Tirion
the city of the Noldor upon Túna
Name and Position
Tirion — “the city of the Noldor” — is the fair city of the second kindred, built upon the green hill Túna in the east of Aman, facing the sea, beneath the light of the Two Trees. Founded by Finwë and his people when the Noldor settled in Aman, it is the wonder-city of the age: its towers, its white stones, its great square and its Mindon Eldaliéva — the — the beacon-tower whose lamp the “last light” — Tirion is the Elves’ summit of art, “the fairest of the cities of the world”.
The Light and the Lamps
- The treelight: In the square of Tirion (and above it on Túna) the mingled gold-and-silver radiance of Telperion and Laurelin fell; the Noldor’s fairest jewellery (Fëanor’s early works, and the Silmarils he conceived “in the shaping of Tirion”) caught it; and the Elves of the Light were indeed of it —.
- The tower Mindon: its steeple bell — the tower with the white lamp that “unfailingly burned” — and the bright fell that the fugitives of the West remember as the last light they saw — is the classic image of departure.
The Departure and the Memory After the rebellion
After the rebellion and the Exile, Tirion stood emptier (the Vanyar had come in part; the Teleri were at the coast); it was the city of the rebels’ leaving, and the memory of its light is the fuel of the Noldor’s. In the songs and the Akallabêth, Tirion endures as the archetype of the beautiful lost home (the Elves’ answer to mortality) — the city against which all later elven-realms (Gondolin) are measured.
Significance
Tirion is the Elvish “white city” — the perfect home that the Noldor forsook; its gens is the symbol of the Light of Valinor, and its loss, the myth’s nostalgia made architecture.