Middle-earth Mysteries - The Sea of Helcar

[@vartanpapazian8342]

This is one of those situations where Tolkien could have woken up one day and decided “Oh yeah I’m not a professional cartographer, the East is probably 5000 miles longer than I listed.” Much like his time scale.

[@Ishkur23]

Much the same way Columbus declared "the Earth is round, like an orange".... and then after discovering the West Indies, he declared "the Earth is round, more like a basketball".

[@Qbliviens]

3:00 but are the elves said to have walked around the sea of Rhûn? It already existing doesn't necessarily disprove it being a part of Helcar. Kind of like the adriatic sea is part of the mediteranean, or the baltic sea is an extention of the north sea etc. It could just be a gulf of the sea of helcar.

[@HansWurst1569]

Good point!!

[@superslayerguy]

“Not now Honey Darth Gandalf just dropped a video on the Sea of Helcar”

[@emankcin1701]

Reform the line. Reform the line! The day may come when we cut ties of weirdness and succumb to the inexclicaple need for human contact, but it is not this day!

[@rogueascendant6611]

One can imagined that the Sea of Helcar drying up is like the Aral Sea in today's modern time. Once a large inland sea near the center of Eurasian continent. Now a shadow of its former self. Almost dried up due of Soviet Union in 1960s irrigation plan to divert the waters over cotton farming. The Sea of Helcar might not be totally gone. Perhaps a small portion of it exist in easternmost. So the bay of Cuiviénen could still be around. The view from the bay doesn't look like a long blue horizon though since the remains of Helcar would be a small lake.

[@Uulfinn]

I still think the seas Nurnen and Rhun are the modern remnants of Helcar. Rhun just means east in Sindarin, so the elves were probably just calling Helcar the eastern sea. The mountains of shadow could have been the western coast of Helcar. Maybe the creation of Mount Doom caused Helcar to begin drying up, causing it to become Nurnen and Rhun and causing Mordor to appear. It would also mean Mordor was created by Melkor and not by the Valar.

[@stegura83]

1:16 Dark Lands is basically Madasgascar on steroids!!

[@istari0]

My thought has always been that it was a casualty of the War of Wrath. We know that affected Middle-Earth beyond the sinking of Beleriand although the idea that it took a long time to completely drain away after that war makes sense to me. Another example of a sea drying up would be the Mediterranean. Long ago, it did mostly dry up.

[@theleakyprophet]

Simple. The raising of Mount Doom was associated with a tremendous amount of tectonic uplift, raising the seabed of Helcar. This would change the geography and weather significantly. Cuivienen could still be present but utterly unrecognizable from desertification or covered in jungle, or ripped to shreds by uplift.

[@spearofhope2]

I love the idea of the mountains surrounding Mordor as having been underwater, their peaks forming an arc of islands off the coast of the sea of Helcar

[@SirBolsón]

One thing to mention is how the Ice Age greatly influenced Tolkien's geographical work for Middle-Earth Earth, being a prehistoric national epic for England & (to a lesser extent) a Pan-European epic. Just as how Middle-Earth (especially the Westlands & Rohan) are supposed to be Ice Age Europe, with "Doggerland" landmass covering all of Britain, Ireland, & Western Europe at the time, the sea of Helcar is eerily quite similar to the glacial "Caspian Lake." This was an enlarged version of the modern-day "Caspian Sea" which had once covered large portions of Central Asia, Iran, the Eastern Caucasus & Russia until it gradually dissipated when the Ice Age glacial maximum stopped and led to a rise in global temperatures.

[@Crafty_Spirit]

Compelling, I knew of Doggerland but not the expanded Caspian

[@SirBolsón]

​@@Crafty_Spirit Yea, it's often overlooked as usually Ice Age Europe is focused on the west and centre rather than the east. It's probably because that part of Europe and Asia is already cold today and so it would've been similar to greenland with not much life inhabiting such a glacial region.

[@popularmisconception1]

A tectonic explanation could be that the tectonic plate that formed the middle part of the Palisor between Seas of Ringil and Helcar was moving to the north, opening up the Sea of Ringil and connecting it to the East sea and Belegaer forming Inner Seas while separating from the southern Dark land. Meanwhile in the north the opposite was happening: the Sea of Helcar was gradually being squashed by the slowly pushing land, new mountains have been raised (Mordor, Misty mountains) and the old ones bent (Blue -> White mountains). As a part of this process the floor of the Sea of Helcar was raised to the level of surrounding land or even higher to a plateau in some places (Nurn, maybe Gorgoroth). So the Sea of Helcar has fragmented into several smaller bays/lakes/seas which gradually dried out (creating mostly deserts, including Khand, southern Rhovanion and southern Rhun), or drained into lower elevation levels (draining through straits of the words) into Inner Seas and Bay of Belfalas. This process was probably already taking place by the time of Awakening of the Elves at the Cuivienen, eastern part of Helcar (them dwelling at what was later called the Sea of Rhun and having to cross Misty mountains), and was almost finished by the time of the Awakening of the Men in Hildorien, east of Cuivienen. It's just that due to magical fantasy reasons the tectonic processes work on a historical timescale in Arda.

