Hyarrostar

The South-east

The Hyarrostar was the south-eastern promontory of Númenor and the warmest of its regions. Trees of many kinds grew there, more than in any other part of the island save the planted groves of the Nísimaldar, and it was the timber-country of the realm.

Its own tree was the laurinquë, which the Númenóreans grew in their gardens for the beauty of its hanging clusters of golden flowers. Some held that it had been brought from Eressëa and was descended from Laurelin, the Golden Tree of Valinor, and they gave it names that said as much; but the Eldar answered that this was not so, and that the laurinquë was a fair tree of no special virtue, pleasant to look upon and nothing more.

The shipwrights' forests

In the days of Tar-Aldarion the Hyarrostar became the source of Númenor's fleets. Aldarion, who loved ships above all things, planted great new forests in the region to supply timber for his shipyards, so that the building of vessels should not strip the older woods of the island. From those plantations came the hulls that carried the Númenóreans east to Middle-earth.

Timber and the price of it

Aldarion's forests began a long argument in Númenor. He was the first to fell timber on a great scale, and his father Tar-Meneldur and others held that the island's woods should not be spent upon the sea; Erendis reproached him for it bitterly, saying that ships and salt water had taken the place in him that his own land should have held. Aldarion answered by planting more than he cut, and it was in the Hyarrostar that he did so.

The argument was settled the wrong way at the last. When the later kings turned from exploring to conquest, and above all when Ar-Pharazôn built the Great Armament to sail against the Valar, timber was taken without measure, both in Númenor and in the coastlands of Middle-earth that the Númenóreans had come to rule. The woods of the south-east went down with the island in S.A. 3319. The laurinquë and Aldarion's plantations are described only in the Description of the Island of Númenor in Unfinished Tales.

The Hyarrostar formed the south-eastern arm of the star-shaped island, between the southern bight that separated it from the Hyarnustar and the eastern coast below Rómenna. It was the hottest and one of the best-watered regions of Númenor, wooded over much of its extent, with its plantations lying inland and its shore giving on the seas toward Middle-earth.