Fun with Botany

In which, once again, Olga does all the work and I riff off of her creativity.

Olga’s post is about the lights that shone on Arda before the Sun and Moon. Light is where my branch of physics originated, so off we go. I’m primarily interested in the Lamps, and the paradox they seem to contain, which is where she starts.  Chapter 1 of The Silmarillion, “Of the Beginning of Days” is her text.

Varda filled the lamps and Manwe hallowed them, and the Valar set them upon high pillars, more lofty far than are any mountains of the later days… all was lit as it were in a changeless day.

Then the 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 cloud as they were living mountains, but whose feet were wrapped in a green twilight. And beasts came forth and dwelt in the grassy plains, or in the rivers and the lakes, or walked in the shadows of the woods.

Silmarillion, Ch. 1, “Of the Beginning of Days”

My quotation overlaps with Olga’s by the first sentence.  I continue to quote because that’s where it gets really interesting.  As I mentioned in my comment on that post, “changeless day” isn’t good for plant growth.  Plants store up energy during the sunlit hours, and then generate new tissue at night.  Mess with that diurnal cycle, and they don’t grow well at all. Prof. Tolkien knew this, of course. He spent lots of time on farms, and kept vegetable gardens.

Garden excerpt from Humphrey Carpenter’s biography via Google Books

Constant brilliant light creates a desert.  So where did that multitude of growing things come from? That’s the brilliant part:  Get those enormous trees going, and all the rest follows.  JRRT is describing a cloud forest. The only ones I’ve seen are on the sides of mountains – the most extraordinary was in Kohala, on the big island of Hawai’i. If you don’t have a mountain handy, but you do have a Vala, you just make the trees that high.  Then the moisture transpired from the leaves condenses into a cloud, the leaves of the trees would hold the clouds in place, and there would be a moist, shady area between the tree trunks where “mosses and grasses and great ferns grow.”

From the Kona Cloud Forest Sanctuary

Ted Naismith’s painting is designed to look pleasing to European eyes, which it does very well. But a more accurate rendering of Tolkien’s vision might look like this.  Once you get out from under the trees, there’s always a rainbow up there, in case it matters.

I also wonder now if Treebeard, when he remembers the “great trees” of his youth, might not be thinking of these mountain-high specimens.

But enough serious discussion.  I have to point out a bunch of things now.

1. The Valar live on an island far to the west.
2. Valinor is a paradise that Men and Elves yearn for.
3. Halfway to that island in the west (measuring from England), the Valar put a land of Men who had the most powerful navy ever seen. Masters of technology, rulers of the world, stupendous egotists, these guys.
4. Before Melkor messed everything up, the island was a cloud forest.
5. “When the lamps were spilled, destroying flame was poured out over the earth.” (ibid.)  Mauna Kea is an active volcano, from which destroying flame pours out daily.

Dear reader, the evidence is clear.  Valinor is Hawai’i.  Yavanna wears a lei and a grass skirt.  Aule and Tulkas, “clad in the raiment of the World”, are wearing loud tropical-print shirts. All you working on the Silmarillion “film” project, take note.