnership with the Dwarves of Khazad-dûm and learn many skills from one another to mutual benefit.

The Elessar

Among the Noldor is Celebrimbor, their greatest living jewel-smith and craftsman, who happens to be the grandson of Fëanor, creator of the Silmaril jewels and the Palantiri, the seeing stones in LotR. The following story is unknown to all but the most devoted Tolkien fans, and I have assembled it from “The History of Galadriel and Celeborn” in Unfinished Tales. (I say “assembled” because the details in Tolkien’s notes contradicted one another, but I have taken the lead of his son, Christopher, who put together that book.)

Back in the First Age when Celebrimbor lived in Gondolin, he made a special green gem called the “Elessar.” He was inspired by “his greatest joy [which] was to see the sunlight through the leaves of trees. And it came into his heart to make a jewel within which the clear light of the sun should be imprisoned, but the jewel should be green as leaves.”

It was a powerful gem: “It is said that those who looked through this stone saw things that were withered or burned healed again or as they were in the grace of their youth, and that the hands of one who held it brought to all that they touched healing from hurt.” The gem was passed along to Eärendil, who took it to Valinor. Galadriel knew of the Elessar, and she requests Celebrimbor to make something like it for her. “I am grieved in Middle-earth, for leaves fall and flowers fade that I have loved so that the land of my dwelling is filed with regret that no spring can redress. I would have trees and grass about me that do not die – here in the land that is mine.” In part because he is in love with her apparently, Celebrimbor undertakes “a long and delicate labour” and creates a second Elessar, this one set in a silver brooch shaped like an eagle with outspread wings. This was the first magical item from Celebrimbor’s hands that assisted Galadriel in manifesting the enchantment of protection and preservation of Lothlórien. But Tolkien has a caveat. Following his theme of all things falling and becoming less beautiful over time, while the Elessar was certainly a marvel, “its light had less power” than the original because the first one had been “lit by the Sun in its youth” and now “nowhere in Middle-earth was the light as clear as it had been, for though Morgoth had been thrust out into the Void and could not enter again, his far shadow lay upon it.” Nonetheless, the Elessar is powerful enough that when wielded by Galadriel she is able to make Lothlórien a place where “no blemish or sickness or deformity could be seen in anything that grew upon the earth.”

(An earlier, alternate version in Unfinished Tales intriguingly has Gandalf delivering the original Elessar to Galadriel from Valinor—from which he was sent to help the peoples of Middle-earth—saying, “This I bring to you from Yavanna. Use it as you may, and for a while you shall make the land of your dwelling the fairest place in Middle-earth. But it is not for you to possess. You shall hand it on when the time comes. For before you grow weary, and at last forsake Middle-earth one shall come who is to receive it, and his name shall be that of the stone: Elessar he shall be called.”)

At the time of LotR’s composition, though the Elessar’s back-story was not fully developed (or discovered, as Tolkien put it), Galadriel alludes to it when she gifts the jewel to Aragorn upon the Fellowship’s departure from Lothlórien:

‘Maybe this will lighten your heart,’ said Galadriel; ‘for it was left in my care to be given to you, should you pass through this land.’ Then she lifted from her lap a great stone of a clear green, set in a silver brooch that was wrought in the likeness of an eagle with outspread wings; and as she held it up the gem flashed like the sun shining through the leaves of spring. ‘This stone I gave to Celebrían my daughter, and she to hers [Arwen]; and now it comes to you as a token of hope. In this hour take the name that was foretold for you, Elessar, the Elfstone of the House of Elendil!’ [my emphasis]

Aragorn wears the Elessar when he tends to the wounded in Minas Tirith after the brutal Battle of the Pelennor Fields. Doubtless, the healing power of the jewel helped him with his long but fruitful labors throughout the night. Additionally, it fulfills a prophecy:

And word went through the City: ‘The King is come again indeed.’ And they named him Elfstone, because of the green stone that he wore, and so the name which it was foretold at his birth that he should bear was chosen for him by his own people.

Who “foretold” this? Aragorn’s grandmother, Ivorwen, who said at his naming, “I see on his breast a green stone, and from that his true name shall come and his chief renown: for he shall be a healer and a renewer.” However, these words appear only in The Peoples of Middle-earth, volume 12 of the posthumously published History of Middle-earth series, so if close readers of LotR have been confused by the passage, that’s why. Tolkien simply didn’t spell it out.

