Helcaraxë

The Grinding Ice

In the uttermost north the coasts of Aman and Middle-earth bent toward each other until only a narrow strait divided them, and that strait was frozen. It was not level ice but a shifting mass of floes and ridges, hills of ice that ground and broke against one another with the movement of the sea beneath, so that the whole region roared and groaned, and mists and cold lay on it that nothing living could long endure. This was the Helcaraxë, formed when the shape of the world was broken in the wars of the Valar against Melkor. Because the Pelóri could not be climbed and the sea could not be crossed without ships, it was the one way from the Blessed Realm to the outer world on foot, and it was the way the desperate took.

Melkor took it first. When the Valar were bound and imprisoned him at the end of the War of the Powers they did not need to cross it, for the Valar do not travel as the Children do; but after the Darkening, laden with the Silmarils and pursued by the hunt of Oromë and Tulkas, Melkor and Ungoliant fled north through Araman and over the Grinding Ice into the north of Middle-earth, where they came to Lammoth and quarrelled over the plunder.

The crossing of the Noldor

When Fëanor sailed from Araman with the ships and burned them at Losgar, the greater part of the Noldor, the host of Fingolfin, was left on the northern shore of Aman without means to cross the sea. They would not go back to Valinor to beg the pardon they had refused, and Fingolfin, whose pride would not let Fëanor's treachery stand, led them onto the ice. The march was long and its cost was cruel: many died in the cold or fell through the floes into the sea, among them Elenwë, the wife of Turgon, whose loss he never forgot. Those who came through were hardened by it, and their bitterness against the sons of Fëanor lasted for the rest of the Age. With Fingolfin went Fingon, Turgon, Aredhel, Finrod and Galadriel, and with them came the Sindar of Aman who had chosen the Noldor's road. They reached the coast of Middle-earth at the moment of the first rising of the Moon, and marched into Hithlum as the Sun first rose, so that Morgoth's servants fled from the new light before them. Fingolfin's host, unlike Fëanor's, had suffered for its exile before ever it fought, and the Ice was remembered in the songs of Beleriand as the measure of the Noldor's endurance. The march took the last years of the Trees, and when Fingolfin's host came at length to the shores of Middle-earth it was smaller and harder than the one that had left Tirion; it entered Mithrim with trumpets blowing, and the sons of Fëanor, who held the northern shore of the lake, withdrew before it in shame to the southern.

After the exile

No one is recorded as crossing the Helcaraxë again. When Aman was taken out of the circles of the world at the Downfall of Númenor, the strait with it ceased to join two lands, and the Ice, if it remained, was only the ice of the northern sea.

The Helcaraxë lay in the far north between the northern end of Araman in Aman and the north-western coast of Middle-earth above Lammoth and the firth of Drengist. On the Middle-earth side the exiles came ashore near Lammoth and passed the Ered Lómin into Hithlum.