Lothlórien

• 1. Introduction

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  Lothlórien is the fairest Elven realm remaining in Middle-earth during the Third Age. Galadriel and Celeborn ruled it, and the wood-elves who lived there were called the Galadhrim. Their capital was Caras Galadhon. The Fellowship of the Ring spent roughly a month inside the realm's borders after emerging from the tunnels of Moria. Every member felt only a few days had passed. Galadriel carried one of the Three Elf-Rings, and she used it to prevent Sauron from perceiving what lay within. Tolkien gave the forest at least six distinct names, each from a different fictional people, each suggesting something different about the nature of the place. Scholars have spent decades debating what Lothlórien really is: a biblical paradise, a corner of old England, or an Elfland drawn from European fairy tales older than anything Tolkien invented himself. The arguments have not settled.

• 2. A Forest's Many Names

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  Tolkien recorded at least six names for the forest in different fictional languages, each reflecting how a different people perceived the realm. The oldest was Lindórinand, a Nandorin word meaning Valley of the Land of the Singers. The Nandor were the first Elves to settle east of the Misty Mountains, arriving in the early First Age. When Galadriel planted the golden mallorn trees there, the Nandorin name shifted to Lórinand, Valley of Gold. A Sindarin name replaced it: Laurelindórenan, meaning Valley of Singing Gold. By the Third Age the standard Sindarin name was Lothlórien, the Dreamflower. The people of Rohan called it Dwimordene, from the Old English dwimor, meaning illusion, and denu, meaning valley. Speakers of the Common Speech used no poetry and called it the Golden Wood. The shortened Sindarin form Lórien was not accidental; it deliberately matched the name of the Gardens of Lórien in Aman, the blessed realm across the western sea. The mallorn trees that gave the forest its golden character had traveled far before arriving there. Gil-galad had received them as a gift from Tar-Aldarion, and Galadriel carried them east when she planted them in Lindórinand.

• 3. Lords and Losses

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  The Nandor, who had turned aside from the Great March to Valinor in the First Age, established the realm called Lindórinand east of the Misty Mountains. Sindarin Elves arrived later from west of the mountains, enriching the culture and gradually replacing the Silvan language with their own. Among the arrivals was Amdír, who became the realm's first lord. Galadriel and Celeborn came later still, fleeing the destruction of Eregion during the War of the Elves and Sauron. The lord who followed Amdír was Amroth. He traveled south with his beloved Nimrodel, but she went missing in the Ered Nimrais mountains and never returned. Amroth drowned in the Bay of Belfalas waiting for her. Control of Lothlórien passed to Galadriel and Celeborn, and Galadriel's Ring of Power preserved the land from death and decay. After the fall of Sauron, Galadriel and Celeborn cleared Dol Guldur of Sauron's influence. At the beginning of the Fourth Age, Galadriel left for Valinor. Celeborn eventually followed. The city slowly depopulated. By the time Arwen, the granddaughter of Galadriel and Celeborn, died as queen of Gondor, Lothlórien was deserted. Caras Galadhon, which had served as the main settlement of the Galadhrim in Middle-earth throughout the Third Age, was where that history had been centered.

• 4. A City in the Trees

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  Caras Galadhon was founded by Amroth in the Third Age and set deep in the forest. It stood roughly ten miles from the point where the rivers Silverlode and Anduin converged. Dwellings and guard-posts alike were built on platforms high in the tops of tall mallorn trees. Stairways rose around the main trunks. At night the city was lit by many lamps burning green and gold and silver. The realm's core territory was a triangular region between the converging Silverlode and Anduin. The tip of that triangle bore its own name: the Egladil, meaning Elven-point in Sindarin. The Silverlode, whose Sindarin name was Celebrant, ran through the realm with a western tributary called the Nimrodel. The Company of the Ring arrived in Lothlórien after crossing these rivers and was brought to Caras Galadhon, where the Lord and Lady of the Galadhrim received them. Before they left, Galadriel brought Frodo and Samwise to her Mirror, a basin of water that offered glimpses of events past, present, or yet to come. She gave each member of the Fellowship an individual gift chosen for their quest.

• 5. Light Against Darkness

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  The Tolkien scholar Paul H. Kocher described the fundamental opposition in Lothlórien as a contest between two kinds of intelligence. Galadriel could perceive Sauron through the light of the realm, but that light could not be pierced in return. Kocher called this the good intelligence possessing an imaginative sympathy that evil lacks.

