Boromir: "Is it not a strange fate that we should suffer so much fear and doubt for so small a thing? So small a thing!" - J. R. R. Tolkien, The Fellowship of the Ring II:10 |

The Sea of Sun

The Romeneär as seen from Menel
The Eastern Ocean (Q: Rómeneär, Ad. Azûlada Azra → "Sea That Goes Eastward"), once called the Sea of the Sun (Ad. Azrûrê, Av. Anarneni) was the great eastern ocean that separated Eastern Middle-Earth from Easternesse and, in later ages, from the New Lands that rose after the great cataclysms of Second Age. Its formation dates back to the Fall of the Lamps, when the destruction of Illuin and Ormal shattered the primal landscape of Arda. A sea of unmatched wonder, it bore the golden radiance of the morning sun and the myriad hues of twilight, a mirror to the heavens above. Its northern and southern waters were part of the even greater ocean called Ekkaia.
Lore[]
In the days before the Darkening of Valinor, and long before the Númenóreans set sail upon the waves of the world, the Lords of the Essence, those powerful Spirits who dwelt beyond the knowledge of the Western lands, plied the sunlit currents of Rómeneär. Their ships, built of strange woods and adorned with golden sails, carried silks, spices, and gems unseen in the West. In later ages, the ocean was a highway of trade, where the merchants of Oronto and the sailors of Wômawas Drûs navigated by the constellations of Varda’s sky.
Legends tell of the Isles of the Hundred Mirages, where the water was so clear that ships seemed to float upon the sky, and of the Pearl Reefs of Rômoth, near Great Havens of the Sun and the Moon, where the Mermaids, a race of water-dwellers said to be kin in some way to the Maiar of Ulmo, made their home in deep coral halls. They were keepers of forgotten songs, whispering to sailors in the moonlit nights. Some claimed that the Syreni still remembered the first words sung in the Great Music of the Ainur, and that those who heard their voices might glimpse a fragment of the Song that shaped the world.