An Account of a Lost Geography: Of Beleriand and Its Realms

While it appears on the surface as dry descriptive prose listing the kingdoms of the Noldor and Sindar during the Siege of Angband, “Of Beleriand and Its Realms” offers a complex geographical lesson, in text and on map, about a brief if centuries long span of cultural flowering and military containment. Indeed, reading through the lens of French historian Michel de Certeau’s notions of place and space expose the chapter’s attention to the cultural practices necessary to inhabit and maintain territories: atonement, alliance, construction of towers, concealment in strongholds, and constant vigilance upon multiple borders. Further, because Beleriand is overwhelmed at the end of the First Age, the account also serves as an elegiac repository of time, place, and peoples forever lost, a kind of suspension between the tragic past and the future cataclysmic events that follow.