  The Christian author Elizabeth Danna traced the idea to a specific speech in the text. She identified it as belonging to the elf Haldir, delivered from a tree-platform high above Cerin Amroth: "In this high place you may see the two powers that are opposed to one another, and ever they strive now in thought; but whereas the light perceives the very heart of the darkness, its own secret has not yet been discovered." Danna noted that this directly echoes John 1:5: "The light shineth in darkness; and the darkness comprehended it not."

  Susan Robbins, a scholar of humanities, situated this in Tolkien's own practice. Tolkien was a devout Roman Catholic. He associated light with holiness, goodness, knowledge, wisdom, grace, hope, and God's revelation, as the Bible does. Galadriel, in Robbins's reading, was one of the bearers of that light in Tolkien's mythology. From the high points of Lothlórien, the fortress of Dol Guldur was visible across the Anduin on a clear day.

• 6. The Question of Time

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  Sam Gamgee exclaimed, on leaving Lothlórien, that "Anyone would think that time did not count in there!" He had noticed the moon was waning when they arrived and new when they left, yet the stay had felt like only days. The Tolkien scholar Verlyn Flieger catalogued the competing explanations the characters offered. Frodo believed Lothlórien existed "in a time that has elsewhere long gone by", a different epoch entirely.

  Legolas offered a different account. He said the world moves "both very swift and very slow. Swift, because they themselves change little, and all else fleets by. Slow, because they do not count the running years." Aragorn tried to bridge these positions. While inside Lothlórien, he suggested, the Fellowship felt time as Elves feel it. But the moon outside had kept its normal pace.

  Flieger found Aragorn's second claim troubling. It reintroduced the suggestion that Lothlórien operated under its own laws of nature, as in a fairy tale. She set this against two older stories with contradictory answers. Thomas the Rhymer is a medieval tale: a mortal visits Elfland briefly and returns to find his world long gone. The Danish ballad Elvehøj presents the opposite: an elf-maiden sings, and the swift stream outside stands still. Flieger traced Tolkien's deepest treatment of Elvish time to The Monsters and the Critics, where he wrote that the human stories of the elves are "full of the Escape from Deathlessness". On the hill of Cerin Amroth, Frodo saw Aragorn as he had been as a young man, dressed in white.

• 7. Old England in the Forest

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  Tom Shippey, a Tolkien scholar, focused on the words the elf Haldir used when describing the triangular land between the converging rivers. Haldir called it the Naith, then the Gore, then, with a third word, the Angle. Shippey tracked that last term closely. The name England derives from the Angle, a strip of territory between the Flensburg Fjord and the River Schlei in northern Germany, the homeland of the Angles before they migrated to Britain. Frodo felt 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". Shippey suggested this might be literally correct: Frodo was in old England.

  Shippey also identified Lothlórien as a locus amoenus, a Latin term for an idyllic place, noting that Tolkien himself described the realm as having "no stain". He compared it to the Earthly Paradise in the Middle English poem Pearl. The Fellowship first waded the river Nimrodel before crossing a rope-bridge over the Silverlode. Shippey read the wading as a purification, washing away the stains of ordinary life before entering the perfect place. He also wondered whether, in crossing to a place Gollum could not follow, the Fellowship had entered a realm "as if dead".

  Around late 1940, while writing about Lothlórien, Tolkien attempted to paint the forest. He called the work "The Forest of Lothlorien in Spring" and executed it in pencil and colored pencil. Wayne G. Hammond and Christina Scull noted that the painting "closely illustrates" Legolas's description of the forest, not any scene from The Lord of the Rings itself, since the Fellowship visited in winter, not spring. They called it "very delicately drawn" but, for the most part, "without life".

  The author John Garth proposed a more personal English source. In 1915, Tolkien wrote a poem celebrating Warwickshire called Kortirion Among the Trees. Garth connected the central green hill of Cerin Amroth to the grassy Motte of Warwick Castle, known as Ethelfleda's Mound. Tolkien had visited Warwick with his fiancée Edith Bratt in his youth. Kortirion Among the Trees appeared in 1915.

• 8. Beyond the Page

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  Peter Jackson's film trilogy based its visual rendering of Lothlórien on the artwork of the conceptual designer Alan Lee. Some scenes were filmed on location in Paradise Valley near Glenorchy, New Zealand. The Lord of the Rings Online introduced Lothlórien as a playable region in March 2009, as part of the Mines of Moria expansion. Players could visit Caras Galadhon and complete quests from the Galadhrim. The musician Enya named an instrumental track "Lothlórien" after the Elvish realm; it appears on her album Shepherd Moons. The Dutch composer Johan de Meij devoted the second movement of his Symphony No. 1 to the forest, subtitling it "Lothlórien (The Elvenwood)". The symphony is called The Lord of the Rings. Enya's track carries no words. It enters the realm in silence.