Two Trees of Valinor
In J. R. R. Tolkien's legendarium, the Two Trees of Valinor are Telperion and Laurelin, the Silver Tree and the Gold Tree, which bring light to Valinor, a paradisiacal realm where the Valar and Maiar, angel-like divine beings, and many of the Elves live. The Two Trees are of enormous size, and exude dew that is a pure and magical light in liquid form. The Elvish craftsman Fëanor makes the unrivalled jewels, the Silmarils, with their light. The Two Trees are destroyed by the evil beings Ungoliant and Melkor, but their last flower and fruit are made into the Moon and the Sun. Melkor, now known as Morgoth, steals the Silmarils, provoking the disastrous War of the Jewels. Descendants of Telperion survive, growing in Númenor and, after its destruction, in Gondor; in both cases the trees are symbolic of those kingdoms. For many years while Gondor has no King, the White Tree of Gondor stands dead in the citadel of Minas Tirith. When Aragorn restores the line of Kings to Gondor, he finds a sapling descended from Telperion and plants it in his citadel.
Commentators have seen mythic and Christian symbolism in the Two Trees; they have been called the most important symbols in the entire legendarium. Their origins have been traced to the medieval Trees of the Sun and the Moon. Parallels have also been identified with Celtic mythology, where several pairs of trees appear. The White Tree of Gondor, too, has been traced to the medieval Dry Tree, a symbol of resurrection. Verlyn Flieger has described the progressive splintering of the light of the Two Trees through Middle-earth's troubled history, noting that light represents the Christian Logos. Tom Shippey links the sundering of the Elves into different groups to the Two Trees and to the Prose Edda which speaks of light and dark Elves; Tolkien treats the difference between these as whether they have made the journey to Valinor and seen the light of the Two Trees.
Narrative
Prelude
The first sources of light for all of Tolkien's imaginary world, Arda, are two enormous Lamps on the central continent, Middle-earth: Illuin, the silver one to the north, and Ormal, the golden one to the south. They are created by the Valar, powerful spirit beings, but are thrown down and destroyed by the Dark Lord Melkor.Creation
The Valar retreat to Valinor to make their home on the western continent, and there one of them, Yavanna the Vala of living things, sings into existence the Two Trees to provide a new pair of light-sources. Of the two, Telperion is male and silver, while the other, Laurelin, is female and golden. The Trees stand on the hill Ezellohar, outside Valimar, the city of the Valar. They grow in the presence of all the Valar, watered by the tears of the Vala of pity and mourning, Nienna. Telperion's leaves are dark green above and silver below. His flowers are white like cherry blossom, and his silvery dew is collected as a source of water and of light. Varda used the dew to form stars in the sky, in preparation for the arrival of the Elves. Laurelin has leaves of a young green, like newly opened beech leaves trimmed with gold, and her dew is collected by the Vala of light Varda.Each Tree, in turn, gives off light for seven hours, with the ends of their cycles overlapping, so that at one hour each of "dawn" and "dusk" soft gold and silver light are given off together. Each "day" of first silver then gold light lasts twelve hours.
Destruction
Countless "days" pass, until Melkor reappears. He enlists the help of the giant spider Ungoliant to destroy the Two Trees. Concealed in a cloud of darkness, Melkor strikes each Tree and the insatiable Ungoliant devours whatever life and light remains in it.Aftermath
Yavanna and Nienna attempt a healing, but they succeed only in reviving Telperion's last flower and Laurelin's last fruit. These are turned into flying ships crossing the sky, and each is steered by spirits of the same 'genders' as the Trees themselves: male Tilion and female Arien. This is why, in The Lord of the Rings, the Sun is called "she" and the Moon "he". The true light of the Trees now resides only in the three Silmarils, jewels crafted by the Elf Fëanor with the light of the Two Trees before their destruction.File:Escudo Real de Gondor.svg|thumb|upright=0.6|Coat of arms of Gondor bearing the white tree, Nimloth the fair
Because the Elves that first come to Valinor especially love Telperion, Yavanna takes a cutting from the tree and makes a second tree like it to stand in their city of Tirion. This tree, named Galathilion, is identical to Telperion except that it does not emit light. It has many seedlings, one of which is named Celeborn, and grows on the isle of Tol Eressëa. In the Second Age, a seedling of Celeborn is brought as a gift to the Men who live on the island of Númenor. It is Nimloth, the White Tree of Númenor. When the dark lord Sauron takes control of the island, he makes king Ar-Pharazôn cut it down. The hero Isildur saves a single fruit of Nimloth, and plants seedlings in Middle-earth. During the rule of the Stewards of Gondor, the White Tree of Gondor, a descendant of Nimloth, stands dead in the citadel of Minas Tirith. On Aragorn's return as King at the end of the Third Age, he finds a seedling in the snow on the mountain behind the city, and brings it back to the citadel, where it flourishes.
