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Wall of Things
(redirection from Ilurambar)

As described in BoLT1, this is a wall that Ilúvatar himself set around Arda.

At the outer edge of Vai stands the Wall of Things, which is described as 'deep-blue'

Valinor is nearer to the Wall of Things than is the eastern shore of the Great Lands, which must mean that Vai is narrower in the West than in the East. In the Wall of Things the Gods at this time made two entrances, in the West the Door of Night and in the East the Gates of Morn; and what lies beyond these entrances in the Wall is called the starless vast and the outer dark. It is not made clear how the outer air (the dark and tenuous realm of Vaitya that is outside all) is to be related to the conception of the Wall of Things or the Outer Dark. In the rejected preliminary text of this tale my father wrote at first ... that in the East the Wall of Things is lower, so that when the Sun returns from the Outer Dark it does not enter the eastern sky by a door but rides above the Wall. This was then changed, and the idea of the Door in the Eastern Wall, the Gates of Morn, introduced, but the implication seems clear that the Walls were originally conceived like the walls of terrestrial cities, or gardens - walls with a top: a ring-fence. In the cosmological essay of the 1930s, the Ambarkanta, the Walls are quite other:

About the World are the Ilurambar, or Walls__of__the World. They are as ice and glass and steel, being above all imagination of the Children of Earth cold, transparent, and hard. They cannot be seen, nor can they be passed, save by the Door of Night.
Within these walls the Earth is globed: above, below, and upon all sides is Vaiya, the Enfolding Ocean. But this is more like to sea below the Earth and more like to air above the Earth.
BoLT1, Commentary on Hiding of Valinor; Chr.Tolkien


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