A mound that rose to the west of Valmar, the city of the Valar, close to the thrones of the Powers in the Blessed Realm. The Green Mound was also known as Corollairë or Coron Oiolairë, or as Ezellohar. In ancient times, Yavanna hallowed the Green Mound,1 and sang a song as she sat upon it, while Nienna wept to water the earth. Two young shoots emerged from the mound and quickly grew to become the Two Trees of Valinor that shone their Light down on the Blessed Realm across many ages.
Precise dating is difficult, but the Two Trees stood on the Green Mound for a period of approximately fourteen thousand years.2 They looked down on the coming and settlement of the Elves in Valinor, and the long imprisonment of Melkor after the Battle of the Powers. After three ages of Captivity, the Valar chose to release Melkor from his confinement, and thus unwittingly began a chain of events that would lead the destruction of the Trees on their Green Mound.
Melkor at first seemed willing to renounce his former enmity for the Valar, but he worked in secret against them and, when his acts of subterfuge were discovered, he fled. In the shadowed southern lands far from the Light of the Trees he found the monstrous spider Ungoliant, and together they returned to Valinor and destroyed the Two Trees before escaping into Middle-earth. Of the Trees, only dry crumbling husks remained on the mound, once green, that was now blackened and defiled.
It was beyond Yavanna's power to cause the Trees to grow once again, so she called on Fëanor to unlock his Silmarils, and thus provide the Light to remake the Trees. Fëanor refused, but it was soon discovered that Melkor had stolen away the Jewels as he made his escape from Valinor. With the Silmarils denied her, Yavanna caused the stricken Trees to put forth a single last fruit and a single last flower, which were set into the sky to create the Moon and the Sun. The Green Mound itself was washed clean by the tears of Nienna. Its further fate after the making of the Moon and Sun is not described, but it perhaps still stands in the lost West as a testament to the Two Trees that once grew from it.
Notes
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The Silmarillion offers no account of the origins of mound, simply stating that it stood before the western gate of Valmar. It may have simply been a convenient feature of the landscape, but given its importance and the significance of its location, it seems rather more likely that the Valar raised it for the very purpose of growing the Two Trees.
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2 |
More precisely, the Two Trees stood for 1,495 Valian Years, which equates (depending on the precise technique used for conversion) to about 14,325 solar years. The Annals of Aman, the source for these values, appears in volume X of The History of Middle-earth.
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- Updated 11 April 2024
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