Orocarni

The mountains of the East

The Orocarni stood at the eastern edge of the inland Sea of Helcar in the far east of Middle-earth, the range that overlooked Cuiviénen. The streams that came down from them filled the bay where the Elves first woke, and it was the sound of their waters that the Quendi heard before they saw the stars. The mountains were called Red, and they were the eastern boundary of the world as the Elves first knew it; beyond them the histories say nothing.

When Oromë summoned the Elves to Aman, a part of them refused, fearing the Valar or loving the starlit shore too much to leave it. These were the Avari, the Unwilling, and they stayed in the lands about the Sea of Helcar and the Orocarni after the Eldar had gone. Some of them wandered west in later ages and mingled with the Nandor and the Silvan Elves of the Third Age; others, the Eldar believed, remained in the east and fell in part under the shadow of Melkor, whose spirits had haunted the hills about the lake even before Oromë came. The Sea of Helcar itself was lost in the changes of the world, and by the Third Age the Orocarni were no more than a name in the oldest songs, the mountains under which the first light of the stars had fallen on the Elves.

The Orocarni ran along the eastern side of the Sea of Helcar in the middle-east of Middle-earth, far beyond the Misty Mountains and the lands known in the Third Age. Cuiviénen lay in a bay at their feet on the sea's eastern shore.