[@jedsithor]

You know, I think it goes underappreciated how much background information we have about Middle Earth outside of the three books. The fact that there are letters describing Tolkien's ideas, how they changed, bits of writing that show early ideas and later ideas....that kind of stuff is rare. Some fantasy authors will publish histories of their world and you may get some short stories or comments in interviews, letters etc that pad out the world but to get insights into how an author created those worlds and stories, the evolution of ideas from initial thought to published novel (Sauron being a great example)...it's like gold dust.

[@untitled568]

I love your geography related videos

[@hugmynutus]

The elves awaking near the shores of the sea is my head canon. As if the sea drained, that location would be so different, it may as well not exist anymore.

[@GustavoTook]

Muito obrigado pela dublagem em português, isso foi incrível !

[@TheMarcHicks]

I don't consider Melkor creating Mordor and Morder being submerged beneath the Sea of Helcar to be mutually exclusive. He might have created Mordor back before the Lamps were raised, and then subsequently submerged under the newly created sea, by the very tumults created by the Lamps being cast down by him later on (which would be kind of ironic, in a way). Alternatively, claims he "created" Mordor might refer to them being created by his casting down of the Lamps......that the the land was so rent and torn by the Lamp collapsing, that it created a vast, volcanic landscape that was subsequently submerged beneath the surface of the newly created Sea of Helcar.

[@astormofwrenches5555]

Karen Wynn Fonstad was a treasure.

[@TheMarcHicks]

She really was. Looking at her maps made it so much easier for me to picture the events of the Quenta Silmarillion.

[@mikeynth7919]

I bought her book about 1982. That she used Tolkien's descriptions to speculate on the geography was wonderful and made Middle-Earth make sense. Of course, everything outside of northwest Middle-Earth is speculative just because Tolkien was as vague about those lands as an ancient Roman geographer was about any lands east of Persia.

[@IZokoraI]

I always assumed that the mountains around mordor existed the whole time and helacar would be behind them. Then, maybe at the time when Morgoth was thrown out of Utumno, the rivers that fed it ceased and it slowly began to vanish.

[@wlam205]

Well thats some timing needed a video for lunch and like a wizard this arrives 😉 thanks for all you do brother its appreciated in case you hadnt heard it in a while lol i know the research time isnt negligible

[@lordtelion]

Well to me it suggests there is either a great salt flat or a dessert east of ruhn

[@cavetroll666]

Thanks for the content cheers

[@General12th]

Cheers, farewell, and remember!

[@ellesartelcontar2387]

Great video I’ve always been interested in the sea of helcar and what was around it

[@General12th]

Hi Darth! If Professor Tolkien had lived for another hundred years, I wonder how much time he would have spent expanding the world, versus altering the parts of the world he already wrote about. (Or rewriting Galadriel's arc for the hundredth time.)

[@k9ine999]

More middle earth mysterys

[@bristleconepine4120]

I, too, love your geography videos! I've been wondering how big are the Orocarni, and how much smaller are the Blue Mountains than they used to be?

[@saladinbob]

There's no way those two seas could possibly co-exist, the Sea of Rhun is in the same area as the North East of the Sea of Helcar, unless either Helcar's position was changed or Rhun's is wrong. I think it's likely that Tolkien simply changed the geography of that area of Middle Earth and forgot about it.

[@uriustosh]

I never learn a thing from your videos but they arent made for me necessarily. The point is even though I know all of this already, I still enjoy watching these videos. That's a testament to the quality.

[@__Sauron_]

I didn’t know that Morgoth created Mt Doom. Thats cool

[@ledanoir1239]

No no trust me It was some old guy with a key sword

[@Crafty_Spirit]

Evil unabated... hot

[@TheMarcHicks]

@@ledanoir1239 Oh please don't even mention that awful series in passing.

[@TheMarcHicks]

Yet I wonder if it was deliberately created by him, back when he was battling the other Valar, or was its creation merely the by-product of him casting down the Lamp that created the Sea of Helcar?

