Studies of the Westward Deeps

An Elvish natural history treatise, written before The Downfall

Studies of the Westward Deeps is an Elvish natural history treatise and maritime survey from before The Downfall. It records observations, philosophical speculation, poems, and other notes about the western reaches of the Endless Ocean. It includes a variety of both mundane and magical observations, some of natural phenomena and some of strange creatures, waters that seem to answer to songs, and currents that carry memory and speech.

Few copies are known to have survived the Downfall. A notable copy was owned and annotated by Airion the Mistspeaker, whose marginal glosses identify some of the treatise’s strangest passages with Yi’weti, the old mages’ name for the Sentient Ocean.