Valinor or the Blessed Realm is a fictional location in J. R. R. Tolkien's legendarium, the home of the immortal Valar on the continent of Aman, far to the west of Middle-earth; he used the name Aman mainly to mean Valinor. It includes Eldamar, the land of the Elves, who as immortals are permitted to live in Valinor.
Earthly Paradise: Eldamar has been compared to the place dreamed of in the Middle English poem Pearl. Miniature from Cotton Nero A.x shows the Dreamer on the other side of the stream from the Pearl-maiden.
The strife among the Elves and their resulting exit from Valinor has been compared to the Biblical fall of man. The serpent tempts Adam and Eve to eat the forbidden fruit, Notre Dame de Paris
Scholars have compared Tolkien's Valinor to the "Land of Promise" in Celtic imrama tales. Here, Saint Brendan sails the seas looking for the Land of Promise. Gautier de Metz, c. 1304
Tolkien's legendarium is the body of J. R. R. Tolkien's mythopoeic writing, unpublished in his lifetime, that forms the background to his The Lord of the Rings, and which his son Christopher summarized in his compilation of The Silmarillion and documented in his 12-volume series The History of Middle-earth. The legendarium's origins reach back to 1914, when Tolkien began writing poems and story sketches, drawing maps, and inventing languages and names as a private project to create a unique English mythology. The earliest story drafts are from 1916; he revised and rewrote these for most of his adult life.
Tolkien went to great lengths to present his work as a collection of documents "within the fictional world", including preparing facsimile pages from The Book of Mazarbul to support the story (it was intended for The Lord of the Rings) and to bring readers into his fantasy.
