Danuin
The Ainu of a Day
Earlier names: Danos, Dana
In Tolkien’s earliest works, Aluin, the eldest of the Ainu who represents Time and still lives with Illuvatar, sends his three sons Danuin, Ranuin, and Fanuin to Arda to aid the Valar with the creation of Time there. His name means “Day” and he is described as the first son of Aluin. Danuin is depicted as the shortest of the three brothers, with short hair and a short beard. All three of them had the appearance of elderly men, making them similar to the Istari. Danuin creates an invisible cord to represent a day, and gives this to Manwe to help him govern time in Arda. His brothers each follow suit, and then aren’t ever mentioned again. Danuin and his family are intriguing characters but the way Tolkien wrote their story (which only takes up a few pages of a 300+ page book) and the role they played in the larger narrative was confusing (they appear to “create” time, yet don’t appear until page 247) and so they were eventually dropped and don’t appear in the published Silmarillion.Â
It’s worth noting that Aluin and his children appear at a time in Tolkien’s writings when the Valier Vaire, the weaver and wife of Mandos who is associated with time because she records all history in her tapestries, did not yet exist. Vaire was instead the name of the female elf who narrates the stories that eventually become The Silmarillion, while Mandos’ wife is Fui Nienna, a grim “Queen of Death” version of Nienna who was the sister of Manwe and Melkor instead of the kind, powerful, melancholy Nienna who appears in The Silmarillion as the sister of Lorien and Mandos and a mentor to Olorin/Gandalf.
