Valmar

The city of the Powers

Valmar stood in the plain of Valinor near the eastern mountains, the one true city the Valar built for themselves. Its gates were of gold, its roofs of silver, and it was hung with so many bells that the Eldar remembered it above all for their sound; Galadriel, an age later in Lórien, could still call up the memory of them. The Maiar dwelt there with the Valar, and the streets were filled with the people of Manwë and Varda, of Aulë and Yavanna, and of the others whose houses lay farther afield in the realm.

The city was not the whole of the Valar's life but its meeting place. Immediately outside its western gate rose the green mound of Ezellohar with the Two Trees, and beside the mound lay Máhanaxar, the Ring of Doom, where the thrones of the Valar were set in a circle and every great matter of Arda was debated. To come to Valmar was therefore to come to the light itself, and after the Vanyar removed from Tirion many of them dwelt on the plains and in the woods around the city, so that its people were the fairest and most devout of the Eldar.

Feasts and gatherings

The great festivals of Valinor were kept at Valmar and on Taniquetil. The most celebrated was the harvest feast at which Manwë hoped to end the quarrel among the Noldor, when Fëanor came up from Formenos and gave his hand to Fingolfin. It was the last feast of the Trees. When the light failed, Manwë and the Valar came down from the mountain to the city and to the mound in a darkness so complete that only Varda's stars could be seen, and from the walls of Valmar the whole disaster of the Darkening was watched.

The Years of the Trees

Valmar was raised when the Valar first came to Aman, and the Trees were made at its gate. For a long age its life was undisturbed. Melkor, when he was released from Mandos, was permitted to dwell within its walls, and he used his freedom there to learn the Valar's counsels and to spread his lies among the Eldar, who came to Valmar often. When his guilt was known and he fled, Tulkas and Oromë rode from the city to hunt him, but he had already gone south to Avathar.

The Darkening and after

On the night the Trees died the Valar sat on the mound before the gate while Yavanna and Nienna tried to heal them; there Fëanor was asked for the Silmarils and refused, and there the news came that Finwë was slain. In the years that followed, the city was the centre of the Valar's grief and of their plans: the making of the Sun and Moon from the last fruit and flower, the Hiding of Valinor, and, at the end of the First Age, the decision to send the Host of the West. When the Vanyar marched to the War of Wrath it was from Valmar that they went, the only time in their history that the first kindred left the Blessed Realm for war. In the Second Age the Valar took counsel at Valmar concerning the Númenóreans, and at the Downfall the city passed with the rest of Aman out of the physical world.

Valmar lay in the eastern part of Valinor, close beneath the Pelóri and not far west of the Calacirya, so that the light of the Trees at its gate shone straight through the pass to the sea. Ezellohar and Máhanaxar were immediately outside its western wall; Taniquetil rose to the east and south; the road from Tirion ran to it through the pass.