Beleriand

So let's start with who these Dunlendings are.

If you remember in our episode on the Northmen, I briefly mentioned that the three tribes of men that would become the Edain of the First Age took different paths to get to Beleriand, with the future houses of Beor and Hador taking a northerly route.

but taking a southern route, were the people that would eventually become the House of Haleth.

And they became divided on their journey, as only some of them actually went into Beleriand.

We read this in Volume 12 of The History of Middle-Earth, The Peoples of Middle-Earth.

Many of the forest dwellers on the shorelands south of the Ered Luin, especially in Minhiriaf, were, as later historians, recognized the kin of the House of Haleth.

Right

... were there ever hobbits in Beleriand? No, because that's where all the terrible things were happening.

Yeah.

Exactly.

The Return of the King does tell you a little something.

It, it does, yes.

Of course, I wanna keep telling Tolkien, "I see, so you didn't want spoilers then, but you're fine with all the titles to your Silmarillion chapters of The Fall of Beleriand," right? You know?

Yes.

Mm-hmm.

Uh, let me give you the titles, and then we'll do a quick last time on, um, of the Coming of Men into the West, of the Ruin of Beleriand, and the Fall of Fingolfin, of Beren and Luthien, of the Fifth Battle, Nirnaeth Arnoediad, Arnoediad.

[laughs] It's simultaneously super important and not important-

Yep.

Yeah.

Men showed up.

Ruin of Beleriand and the Fall of Fingolfin.

Mm-hmm.

But otherwise, I think you should just assume that like people are going to move in the section we're talking about right now.

They're going to move from east to west to Valar, and they're going to move from west to east back into Beleriand.

Beleriand.

Beleriand, sorry.

Yeah.

So I guess the thing that you're saying that is maybe not clear to me, and maybe this is because I know that there's some stuff that's in both of these places.

Like, Angband shows up here, and we know that Angband is in the middle earth of the Lord of the Rings.

Yeah.

So that probably rules out Legolas.

But if so, who was the coat for? After all, there were no other elven kings, right? I mean, there was Gil-galad, but he was born in the First Age in Beleriand, and he didn't have any children.

And then it seems like we're out of Elvish Royals, unless you read the Unfinished Tales.

In the chapter about Galadriel and Celeborn, there is a subsection titled Amroth and Nimrodel.

... at least it was covering material that I had more familiarity with.

It took a while for me to go back and do the Book of Lost Tales and The Lays of Beleriand because there's definitely a deterrent aspect.

Christopher explains it's because the way his father wrote these stories was, quote, "intrinsically difficult," and one of his jobs in writing The History of Middle-earth was to disentangle it.

Mm.

... you know, uh, I just did what I could, basically.

Sometimes he's left his father's writings, sometimes he's changed it.

For example, to, to make it consistently, he's changed Elfin with an F to Elven with a V. Beleriand, it replaces the earlier name Brasiliand, and things like that.

Uh, but sometimes he's kept both, like Thingol is known as Tinwelint in the Tale of Tinúviel, as we'll see.

Of course, he doesn't have all the connective tissue with Aragorn and the background and everything.

But he begins writing Lord of the Rings before he knows the resolution of Morgoth's attempt to sweep over Beleriand.

So Morgoth has begun his advance and

his...

A region of the Westlands.

Um, uh, Lindon was the name of Ossiriand, a region west of the Blue Mountains in eastern Beleriand.

After the Deluge of Beleriand and the War of Wrath, Lindon became the westernmost land of the continent of Middle Earth.

Um, oh, I'm sorry.

I'm, I'm thinking, I have, I have it wrong.

And I think he wants them to know like he...

When he meets Arundir, he talks about him knowing Beleriand and then he's talking about poetry with Elrond.

He's bringing up their shared history and it's that thing where he hasn't reconciled these two sides of himself.

And I think as season two goes on to its culmination of his story, we see him getting even closer back to that side of him.

Yeah.

Side note, I'm redrawing a map of Beleriand-

Oh, really?

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