Dor Bendor

Dor Bendor(S. "Landless Land;" La. Maatta Maa) comprises the unmelting ice that crowns the arctic pole of Arda's globe. Its expanse is vast and unexplored. Of all the Free Peoples, the Snow-elves alone are said to have trodden its pathless wastes. There, indeed, at the summit of the world stands their fabled ice-city of Helloth, though to mortal knowledge it is little more than a rumor and a legend.

In spite of the unfathomable mystery that shrouds it, Dor Bendor is, in reality, the youngest of all Arda's regions—younger even than Forodwaith itself; for that land was shaped while the world was still flat, but it was the Downfall of Númenor (more than three thousand years after the War of Wrath) that led to the creation of the Landless Land. In the drowning of Númenor, Eru Ilúvatar changed the very shape of the world, bending the seas so that Arda became globed amid the stars. This cataclysm transformed the uttermost climes of Ekkaia, the Encircling Sea, hardening the Helcaraxë, the Grinding Ice of the Ancient World, into an immovable mass. For much of the year, the southern boundary of Dor Bendor lies from two to fifty miles off the northern coasts of Forochel, affording a narrow channel for seaborne vessels; during winter, the Landless Land extends its icy fingers southward, forming a seamless bridge with the extremities of Forodwaith.

Frigid, barren and dry, Dor Bendor is a region of violent gales but little precipitation. In winter, the howling spirits of wind blow ice-crystals across the wastes as the sands of a great desert, raising mounds of ice and snow and sculpting them into fantastic shapes and designs. Storms born amid these tempests immediately wheel away south ward to unleash their fury upon Forodwaith and lands further south. Only in high summer, when opposing winds from the South are strong enough to contest the north wind's dominion, do storms linger here, exhuming their snow across the endless winterscape; but such events are as ephemeral as they are infrequent, and swiftly dissipate in the face of Dor Bendor's might.

Travel in this icy wasteland is dangerous in the extreme. The often changeless terrain, coupled with repeated blights of olfain, can easily rob a traveler of all sense of direction, leaving the hapless wanderer lost in an unending white nightmare. Fissures of cracked and split ice frequently interpose themselves in the line of travel. Some of these are but shallow ditches causing the wanderer to stumble; others are vast, deep crevasses wherein sleds, sled-dogs and an entire party can disappear without a trace. Many such deep ravines are the lairs of ice-drakes, creatures that revel in the cold and tread fearlessly upon the ice.