Cerin Amroth

The mound

Cerin Amroth stands where the eaves of Lothlórien open into the Naith, a broad hill raised by hands long before the Third Age and kept as the hallowed heart of the realm. Two rings of trees crown it. The outer circle is of trees with snow-white bark, leafless and gleaming, that stand bare in every season; within them grows a ring of golden mallorn trees, and at the very summit one mallorn taller than the rest.

The turf of the mound is thick with two flowers that grow nowhere else in such profusion. Elanor, the sun-star, opens small and gold and green-hearted, and niphredil, pale as snow, was first seen at the birth of Lúthien in Doriath and came east with the Elves. To walk on the mound was to feel the whole weight of the ancient world made present: the Hobbits who climbed it in January T.A. 3019 said afterwards that colours there had no names they knew and that nothing seemed either faded or new, only itself.

At the top of the great mallorn a ladder still climbed to a flet, a house of timber in the boughs where Amroth dwelt before the sorrow of T.A. 1981, when he was drowned in the sea seeking Nimrodel. After him no one lived there, and the mound took his name. From the flet one could look north to the shining line of the Misty Mountains and the pale gleam of the Dimrill Dale, and south over the golden wood; only away to the south-east, where Dol Guldur sat on its hill across the river, did the view carry a shadow.

The troth and the grave

In the summer of T.A. 2980 Aragorn came to Lórien out of the wild, and there he met Arwen again after many years apart. On Cerin Amroth, among the elanor and the niphredil, they pledged themselves to each other and set aside the choice of the Elves for her; Arwen chose mortality that day, though the price would not be paid for six generations of Men. Aragorn said afterwards that he never returned to the mound as a living man.

When King Elessar surrendered his life at Minas Tirith in Fo.A. 120, Arwen went north to the empty wood in the fading of the year. The mellyrn still stood gold, but the Galadhrim were gone and Galadriel had long since passed over the Sea. In the following winter she came to Cerin Amroth and laid herself down on the mound, and there her grave remained while the world lasted, in a land where no one came to find it.

Cerin Amroth was already old when the Sindarin lords came east, and it was the chief seat of the kings of Lórien before Caras Galadhon was raised. Amroth's flet at its crown was left standing but untended after his death in T.A. 1981. In 2980 Aragorn and Arwen were betrothed there. In January 3019 Haldir brought the Company of the Ring to the mound on their way inward, and Frodo climbed the ladder to the old flet and looked out on both the beauty of the wood and the darkness across the Anduin. After Galadriel's departure in T.A. 3021 the realm emptied, and in Fo.A. 121 Arwen died on the mound, the choice she had made there in her youth fulfilled at last.

A high green mound in the northern part of the Naith of Lothlórien, between the stream of Nimrodel and Caras Galadhon, with views north to the Misty Mountains and the Dimrill Dale and south-east across the Anduin toward Dol Guldur.