With the Elessar, Tolkien as tree-lover is again on full display. The artifact is potent because it captures the “sun shining through the leaves of spring.” Such light is evocative of freshness and rebirth to anyone attentive to it in the temperate world, as Tolkien clearly was. This nature-centeredness is, as I have been showing in this series, fundamental to Tolkien’s legendarium, and a large part of its appeal for many readers, including me.

The Rings of Power

In the year 1200 of the Second Age, Sauron enters the picture. He resents the Elves and wishes to bring them under his power. At this time he is still able to appear in a “fair form” and he arrives in Eregion as “Annatar,” the “Lord of Gifts,” presenting himself to the Noldor Elves as an emissary of the Valar. Galadriel immediately distrusts him, as do Elrond and Gil-galad, even though they don’t recognize him for who he really is. But Celebrimbor is taken in because Sauron—being one of the Maiar originally apprenticed to Aulë, the god of craft work—is truly skilled, and has knowledge unknown to the Elves. He tempts the Noldor by suggesting that they can make Middle-earth as beautiful as Valinor, and in this he puts his finger on their weak point. The Noldor aren’t just any Elves; as told above, they once lived in the West, in Valinor,, the abode of the Divine on earth, and Middle-earth is mundane in comparison. As Tolkien explains to Waldman:

They wanted to have their cake without eating it. They wanted the peace and bliss and perfect memory of ‘The West’, and yet to remain on the ordinary earth where their prestige as the highest people, above wild Elves, dwarves, and Men, was greater than at the bottom of the hierarchy of Valinor.

Celebrimbor and Annatar collaborate for the next three centuries. Their most impressive works are the Rings of Power, particularly the Seven and the Nine. At the same time, the ever devious Sauron sows dissent among the Noldor against Galadriel and Celeborn, who find themselves out of favor. Galadriel leaves for Lothlórien with the Elessar around 1350.

In the year 1500, Sauron returns to Mordor. In 1590, Celebrimbor creates his greatest work, the Three Elven Rings: “those who had them in their keeping could ward off the decays of time and postpone the weariness of the world.” But Sauron has been playing a long-game and just a decade later he forges the One Ring, to which all the other rings including the Three are subject.

As soon as Sauron sets it upon his finger, Celebrimbor is immediately aware, and knows he has been betrayed. He visits Galadriel in Lothlórien and gives her one of the Three. Sauron, enraged that his motives have been exposed, brings war against Eregion, seizes the Seven and the Nine, and cruelly kills Celebrimbor. After much bloodshed and environmental destruction (including the razing of forests), Sauron is eventually defeated in 1700 and forced to flee back to Mordor. He distributes the Seven Rings to Dwarves and the Nine Rings to men, the latter of whom become the Nazgul, aka the Ringwraiths, aka the Black Riders. The remainder of the Second Age is marked by more war and ends with Sauron’s eventual defeat when the One Ring is cut from his hand by Isildur, Aragorn’s ancestor.

During this tumult of the Second Age, the Three Elven Rings sit idle because Sauron has the One. But once it is taken from him, they are free to be used, and so they are throughout the Third Age by Galadriel, Elrond and Gandalf (who receives the Ring of Fire in about the year 1000 from Círdan the shipwright, with whom Gil-galad left it when he marched to war against Sauron, and to his own death).

Galadriel’s ring is Nenya, the Ring of Water. It is made of mithril and is set with a jewel of adamant (a mythological stone of surpassing hardness). She gives the Elessar to her daughter Celebrían, as it is superfluous now that she has Nenya. For thirty centuries, she uses it to spare Lothlórien from decay and to keep it hidden as “the heart of Elvendom on earth.” Not just anyone could have put it to such effective service; she is in her own right the most powerful Elf in Middle-earth in the Third Age, and that’s significant. As I wrote about in the Mirkwood essay, Lothlórien was attacked three times while Sauron was throwing his forces against Minas Tirith and Gondor, but each assault was turned back because “the power that dwelt there was too great for any to overcome, unless Sauron had come there himself.” That “power” is Nenya, yes, but also Galadriel.

