Nísimaldar

The Sweet-scented Trees

The Nísimaldar was the name given to the country about Eldalondë on the Bay of Eldanna, the warmest and rainiest quarter of Númenor. It was not a wild forest but a planted land. The Eldar of Tol Eressëa, coming to the western haven, brought trees out of the West as gifts, and in that mild air they grew as they grew nowhere else in mortal lands, until the whole district was a wood of sweet scent through which the river Nunduinë ran down to the sea past the lake of Nísinen.

The trees

Six kinds were remembered by name. The oiolairë, the ever-summer, stood highest in honour, for from it was cut the Green Bough of Return that was set on the prows of ships. The lairelossë was named for a blossom like summer snow; the nessamelda, the vardarianna and the taniquelassë were prized for the fragrance of leaf and bark; and the yavannamírë bore round scarlet fruit and carried the name of Yavanna in its own. Greatest in stature was the mallorn, silver-barked and golden-flowered, whose leaves turned to gold in autumn and did not fall until the spring; it grew tall in the Nísimaldar, though never so tall as in Eressëa.

The mallorn passes east

Tar-Aldarion carried nuts of the mallorn to Gil-galad in Lindon, but they would not take root there, and the Elven-king afterward gave them to Galadriel. By her power they grew at last in Lothlórien, so that the golden wood of Middle-earth was an inheritance of the Númenórean west; no mallorn had grown east of the Sea before that gift, and the only one ever to grow in the far west of Middle-earth was the tree that sprang in the Shire in the days after the War of the Ring.

The end of the woods

The Nísimaldar depended on the friendship that had made it. When the ships of Eressëa ceased and the Faithful were driven from the Andustar, no new gifts came, though the planted woods stood until the end and their scent still reached ships at sea. They went down with the western promontory in S.A. 3319. The names of the trees, their virtues, and the story of the mallorn are recorded only in the Description of the Island of Númenor in Unfinished Tales.

The Nísimaldar covered the country round the head of the Bay of Eldanna in the southern Andustar, the mildest and wettest ground in Númenor. The trees ran from the highlands down to the sea and closed about the haven of Eldalondë; the Nunduinë flowed through them, and the small lake of Nísinen within them took its name from the fragrant shrubs on its shores.