Having long been a student of mythology, I believe that one should consider the definition of "myth." One I personally prefer is stated in the Funk & Wagnalls Standard Dictionary of Folklore, Mythology, and Legend:
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Myth: A story, presented as having actually occurred in a previous age, explaining the cosmological and supernatural traditions of a people, their gods, heroes, cultural traits, religious beliefs, etc. The purpose of myth is to explain, and, as Sir G.L. Gomme said, myths explain matters in "the science of a pre-scientific age." Thus myths tell of the creation of man, of animals, of landmarks; they tell why a certain animal has its characteristics (e.g. why the bat is blind or flies only at night), why or how certain natural phenomena came to be (e.g.why the rainbow appears or how the constellation Orion got into the sky), how and why rituals and ceremonies began and why they continue. Not all origin stories are myths, however; the myth must have a religious background in that its principal actor or actors are deities; the stories are thus systematized at least to the extent that they are related to a corpus of other stories in which the given god is the member of a pantheon. Where such interrelation does not occur, and where the gods or demigods do not appear, such stories are properly classified as folktale.
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As Tolkien said that his tales were an attempt to create a mythology for England, I feel he succeeded quite well, and that any later attempt to try to make those tales more scientifically accurate was a mistake. The beauty of myth does not lie in its scientific precision, but rather in how it shows the ingenuity of the human mind, striving to understand the world in which it lives, as best it is able. In my humble opinion, of course.
That said, trees play major parts in many myths about the early world (the Tree of Life, the Tree of Knowledge, Yggdrasil, etc.) and there certainly are quite a few myths about the bringing of light and/or fire from the gods to man (Prometheus comes screaming to mind
). I find the Two Trees a clever and elegant blend of such myths. I don't believe Tolkien was the first to invent a tree of light (I'd have to dig up some of my more esoteric mythology texts to check it out, but I seem to recall such tales in some Eastern mythologies), but he may have been the first to use it as a basis for a myth to explain the reality of the sun and moon.
Just my two cents', as ever.