Tolkien never mentioned any tree made in the likeness of Laurelin, writing that "of Laurelin the Golden no likeness is left in Middle-Earth". In the First Age, however, the Elvish King Turgon of the city of Gondolin creates a non-living image of Laurelin, named Glingal, 'Hanging Flame', which stands in his court.
Origins
Medieval Trees of the Sun and the Moon
The Tolkien scholar John Garth traces the mythology and symbolism of the Two Trees to the medieval Trees of the Sun and the Moon. Tolkien stated in an interview that the Two Trees derived from them, "in the great Alexander stories" rather than from the World Tree Yggdrasil of Norse myth. Garth notes that the Wonders of the East, an Old English manuscript in the same Codex as Beowulf, tells that Alexander the Great travelled beyond India to Paradise, where he saw the two magical trees. They drip down a wonderful balsam, and have the power of speech. They tell Alexander that he will die in Babylon. Garth writes that Tolkien's trees emit light, not balsam; and instead of prophesying death, their own deaths bring Arda's era of immortality to an end.Trees in Celtic mythology
Marie Barnfield, writing in Mallorn, states that the male/female pair of trees has numerous parallels in Celtic mythology, including the pine trees of Deirdre and Naoise, and the paired rose bush of Esyllt and vine of Trystan. Further, the hill of Ezellohar in front of Valimar's western gate matches the "sacred centre of Ireland", the Hill of Uisneach "to the west of Tara". The Two Trees of Valinor, in this context, align with the "feminine" Ash tree of Uisnech, and the "masculine" Lia Fáil, the standing stone on the hill of Tara. Lastly, the dews of Telperion and the rains from Laurelin that served "as wells of water and of light" match up, according to Barnfield, with Connla's Well and the Well of Segais.The Sampo in the ''Kalevala''
Tolkien read the Finnish Kalevala closely. Its central symbol is the magical Sampo, a device that brought wealth and good fortune to its owner, but whose mechanism is described only vaguely. Jonathan Himes, writing in Mythlore, has suggested that Tolkien found the Sampo complex, and chose to split the Sampo's parts into desirable objects. Its pillar became the Two Trees of Valinor with their Tree of life aspect, illuminating the world. Its decorated lid became the brilliant Silmarils, which embodied all that was left of the light of the Two Trees, thus tying the symbols together.The Dry Tree
Cynthia Cohen writes in Tolkien Studies that the White Tree of Gondor in The Lord of the Rings stands for "the deeper history of Men in Tolkien's Secondary World, reaching back to the Two Trees of Valinor". During most of the action of the novel, the tree is dead, and has been for over a century, but all the same it serves as a symbol of Gondor's strength and national identity, and of hope for the Kingdom's renewal. She suggests that the White Tree parallels the Dry Tree mentioned in the 14th century text Mandeville's Travels. The Dry Tree had been alive in the time of Christ, and was prophesied to come to life again when a "great lord from the western part of the world" returned to the Holy Land, just as Aragorn brings the line of Kings back to Gondor. Cohen comments that the dead White Tree's replacement by a living sapling "upholds the metaphor of resurrection and enables Tolkien to draw an implicit connection between Aragorn and Christ". Finally, she remarks on the verse that Aragorn recites when he sees the White Mountains of Gondor: "West Wind blew there; the light upon the Silver Tree / Fell like bright rain in gardens in the Kings of old," which she states links Telperion, the Silver Tree of Valinor, to the White Tree. Since Tolkien has left it ambiguous whether the Silver Tree of the verse, the place where the West Wind blew, or where the "bright rain" fell, are in long-ago Valinor or present-time Gondor, the ancestry of the tree and the lineage of the Kings merge into a continuum.Patrick Curry, in the J.R.R. Tolkien Encyclopedia, writes that the importance that Tolkien gives to the Two Trees shows "the iconic status of trees in both his work and his life." Richard Goetsch adds that the Two Trees are "central to many of the crucial plot developments of the entire saga, from the beginning of the First Age to the end of the Third Age", and further that they "function as the ultimate expression of the natural world in Tolkien's mythos."