Eldalondë

The Elvenhome haven

Eldalondë, called the Green, stood at the head of the Bay of Eldanna on the western coast of Númenor, in the southern part of the Andustar. Its name meant the haven of the Eldar, and it was reckoned the fairest of all the harbours of the island. The bay faced west toward Tol Eressëa, and it was there above all that the white ships of the Eldar came in, needing neither oar nor favouring wind, to the green shelter of the harbour.

The country about it was the warmest and rainiest in Númenor, and the trees grew down to the water's edge. The river Nunduinë came out to sea at the town after passing through the lake of Nísinen, and the quays were set among gardens and groves so that houses, wharves and woods ran together; from that greenness the haven took its name. Mariners said that the scent of the Nísimaldar, the fragrant trees the Eldar had planted about the bay, could be caught far out at sea before the coast itself was sighted.

Gifts from the Lonely Isle

For the first thousand years of the realm the visits of the Eldar to Eldalondë were the chief living link between the Númenóreans and the West. The Elves came as friends and not as traders, bringing birds, flowers and above all trees: the six sweet-scented kinds of the Nísimaldar, and the mallorn, which grew in Númenor as nowhere else in mortal lands. From the boughs of the oiolairë, the ever-summer, was cut the Green Bough of Return, which the women of Númenor set on the prow of a ship leaving harbour as a prayer that it should come home; Erendis once refused that bough to Tar-Aldarion, and the refusal was remembered as a bitter thing.

The silence of the haven

The change in Númenor closed Eldalondë. As the kings turned from the Valar the ships of Eressëa came more seldom and then not at all; the Elf-friends of the western coast were watched, and Ar-Gimilzôr removed them to Rómenna. The haven that had been made for the Eldar stood empty of them through the last twelve hundred years of the island's life, and it drowned with the Andustar in S.A. 3319. The whole account of Eldalondë and its bay survives only in the Description of the Island of Númenor in Unfinished Tales.

Eldalondë lay at the head of the Bay of Eldanna, the largest and southernmost of the three western bays of the Andustar, south of the Bay of Andúnië. The Nunduinë reached the sea at the town; behind it the woods of the Nísimaldar covered the warm, well-watered country, and the highlands of the northern Andustar rose beyond. The bay opened west toward Tol Eressëa, which was the reason for both its name and its use.