I am happy to post this interview what is binary option with author Benita J. Prins, fellow lover of all things Tolkien and a great writer in her own right too! I read her fantasy, Sea of Crystal, Sea of Glass recently and recommend … Continue reading
Tolkien’s Sun begins as an act of making rather than as an impersonal sphere of gas. Within the history of the First Age, its light was fashioned in Valinor from sacred material: the golden fruit of Laurelin and the final beams of Telperion. Laurelin had been one of the Two Trees that illuminated the land before there was a sunrise. Its destruction did not end its radiance; it changed the form that radiance would take.
That transformation explains the image more exactly than a botanical description can. The Sun is called the Golden Flower of Laurelin because the flower is bound up with the tree’s identity, fruit and destruction. The epithet preserves a piece of Valinor in a new celestial form. It is a name for inheritance: the old golden light survives, though daily sunrise now belongs to a world of ruin, exile and mortal time.
During the Years of the Trees, before the Sun established its regular course, the great light of Valinor came from two living trees. Yavanna brought them forth with the Valar’s help: Telperion, silver-white in the west, and Laurelin, golden in the east. Laurelin’s name is commonly glossed as “the Golden One”, yet the fuller image, the Golden Flower of Laurelin, recalls both its blossoms and the new radiance made from its fruit.
| Element | Nature in Tolkien’s account | Light or colour | What happens to it |
|---|---|---|---|
| Laurelin | One of the Two Trees of Valinor | Golden blossoms and fruit | Destroyed; its fruit becomes material for the Sun |
| Telperion | The other Tree | Silver-white blossoms and fruit | Destroyed; its final light is used in making the Sun |
| The Sun | A great celestial lamp | Warm, golden radiance | Rises, sets and renews the cycle of day |
| The Moon | A lesser companion light | Pale radiance | Shares the night sky with the Sun’s reflected presence |
The distinctions matter. The Sun is not the surviving tree moved intact into the heavens. It is a continuation created through transformation. Morgoth’s destruction ends the old order of light, while the Valar fashion a new one from what remains. Every sunrise thereafter therefore contains Valinor, though the forest has become a celestial fire.
The wording has a history within Tolkien’s manuscripts. In the early version of the story collected in The Book of Lost Tales, the Sun is named “the Golden Flower of Laurelin”. In the revised account in The Silmarillion, the crucial material fact becomes explicit: the Sun is made from the golden fruit of Laurelin and the last beams of Telperion. The floral name has not simply disappeared. It has been absorbed into the new story of cause and origin.
Calling the Sun a flower therefore does not imply botanical classification. The name gathers several meanings into one image. Laurelin is the Golden One, its blossoms are golden flowers, and its fruit carries the substance of the Sun. A succession is implied: living tree, luminous blossom, ripening fruit, celestial lamp. The Sun resembles Laurelin because it was made from it.
The phrase is also especially useful for readers who know that Tolkien revised extensively. An evocative name in one version can become a causal history in another. The later creation story does not discard the poetry of the flower; it explains why the poetry has power. Laurelin’s radiance did not merely inspire the Sun. Part of it became the Sun.
Tolkien’s created world joins organic life with deliberate craft. Trees grow, flowers open and fruit ripens, yet mountains, lamps and celestial lights are also made by powers with purposes and skills. The Sun gathers these processes into itself. Its substance is botanical; its operation is crafted; its effect is cosmic.
Flowers provide a natural language for solar radiance. Their opening and closing respond to light and season, and many blossoms turn towards the Sun. A golden bloom can therefore suggest illumination, renewal and the daily return of warmth. It joins something fragile and short-lived to something vast and seemingly enduring.
Gold carries more than wealth in Tolkien’s mythology. It can mean preciousness, beauty, danger and almost divine radiance. Calling the Sun a golden flower joins all those associations without reducing the light to an object of ownership. It binds the heavens to the living earth and makes the daily sunrise an inheritance rather than a merely mechanical event.
