# Was Beleriand inspired by Beringia?



## High King of the Noldor (Dec 12, 2021)

I was thinking about the Silmarillion today (as I often do), and my mind wandered to the Helcaraxe. I was also thinking of my museum visit yesterday, in particular the Native American history hall that discussed the arrival of humans to the Americas. Thousands of years ago there was a land bridge between Russia and Alaska called Beringia, which was a large flat plain (frozen at times) that allowed travel between the two landmasses.



My thought is, are the Helcaraxe and Beleriand based on the old landmass of Beringia? It was a frozen land in the far north that allowed travel between the old world into the new world (Much like the Helcaraxe), and at the same time was an old, primeval land lost to the shifting times (Much like Beleriand). Tolkien was known to use archaeological marvels to influence his world, the floating houses of Switzerland directly inspiring Laketown for instance.


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## Olorgando (Dec 13, 2021)

High King of the Noldor said:


> Tolkien was known to use archaeological marvels to influence his world, the floating houses of Switzerland directly inspiring Laketown for instance.


Not floating, at least not the one(s) that I know of.
Lake Constance is bordered by Germany on its northern shore, and Switzerland on its southern shore (Austria has a tiny bit of shoreline on the eastern shore). As with Lake-town, the prehistoric villages were built on stilts made of tree trunks - kind of stone age (or later) precursors of Venice. At least during one of the three vacations my wife and I spent on the German shores of Lake Constance (1982, 1989, 1990) we visited one of the sites mentioned in this Wikipedia article:









Pfahlbaumuseum Unteruhldingen - Wikipedia







en.wikipedia.org


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## m4r35n357 (Dec 13, 2021)

High King of the Noldor said:


> My thought is, are the Helcaraxe and Beleriand based on the old landmass of Beringia? It was a frozen land in the far north that allowed travel between the old world into the new world (Much like the Helcaraxe), and at the same time was an old, primeval land lost to the shifting times (Much like Beleriand). Tolkien was known to use archaeological marvels to influence his world, the floating houses of Switzerland directly inspiring Laketown for instance.


Santa lives in Angband!


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## Olorgando (Dec 13, 2021)

High King of the Noldor said:


> Thousands of years ago there was a land bridge between Russia and Alaska called Beringia, which was a large flat plain (frozen at times) that allowed travel between the two landmasses.


I don't recall where I read this, but there is at least one objection to this fixation on the Americas being populated by gatherer-hunters over land.
During the cold phase of the last Ice Age, not only was Beringia dry, but for example the now British Isles weren't islands. What is now called the Dogger Bank in the North Sea was dry land (called Doggerland), etc. The point is, a lot of the shallower parts of what we now call the continental shelves of all continents were dry land. Now at all times movement by ships or boats (where possible) has beaten land transport by orders of magnitude. And the settlements of - some may have called them paleo-Inuits - would now be submerged on the current continental shelves - and too likely to decompose, mostly being made of organic materials. It might also hypothetically explain the rapid settlement of North and South America after the first archaeologically found and dated artifacts (this would seem to be the so-called Clovis Culture) - though then again the rate of progress from Alaska to Tierra del Fuego on the southernmost tip of South America would have been a leisurely stroll, not to say snail's pace for gatherer-hunters.


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