Nether Darkness

A darkness witnessed by the voyagers of Númenor in the distant South of the World. Its meaning is never explained precisely, but it seems to be a reference to the Void beyond the Circles of the World. What maps we have of the form of Arda show that the Encircling Sea became very narrow in the far North and South, so that travellers on a vessel sailing to the southern limit of Arda would be able to see the Walls of the World, and apparently some part of the darkness that lay beyond.

We have only a single tangential reference to the Nether Darkness, and so specific conclusions about its nature must naturally be tentative. We have assumed here that the name referred to the Ancient Darkness or Void surrounding the world, and this does seem to largely match what we little we know about the Nether Darkness, but the equivalence is far from certain.

One other possibility relates to the shape of the world at the time of the great Númenórean voyages. At this time, Arda had a flat form, with the Sun passing across it from east to west in its central regions. In a world with such a shape, the extreme North and the extreme South would be far from the light of the Sun, and so a vessel travelling into the distant North or South would potentially find itself in a zone of twilight or even sunless darkness. These zones far from the Sun would be potential alternative explanations for the Nether Darkness. Such a conception is of course highly speculative, but it seems to fit the sole quoted source at least as well as the outer darkness beyond the Walls of the World.