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Old 01-15-2018, 06:51 AM   #14
Huinesoron
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Join Date: Nov 2017
Location: The north-west of the Old World, east of the Sea
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Huinesoron is battling Black Riders on Weathertop.Huinesoron is battling Black Riders on Weathertop.
Quote:
Originally Posted by Victariongreyjoy View Post
The War of Wrath was such a battle that a whole continent got destroyed.
There is another fact to keep in mind while thinking about this, and that is that Beleriand is... actually really tiny.

The key to realising this is the First Lord of the Rings Map, Section B (which I found scanned here). That map shows both Himling and Tol Fuin, as well as the distinctive fork of Mount Rerir. It's relatively trivial to line those points up with the Silmarillion map, and to match Section B onto the final LotR map. You get something that looks like this (with Beleriand a bit of a mess from the overlaying, but you should recognise the shapes):



As you can see, Beleriand is incredibly small. From Angband to the mouth of Sirion is about the same distance as the length of Mirkwood, or from the Gap of Rohan to Minas Tirith. Assuming the LotR scale-bar applies across the whole map (it is a round-world map, but the whole thing is still fairly small, so it's not too unreasonable), that's only about 500 miles, in which are encompassed all of the petty kingdoms of the Noldor, Sindar, Edain, and Morgoth.

Beleriand isn't a continent. It's about the same size as Great Britain.

Which... makes sense! Tolkien was a scholar of the Anglo-Saxons, and Anglo-Saxon Britain was a patchwork of kingdoms - some allied, some warring, most shifting their allegiances as time went by. If Middle-earth in the Third Age is Europe in WWI - a number of relatively large nations falling out into two blocs - then Beleriand in the First Age is Britain under the Heptarchy - myriad pocket kingdoms squabbling for supremacy, but all under threat from the Barbarians coming in from Outside.

The point being, the sinking of an island-sized realm is much easier to contemplate than a continental landmass. And, in fact, it happened! 16,000 years ago, Great Britain and Ireland were part of a single penninsula connected to northern France, with most of the North Sea being dry land. It took about ten thousand years for the entire area to be submerged and Britain to be cut off, but at least part of the sinking followed a massive tsunami off the Scandinavian coast.

In fact... have we been thinking about the destruction of Beleriand all wrong? Is it possible that the landmass was drowned not because it was blasted to pieces... but because of massive Morgoth-induced climate change (dude lived in a volcano!) melting the northern ice cap and inundating it? It certainly looks like Lothlann extends directly into what is 'now' the Icebay of Forochel...

hS
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