What happened to all the ships that arrived in Valinor?

[Phantom718]

Was this ever written about or even speculated on?

It's a small, insignificant thing to consider but...

If the ships sailing into the west over the ages were really a one-way journey, and nobody ever sailed back to ME, then what happened to the ships themselves? Did the Undying Lands just have a massive junkyard of ships from ME docked there? Were they broken down and recycled into something else? Were they used for recreation? Did they just disappear once they served their purpose?

 

[Olorgando]

I would hypothesize that recycling and recreation played the major part. Think about it, all of Fëanor's seven sons, as well as Fingolfin's and Finarfin's kids, were born in Valinor, as well a countless unnamed others in the Ages of the Two Trees. You don't believe the Elves stopped procreating there after the rebellion of the Noldor? 🤨 The Teleri were big on sailing anyway, and it would conserve Valinorean forests to re-use Middle-earth vessels there. Just the traffic between Valinor itself and Tol Eressëa must have approached mass transit proportions by the end of the Third Age (and never mind now!). Granted, Elven generations tended to be spaced extremely more widely than human ones, but then the depletion by natural death is out of the picture there. Every birth was a net gain in population.

 

[Inziladun]

Just because the journey into the West was one-way, does not mean that those in the West no longer sailed. Valinor was removed from the World, therefore other forces governed these things; perhaps they no longer traversed the oceans, but wandered about the stars.