the coming of Melkor." Origins The Tolkien scholar John Garth traces the Two Trees to the medieval Trees of the Sun and the Moon. Tolkien stated in an interview that the Two Trees derived from them rather than from the World Tree Yggdrasil of Norse myth. The Wonders of the East, a manuscript in the same Codex as Beowulf, tells that Alexander the Great travelled beyond India to Paradise, where he saw the two magical trees. They drip down a wonderful balsam, and have the power of speech. They tell Alexander that he will die in Babylon. Garth writes that Tolkien's trees emit light, not balsam; and instead of prophesying death, their own deaths bring the era of immortality to an end. Significance Matthew Dickerson writes in the J.R.R. Tolkien Encyclopedia that the Two Trees are "the most important mythic symbols in all of the legendarium". Verlyn Flieger describes the progressive splintering of the first created light, down through successive catastrophes. After the destruction of the twin lamps of Arda, Yavanna recreates what she can of the light in the two trees; Varda catches some of the light, and some of that fills the Silmarils. The whole of the history of Tolkien's First Age is strongly affected by the desire of many characters to possess the Silmarils that contain the only remaining unsullied light of the Trees. In the Second and Third Ages, the White Trees of Númenor and of Gondor, whose likeness descends from that of Telperion, have a mostly symbolic significance, standing both for the kingdoms in question, and also as reminders of the ancestral alliance between the Men who had lived on Númenor and the Elves. The destruction of one of these trees precedes trouble for each kingdom in question. Martin Simonson describes the destruction of the Two Trees as setting a "mythical precedent" for the transfer of the stewardship of Arda (Earth) from the Valar to Elves and Men. In his view, this stewardship is central to the moral battle, as the Two Trees, like Men and Elves, are composed of both matter and spirit. Matthew Dickerson and Jonathan Evans note that Tolkien calls the elves "stewards and guardians of [Middle-earth's] beauty"; they are constantly preoccupied with maintaining the beauty of nature, something they inherited from Yavanna's making of the Two Trees. Tolkien, as a Roman Catholic, would certainly have been exposed to the significance of