Avathar

The land of shadows

South of the Bay of Eldamar the coast of Aman ran on between the Pelóri and the sea, but it narrowed until only a thin strip of ground was left beneath the mountains, and there the light of the Trees, which fell through the Calacirya far to the north, never reached. This was Avathar, the Shadows, the darkest place in the Blessed Realm, and the Valar had given it no thought since the raising of the mountains. It was here that Ungoliant hid. She had come into Arda from the darkness outside in the beginning, had served Melkor and then abandoned him, and had fled from the Valar's hunt into the south, where she lived in a ravine under the mountains in the form of a great spider, weaving webs of blackness and devouring every light she could find until she starved for want of it.

Melkor and Ungoliant

When Melkor fled the judgment of the Valar he went south along the coast, past the eyes of the Eldar, and found Ungoliant in Avathar. He offered her whatever light she could take if she would help him, and she, hungry and afraid, agreed on his oath. She spun a cloak of unlight about them both, and by it they climbed Hyarmentir, the great southern peak of the Pelóri, which the Valar had left unwatched because no one had ever come at Valinor from that side. Ungoliant went up by rope and ladder of her own weaving, and from the top she and Melkor looked down on Valinor at festival and came down across the plain to Ezellohar. After the Trees were dead the two fled north, not south, and Ungoliant never returned to Avathar; she came at last to the dark valleys south of the Ered Gorgoroth in Beleriand, whose spiders were her offspring, and beyond that her end is unknown.

Avathar itself appears no more in the histories, but the memory of what came out of it was the reason the Valar, in the Hiding of Valinor, raised the whole Pelóri to a height that nothing could climb, from the far south as well as the north.

Avathar lay along the south-eastern coast of Aman, beneath the southern Pelóri and beside the sea, growing narrower toward the south. Hyarmentir rose above it, and to its north lay the Bay of Eldamar and the coast of Elvenhome.