Caras Galadhon

The city in the trees

Caras Galadhon stands within the Naith of Lothlórien, on a hill that rises above the woods between the Celebrant and the Anduin. About the hill runs a deep dry fosse and, within it, a wall of living green; a single road passes the ditch by a white bridge and comes to gates that face south-west, hung between the ends of the wall where they overlap. The gates were shut and guarded by night, and lamps of gold and silver and green burned along the wall and in the trees, so that from below in darkness the whole hill seemed lit from within.

The hill is covered with mallorn trees of enormous height, and in them the Silvan Elves made their dwellings. They built no halls of stone. Their houses were telain, flets: broad wooden platforms without walls set on the level boughs, some small enough for a single sleeper, others wide enough for a company, reached by rope ladders that could be drawn up after their owners. Paved paths and grass rides ran between the trunks below, with a fountain in the open ground, and the sound of Elvish singing came down from the branches at all hours; visitors thought that the wood, the lamps and the voices together made the city seem less a fortress than a green house of many storeys.

The court of the Lord and Lady

On the crown of the hill grows a mallorn greater than the rest, and near its top a wide flet was made, an oval chamber roofed with living boughs and open at the middle to the sky. A long white ladder climbs to it. There Celeborn and Galadriel sat on two chairs beneath the bole and received those who came to Lórien, and there in T.A. 3019 they heard the tale of the Company's crossing of Moria and the fall of Gandalf. It was the seat of Amroth before them, and after Amroth's loss the chief place of the realm.

In an enclosed garden in a hollow below the hill, reached by a stair of green turf, stood the silver basin and the pedestal that held the ewer of Galadriel's spring. This was the Mirror, in which she showed Frodo and Samwise things that were, things that are, and things that yet might be. It was there, alone with the Lady, that Frodo offered her the One Ring and she put it aside. When Galadriel departed over the Sea in T.A. 3021 the city emptied with the rest of the realm.

Caras Galadhon was the seat of the kings of Lórien and then of the Lady and the Lord of the Galadhrim. Its best-recorded days are the winter of T.A. 3019, when the Fellowship of the Ring was brought there by the marchwardens under Haldir on 17 January, lodged on the ground beneath the trees, and given the freedom of the city for close on a month; Gimli the Dwarf was healed there of the old grievance between his people and the Elves. The Company was fitted out with cloaks, rope, lembas and boats and left on 16 February with the gifts of Galadriel. In the following March, while the host of Dol Guldur attacked Lórien three times, the city stood untaken; Celeborn afterwards led the Galadhrim across the Anduin and destroyed the enemy's tower. Within a generation of Galadriel's passing the flets were deserted and the lamps unlit.

A hill city deep within the Naith of Lothlórien, between the rivers Celebrant and Anduin, some way south of the mound of Cerin Amroth and the northern eaves of the wood.