[@ciaranirvine]

If Mordor was roughly in the region of the Balkans, then the Sea of Rhun may have been a large lake in what is now around the Polish plain that has since dried out, and Helcar could be the proto-Black Sea before the (still hypothetical) deluge event around 7500 years ago. Or the proto-Black was actually Nurnen and Helcar was the Caspian. Tolkien's distances are often a bit wonky so I wouldn't put much on the notion that Rhun was only 400 miles from Cuivienen. Of course the actual answer is probably that Helcar was an antique notion that the good professor subsequently forgot all about/abandoned as the world evolved, but its ghost lingered on in early writings that simply never got revised

[@romanmoravcik7048]

I have a idea for a video, although you explained why Eriador remained depopulated i always had the question why was also most of Rohan and Gondor depopulated? Like Gondor in the end of the Third Age only had 3 cityes. Minas Tirith, Pelargir and Dol Amroth and Minas Tirith only held half the population it could, and most of the Western country side mas mostly underpopulated. And Rohan didnt really expand its population since its founding either.

[@romandacil3984]

Tolkien was forever tinkering with his creation and probal kept changing his mind right up until the end. I would go with that the Sea of Helcar disappeared either in the War of Wrath or in the warping of Middle-Earth following the Downfall of Numenor. I always liked the Peter Fenlon MAp of Middle-earth (MERP) though it would not be canon for Tolkien.

[@m78088]

Idea for video, does Gandalf had "house" somewhere in middle earth?

[@superslayerguy]

Definitely 100% No, Gandalf was always on the move, he was the only wizard that didn’t have a home base. However he did love The Shire with all his heart and tried to visit it whenever he could so maybe that could be considered his home :) but would be good to see Darth Gandalf explain it also :)

[@m78088]

@superslayerguy he need to have some sort of house, where he keep some valubele items, probaby in Rivendel

[@superslayerguy]

@@m78088 yeah I mean Elrond may have had a chest for him or something to store stuff but I personally wouldn’t consider that a “home Base” like Orthanc was to Saruman. That’s what’s great about Tolkien’s work though is there’s lots of room for imagination and for the reader to fill in the blanks :)

[@General12th]

Almost certainly not. He was known as the Gray Pilgrim, a wanderer, for a reason.

[@istari0]

@@m78088 Why? There's nothing in Tolkien's writings to indicate that Gandalf ever really kept possessions beyond what he could readily carry with him.

[@SirBolsón]

This links to your video on how China was supposed to be a part of Middle-Earth as part of Tolkien's vision for the Far-East. This where is the 'wereworms' Bilbo mentioned in The Hobbit might have lived nearby.

[@Crafty_Spirit]

They were watcchers in the waters of Helcar

[@AnthonyConsalvo]

This would make sense with an animal like the wereworms existing and thriving here: one's headcanon could include the idea that the saline desert left there was inhabited only by animals which could endure such a rapid geological shift. Maybe Helcar disappears and reappears with enough regularity over the ages that the wereworms and fellow animals in this ecology have evolved to live in both inland sea and saline desert.

[@heeho-elem]

Quick somewhat unrelated question: the icy wastes the Noldor crossed going from Valinor to Middle Earth are called the Helcaraxé, if I'm not mistaken. That's hella similar to Helcar. I know the places themselves are in no way, shape or form related, but what about their names? Any clues as to what their etymologies are?

[@Crafty_Spirit]

Helcaraxe means grinding ice and I guess Helcar refers to ice then

[@picklerick.n.666]

Merry Christmas 🎄🎄🎄😇😇😇 God bless you and your work sir 😇🙏💙

[@ClareBearBunny]

I'd love to see you talk about Tolkien's languages.

[@Googleguy863]

I've got a question I've been sitting with for a while, as there isn't much information about it: What is the lifecycle of an orc, how long do they live and how fast do they age?

[@nathaniellong4281]

Yeah, but where Helcar likely disappeared in some disaster, divine or natural, we humans destroyed the Aral Sea.

[@dlxmarks]

I suppose Tolkien wasn't in the habit of dropping by Oxford's School of Geology to run some of these ideas past its faculty. They could have given him some good pointers. 😄

[@istari0]

Much of Middle-Earth was sculpted by the Valar so the usual laws of geology don't necessarily apply.

[@dlxmarks]

@@istari0 There were the geographical features created by the Valar, the ones destroyed by the Valar's conflicts, and then there were the things that happened without their direct involvement. I was referring to that last category.

[@istari0]

@@dlxmarks Given the heavy involvement of the Valar, I'm dubious that any of the significant geological features of Middle-Earth were created by natural forces.

[@arhexirthesnake]

Maybe it exists like the Aral sea exists. Still, but barely.

[@daniels7907]

We don't even know what happened to the Blue Wizards who went into the East, nor do we know much about the East in general (e.g. nations, cities, whether Easterlings sail the ocean on their side of Middle-earth, etc.). Helcar very probably did shrink as can happen in real life (e.g. the Dead Sea). Tolkien uses a framing story that he's really translating ancient tales such as found in the Red Book of Westmarch. In that regard, he is presenting himself as not being an omniscient narrator. There are things he simply doesn't know because he doesn't have sources to draw upon.

