Cuiviénen

Every history of the Elves in The Silmarillion begins beside one starlit water. Cuiviénen, the Water of Awakening, is a bay of the inland sea of Helcar in the far east of Middle-earth, and on its shore the firstborn Children of Ilúvatar awake beneath the stars, in the long night before Sun or Moon exists. The first things they know are starlight and the sound of falling water, and from that beginning comes their lasting love of both. From Cuiviénen the kindreds of the Elves take their beginnings: there they devise speech and names, there the Valar find them, and from its shores the Great Journey into the West sets out. The waters themselves lie far beyond all the maps of the West-lands, and the loremasters of the Eldar record that their like cannot be found again in Middle-earth.