Least we didn't spend two hundred years staring at each other enchanted, I'm guessing you'd have reacted really really badly to that happening.

...well, we would have been interrupted by the world ending, and, uh, yes.

Growing up I was terrified that'd happen to me.

How does that even happen. Nobody's that pretty. You even aren't, for which I am grateful for a variety of reasons.

The world was young then, there was a lot of magic just sort of - ambient - and it was very scary to be around. 

How does this lead to centuries of staring?

Not sure exactly but it's something of an intensifier? Like, if ordinarily someone's so beautiful you feel like for a second the world falls away when you look at them, and then you recover and look away and blink and laugh at yourself, instead, by magic, the recovering and looking away and blinking doesn't happen.

That's concerning. This problem is safely a thing of the past?

Yeah. Before the rising of the Sun and the Moon.

It's still weird that those are novel features of the place.

I think it's cool that the Valar came up with the idea. Much nicer than it being dark all the time.

I'd be more impressed if they came up with it before anyone was around to have to sit in the dark.

They had the Lamps, back then, but Melkor knocked them down.

Lamps.

It worked.

It just seems really silly.

Giant fires floating in the sky don't really seem to me like the most efficient way to keep a planet lit, honestly.

They're not efficient, huge amounts of sunlight is constantly streaming into nowhere for no useful purpose. They just happen that way when the laws of physics operate on their own.

So they make sense for your planet but it makes sense that the Valar and Maiar tried other ways of doing it first on ours.

If I were trying to light a planet and I had the temperature taken care of separately and I didn't want to do a sun I'd probably go for bioluminescent plants! Or maybe they'd technically have to be fungi in order to take in ambient warmth and give off light, but - Mental image, forest with glowing mosses all up and down the trunks and dangling from the branches in eerie colors. Fireflies.

That's kind of what Mum did! Lots of Doriath was lit like that before the Sun!

Oh, neat! - What did handle temperature back when it was lamps?

I think the world itself was very hot from being new.

Huh. What were they planning to do when it got older and cooled off?

I think the Lamps produced enough heat, too, and the Trees definitely did.