[@sagetmaster4]

Ooooo. Real life sea of Helcar is super sad

[@shawncarter5619]

isn't it a cognate of the Mediterranean Sea?

[@windsaw151]

I am still siding with Karen Wynn Fonstad on where the Sea of Helcar was. Many channels claim that this is an error because Mordor was mentioned in the History of Middle Earth later on. But no matter how you approach that subject, you will always run into contradictions, especially when it comes to distances. I still believe that her solution is the one with the least friction. And really, I believe Tolkien never gave the Sea of Helcar a thought when he mentioned Mordor in the First Age. Or in general. This is more of a modern fanboy problem.

[@Crafty_Spirit]

Fanboy problem 😂

[@windsaw151]

@@Crafty_Spirit Not on the same level as the Balrog wings, but still...

[@tominiowa2513]

@@windsaw151 Or Balrog furry boots.

[@gnarlynarly1350]

Huh there is like no lakes in the whole of arda

[@Ishkur23]

Wasn't the sea of Helcar created by Melkor toppling one of the lamps? So it was not a natural formation (as natural as one can insist given that all formations were ultimately created by the Valar). Natural formations generally do not last. At least, not as long as geological formations.

[@apstrike]

Valar warming.

[@Byenie0912]

i'mn guessing Valinor sent a Valar in a covert mission to massacre the inhabitants around the Sea of Helcar because there were too many cross breeding taking place between the Avari elves and the Early Humans. The sea evaporating and turning into a desert was the aftermath Too many half elves ruin the music of the ainur Mandos won't be able to tell apart who to send back to Iluvatar and who to remain in Arda for reincarnation

[@alanywalany6460]

The Valar are not allowed to hurt the Children of Illuvatar

[@paulemge9156]

Sounds plausible

[@panikwe]

Sea of Rhun must be part or remnant of the sea of Helcar. It was part of the sea like is Adriatic part of Mediterranean sea and it is remnant like is Hudson bay remnants of lake Agassiz.

[@manuelgarcia-ve5vm]

tolkien maps look silly ... anyway, its a fantasy world so i do know everything goes, ultimately ...

[@xyreniaofcthrayn1195]

Or the sea of helcar went underground about the same time as the isle of numenor was rent under the waves and eru decided that valinor was no longer a part of the physical realm or or in the same event that rendered the plane scape of arda to become spherical the sea of helcar was also cast into the wraith scape due to being in conflict with the new shape of arda.

[@QuentaAccords]

In Theory: The Sea of Helcar & Sea of Ringil both dried out, yet still exist in our world today. Helcar meaning Ice-Cold and the Grinding Ice of Helcaraxe (Ice-Cold-Spikes in Quenya) are subtle yet major indicators pointing towards the Arctic Ocean. When the Arctic Ocean was less cold in the Years of the Trees & 1st Age. Melkor melting the Ice-Caps supporting the Lamps are further indicators of Ice. Lastly, Ringil in Quenya is Cold-Chill. Which two Seas can you think of are regarded as "cold?" The Arctic (Helcar) and Antarctic Oceans (Ringil).

[@Crafty_Spirit]

So maybe the'y were rather glaciers than seas?

[@oldworldpatriot8920]

The professor explained the inconsistencies of his maps decades ago,quote; “Man I don’t know,I’m just making this shit up as I go,gimme a fcking break!”

[@foglet1]

Hey Darth Gandalf, I was wondering if you had heard of ArdaCraft; they are a group dedicated to recreating Middle-earth as faithfully as possible to the lore in Minecraft, and some of their builds might be useful as backgrounds, as you use when you illustrate your points. There is only so much Tolkien Art on the internet, so the project might give you more material, especially for less depicted locations such as the West-Marches or the Eastemnet. Just something that might be worth considering

[@General12th]

That's nifty! What's the map scale?

[@foglet1]

@General12th 58:1, but the mountains are scaled slightly higher, as well as the buildings of course

[@foglet1]

1:58 I mean lol

[@glorfindel4625]

I’ve seen many videos on Ardacraft, and it would be cool to see pictures of some of the regions built on Ardacraft.

[@brucemooney1277]

Im sorry, but Tolkien has a massive flaw in his worldbuilding, and it’s geography. The idea that Arda was first flat, then round, that things appeared then disapeared, that there was 1001 cataclysms, a dozens contradicting maps… It’s utter rubbish. As much as I admire Tolkien work on a philological level, as much as I love his chacters, his way of writing and getting us immersed in his novels… I despise his concept of how the world came to form and evolve lol Make the story stick to the map, not the map stick to the story

[@centralscrutinizer6108]

What you said at the very end is the exact analog I thought of in my head while watching the video. Maybe like the Russians with the Aral Sea, maybe Morgoth and Saurons industrial machine decimated Helcar to the point of just drying up so just massive ecological destruction all at the Gods hands.