Strictly speaking, no preserved line of Eldar dialogue presents “the Golden Flower of Laurelin” as its formal everyday name. The published myth generally calls the luminary the Sun, while the fuller phrase belongs to Tolkien’s narration and earlier versions of the story. To say that the Elves called it thus is a graceful shorthand, but it hides an important distinction between Elvish speech and the narrator’s poetic interpretation.
The Eldar, however, are the people best placed to recognise what the name contains. For them Laurelin was not an abstract point of light in a diagram. They knew its trunks and leaves, the glow of its blossoms and the ripening of its fruit. They had lived beneath its radiance before it was destroyed. When that radiance returned as the Sun, the new light carried an intimate memory of what had been lost.
This matters because the Eldar possess lives far longer than those of humans and other mortal peoples. Their long continuity gives the name emotional weight. The flower’s brief bloom becomes a vessel for durable remembrance. The Sun can rise each day without making the destruction of the Trees seem unimportant; it carries their loss forward within the very light it gives.
Within Tolkien’s mythology, the Sun is not an impersonal natural object. It is a lamp made by the Valar, drawing upon Fëanor’s traditions of crafted light and the substance of the Two Trees. Its celestial position does not make it less fashioned. The Sun’s scale only increases the wonder of a deliberately made thing.
The Golden Flower unites two vocabularies that might otherwise seem incompatible. A flower is organic, temporary and associated with growth. A lamp is artificial, durable and made to serve a purpose. Laurelin’s fruit bridges them by becoming the material of a new instrument. What was once living radiance can now travel across the sky and illuminate a world outside Valinor.
A scientific account of stellar light begins with physical processes; Tolkien’s account begins with makers, materials and inherited purpose. Neither approach makes the other unnecessary. Their difference explains why this name carries so much more than a description of colour. The Sun’s gold is not merely what an observer sees. It records what the Sun is and what it once belonged to.
For Australian readers, sunlight carries a double familiarity. High UV makes broad-brimmed hats, sunglasses and sunscreen part of daily custom, while a walk through Melbourne’s laneway cafés beside the Yarra can turn brick, glass and water copper-gold in the late afternoon. The beauty is real, but it arrives with heat and caution. Laurelin’s radiance has a similar double charge: it illuminates, and it is inseparable from what has been lost.
Canberra’s broad civic avenues and the sails upon Sydney Harbour offer other familiar ways of seeing light change across a landscape. During daylight saving in Melbourne, Sydney, Adelaide and Hobart, the southern summer stretches the evenings and allows the last gold to linger. The experience resembles the instant before a Tolkienian dawn: night does not vanish abruptly, but withdraws while leaving its colour behind.
Golden wattle, Australia’s national floral emblem, releases a vivid yellow during spring, while stalls at Adelaide Central Market place native foliage and cut flowers among produce and pantry goods. In the Australian speculative fiction market, Tolkien reaches readers through schools, public libraries, independent bookshops, gatherings such as Continuum in Melbourne and online reading communities including BookLikes. Local encounters with myth therefore unfold amid familiar skies, native flora and an active culture of fantasy writing.
Read as a whole, the Golden Flower of Laurelin holds several meanings together. It provides a genealogy: tree, blossom, fruit and Sun. It preserves an emotional history: creation, damage, adaptation and remembrance. It also creates a pattern for time, moving from the slow growth of the Trees to the swift repetition of day and night. What was once a single golden tree becomes a golden presence encountered every day.
The image never suggests that the new order simply erases the old. The Sun is brighter and more widely useful than Laurelin’s radiance had been, yet it is made from material damaged by Morgoth and gathered in sorrow. Tolkien’s hope is therefore qualified. New light can come from loss, but the loss itself remains part of the light’s meaning.
The Sun in Tolkien’s sky is more than a bright body. It is a ruined tree’s blossom made luminous, a lamp made from radiance and fruit, carrying Valinor into every morning without pretending that what was destroyed has never been destroyed.
An essay I wrote about the desire of Tolkien and the TCBS to be a light to their darkening world. A century later, he still provides light. Thank you, Professor and God trade binary option bless! Art by Justin Gerard … Continue reading