Cuiviénen

The Water of Awakening

Far in the east of Middle-earth, in the Years of the Trees when the only light beyond Aman was that of the stars, there lay a great inland sea called Helcar, formed where the northern Lamp had stood before Melkor cast it down. On its eastern shore, beneath the Orocarni, was a bay fed by streams falling from the mountains, and it was here, by the water in the starlight, that the Elves awoke. Varda had kindled new and brighter stars against their coming, and the first thing they saw when they opened their eyes was that sky; so the Elves loved starlight above every other light for ever after, and named Varda before all the Valar. The sound of water running over stone was the first thing they heard, and water and song were bound together in their memory of the place.

They were called the Quendi, those who speak with voices, because before they did anything else they began to make words. In that first age of the world they lived beside the water without lords or history, learning to name what they saw, walking under the stars, and making the first songs and the first Elvish tongue. Nothing of the Valar was known to them, and the world beyond the mountains and the mere was rumour.

The shadow on the water

Melkor found the Elves before the Valar did, and his knowledge of them was one of the things he kept most carefully hidden. He set evil spirits in the hills around Cuiviénen to walk among the wandering Elves and whisper to them, so that fear of the Valar was planted in them before they had ever seen one. A dark rider on a black horse was seen hunting near the water, and any Elf who strayed too far from the shore alone might not come back. Those who were taken were carried to Utumno, and the Eldar of later days believed, though they said it with sorrow and without certainty, that the Orcs were bred from them there by slow cruelty.

Then Oromë, riding east on one of his hunts, heard singing across the water and came to Cuiviénen. Many of the Elves fled at the sound of Nahar's hooves, taking him for the rider of their fear, and those who fled the deepest into hiding were the ones Melkor's lies had reached. But others stayed, and Oromë stayed with them for a while and named them the Eldar, the people of the stars, before riding back to Valinor with the news.

The war and the summons

The Valar took counsel and resolved that the Elves should not be left in the dark within Melkor's reach. They went to war, and the assault on Utumno shook the whole of Middle-earth; at Cuiviénen the Elves felt the earth heave and saw the north lit up, but understood almost nothing of what was happening or why. Melkor was taken in chains to Valinor, and the Valar then debated for a long time whether to summon the Elves west out of a world that still held his lieutenants and his works. In the end they summoned them, and Oromë carried the summons back to the water.

The Elves were afraid and unwilling, so Oromë took three of their number to Aman to see the light of the Two Trees for themselves and speak for their peoples: Ingwë of the first kindred, Finwë of the second, and Elwë of the third, who was afterwards Thingol of Doriath. They came back to Cuiviénen filled with the memory of the light, and each urged his own people to go.

The Sundering

Here the Elves divided for the first time, and the division was never undone. Those who accepted the summons and set out became the Eldar; those who refused it, distrusting the Valar or unwilling to leave the water and the stars they knew, were called the Avari, the Unwilling, and they remained. The march went in three hosts. The smallest was the host of Ingwë, the Vanyar; next came the Noldor under Finwë; and the largest was the host of the Teleri, so numerous that they had two lords, Elwë and his brother Olwë.

The Great Journey

Oromë rode before them on Nahar and went up and down the line, but the march was slow beyond all reckoning, for the Elves loved every new country they came into and stopped often to look at rivers and mountains they had no names for yet. Some turned aside and never rejoined the march at all. When the host came to the Great River a part of the Teleri under Lenwë would go no further west and turned south down the water, and they became the Nandor; Elwë himself was lost in the woods of Beleriand and stayed behind for love of Melian, and those who waited for him became the Sindar. Every later kindred of the Elves, in Beleriand, in Eregion, in Lórien, in Mirkwood and in Aman itself, can be traced back through those partings to the three hosts that left Cuiviénen.

Lost

Of the Avari who stayed by the mere almost nothing was afterwards recorded in the West; they passed out of the histories that the Eldar kept, and what became of them in the east is not told. The shape of Middle-earth was altered more than once in the ages that followed, in the ruin of Utumno and again in the drowning of Beleriand, and the inland Sea of Helcar was gone. The Elves of the later ages held that no road led back to the Water of Awakening and that it could not be found again by any search. In their memory it stayed as the first and most innocent of all their homes: a shore under new stars, before any of them had heard of the West, or of Angband, or of one another as sundered peoples.

Cuiviénen was a bay on the eastern side of the inland Sea of Helcar, which lay in the middle of Middle-earth where the Lamp Illuin had fallen, with the Orocarni, the Red Mountains, rising beyond it to the east and sending streams down into the water. Utumno lay far to the north-west, near enough that Melkor's servants could reach the shores of the mere. The Great Journey went west from Cuiviénen across the whole breadth of the continent, past the Misty Mountains and the great forest that later ages called Greenwood, over the Anduin and at last to the shores of Beleriand and the Sea.