The power has such presence that Frodo can see it, when looking toward Caras Galadhon from the tree platform at Cerin Amroth:

Frodo looked and saw, still at some distance, a hill of many mighty trees, or a city of green towers: which it was he could not tell. Out of it, it seemed to him that the power and light came that held all the land in sway. He longed suddenly to fly like a bird to rest in the green city. Then he looked eastward and saw all the land of Lórien running down to the pale gleam of Anduin, the Great River. He lifted his eyes across the river and all the light went out, and he was back again in the world he knew. Beyond the river the land appeared flat and empty, formless and vague, until far away it rose again like a wall, dark and drear. The sun that lay on Lothlórien had no power to enlighten the shadow of that distant height.

Treebeard implies that this Elvish protection also imparts a kind of isolation or disconnection. As the Fellowship is making plans for their route after Lothlórien, Celeborn warns them to avoid Fangorn forest (though he doesn’t mention the Ents). When Merry and Pippin meet Treebeard, Pippin asks Treebeard why Celeborn said that. The old Ent answers:

And I might have said much the same, if you had been going the other way. Do not risk getting entangled in the woods of Laurelindórenan! That is what the Elves used to call it, but now they make the name shorter: Lothlórien they call it. Perhaps they are right: maybe it is fading, not growing. Land of the Valley of Singing Gold, that was it, once upon a time. Now it is the Dreamflower. Ah well!

He adds: “They are falling rather behind the world in there, I guess.”

Eventually, however, they would catch up with the world, or rather, the world would catch up with them.

III. The fading

One of Tolkien’s central themes is the inevitable fall from the divine to the mundane in Middle-earth. (Please note that is is “quite different in form, of course, to that of Christian myth,” as Tolkien wrote to Waldman.) One expression of this fall is the fading of Elves and the rising primacy of Men (humans).

Galadriel’s re-making of Lothlórien through the introduction of the Valinor native tree, the mallorn, her preservation of all the flora in a state of “no blemish or sickness or deformity,” and her protection of the region as a haven for Elves, are accomplished through her own personal power as an ancient and wise being, magnified by the Elessar stone and then the Elven Ring. She also knows that Lothlórien is living on borrowed time since Elves are on their way out and, one way or another, Nenya will soon fail. She says to Frodo:

Do you not see now wherefore your coming is to us as the footstep of Doom? For if you fail, then we are laid bare to the Enemy. Yet if you succeed, then our power is diminished, and Lothlórien will fade, and the tides of Time will sweep it away. We must depart into the West, or dwindle to a rustic folk of dell and cave, slowly to forget and to be forgotten.

Later, when giving Sam the box of soil with a mallorn nut, she tells him:

Though you should find all barren and laid waste, there will be few gardens in Middle-earth that will bloom like your garden, if you sprinkle this earth there. Then you may remember Galadriel, and catch a glimpse far off of Lórien, that you have seen only in our winter. For our Spring and our Summer are gone by, and they will never be seen on earth again save in memory.

And so it is after the One Ring is destroyed. The Three Elven Rings lose their powers. Less than two years later, Galadriel leaves Middle-earth from the Grey Havens, with Elrond, Gandalf, Frodo and Bilbo. Celeborn hangs on longer. Although after Sauron’s fall, the realm had been expanded into southern Mirkwood, which he renamed “East Lórien,” he loses interest apparently some time in the first century of the Fourth Age (as implied below) and moves to Rivendell, where Elrond’s sons are still living. Eventually, he goes to the Grey Havens himself and sails to Valinor to rejoin his wife and daughter and “with him went the last living memory of the Elder Days in Middle-earth.”

Our last glimpse of Lothlórien is in “The Tale of Aragorn and Arwen” in the first Appendix of The Return of the King. In the 120^th year of the Fourth Age, Aragorn dies at the age of 210, and a forlorn Arwen leaves Minas Tirith. She travels alone to Lothlórien and

dwelt there alone under the fading trees until winter came. Galadriel had passed away and Celeborn also was gone, and the land was silent. There at last when the mallorn-leaves were falling, but spring had not yet come, she laid herself to rest upon Cerin Amroth; and there is her green grave, until the world is changed, and all the days of her life are utterly forgotten by men that come after, and elanor and niphredil bloom no more east of the Sea.

That place which had been the most beautiful in Middle-earth is withered and she who had been the most beautiful woman dies there. The Dreamflower is over.