Tol Eressëa

The island that crossed the sea

Tol Eressëa was originally an island in the middle of the sea. When the Eldar came to the western shore of Middle-earth on the Great Journey and could not cross the water, Ulmo uprooted this island, drew it to the coast, and carried the Vanyar and Noldor over the sea on it to the Bay of Eldamar. Many years later he came back for the Teleri, who had waited by the mouths of Sirion and grown to love the sea under the teaching of Ossë. Ossë was loath to lose them, and at his and their pleading Ulmo rooted the island fast in the bay within sight of the coast, where it remained. This is why it was called Lonely: it stood alone in the water, and for a long age the Teleri were parted on it from their kin ashore, seeing the light of the Trees only from afar through the Calacirya.

In time Ossë taught the Teleri to build ships and they sailed to the mainland and built Alqualondë. The island was then largely empty until the end of the First Age.

Home of the returning Elves

After the War of Wrath the Valar pardoned the exiled Noldor and summoned the Elves of Beleriand to the West. Most who accepted were settled not in Valinor itself but on Tol Eressëa, where the Noldor and the Sindar of Middle-earth dwelt together in the light of the West but still able to look east. The haven of Avallonë was built on its eastern shore, and its tower was the first thing a mariner sailing west would see. Yavanna had given the island a white tree, Celeborn, grown from a seedling of Galathilion of Tirion, and from Celeborn the Eldar brought Nimloth to Númenor as a gift to the kings.

Eressëa and Númenor were bound together for most of the Second Age. The island lay within sight of the Meneltarma on the clearest days, and the Eldar sailed from Avallonë to the western havens of Númenor bringing gifts, birds, flowers and wisdom, until the Númenóreans grew envious of the Elves' immortality and the visits ceased. When Aman was removed from the world at the Downfall, Tol Eressëa went with it, and in later ages it was the nearest shore of the Undying Lands to those who found the Straight Road.

Ages of the island

The island served as a ferry twice in the Years of the Trees and was fixed in the bay when the Teleri asked to stay near the sea. Their long dwelling on it separated their speech from that of the Noldor and made them the mariners of Aman. At the Kinslaying the island played no part, being unpeopled, but after the exiles' return it became the most populous place of the Eldar in the West. In the Second Age the friendship between Eressëa and Númenor was the channel through which the Faithful of Númenor kept their loyalty to the Valar; the palantíri that Amandil and Elendil carried out of the Downfall had been gifts of the Eldar, and Unfinished Tales records a tradition that the master-stone of the set remained in the tower of Avallonë. At the Downfall the island passed out of the physical world with Aman, and the ships that sailed from the Grey Havens in the Third Age came to it by the Straight Road.

Tol Eressëa lay in the Bay of Eldamar off the eastern coast of Aman, facing the Calacirya and Tirion on the west and open to the Great Sea on the east, where after the Hiding of Valinor the Enchanted Isles and Shadowy Seas lay between it and Middle-earth. Avallonë was on its eastern shore, the side toward Númenor.