I've been treating them as a group of elves who broke off from the great migrations and settled down near the Savage Baronies, before being driven out by a Hulean invasion and settling later in Glantri. That kind of makes sense of their culture.
Have I missed anything on them?
Is there yet a concensus on where the Belcadiz elves came from?
No, and probally there will never be...
Two very well conceived theories (by Chtulhudrew and DM) are described here.
I personally go with DM's theory (which you can find at the linked topic, above), which places the Belcadiz for some time in the Thanegioth islands. ;)
I've been treating them as a group of elves who broke off from the great migrations and settled down near the Savage Baronies, before being driven out by a Hulean invasion and settling later in Glantri. That kind of makes sense of their culture.
The main difficulty of the whole Belcadiz thing lies in explaining their stop in Glantri (until BC 1700) and the obvious link of the Belcadiz culture with the Ispan culture which migrates in AC 900 from the Thyatian Empire to the Savage Coast (a link that must have been estabilished before about AC 700, when the Belcadiz return to Glantri... ).
The main difficulty of the whole Belcadiz thing lies in explaining their stop in Glantri (until BC 1700) and the obvious link of the Belcadiz culture with the Ispan culture which migrates in AC 900 from the Thyatian Empire to the Savage Coast (a link that must have been estabilished before about AC 700, when the Belcadiz return to Glantri... ).
Actually, I'm fairly confident that the Belcadiz weren't anywhere near Glantri in BC 1700. Atziann's tribe may have been, but any claims of "the Belcadiz were in Glantri two millenia before the Flaems" is half wishful thinking, half fabricated propaganda on Carlotina's part, encouraged by a few fragmentary archaeological remains left behind by the proto-Schattenalf. ;)
(The thought of 'Atziann was a Belcadiz-type in mortal life' brings to it interesting associations of Cortez and Pizarro, though...)
Atziann was a Belcadiz elf.
The Schattenalfen ancestors were Belcadiz elves.
What If?...
Weren't one of the groups of elves to settle in the Highlands originally from Blackmoor, not Evergrun? What if these were the Belcadiz elves, with a culture that had been influenced by Blackmoor.
They settled in the Highlands. The Bad Things happened. One group went underground, from which the Schattenalfen and other underground travelers were born. Another group... "went between."
They were lost, wandering, for two centuries in the Spirit World. Two centuries in the Spirit World that, because of the warps of time and space in that realm, ended up being more than two millennia in the Known World. When they finally wandered back out of the Spirit World, on the Isle of Dawn, it was around 700 AC. There, they meet the newly arrived refugees from the Kerendan colonies in Ylaruam. It was thus the case that the elves gave the proto-Ispans their culture, not through cultural re-integration, as I had originally written (which was a kludged-together mess, anyway).
This not only preserves the timeline, it explains why, in early 700s, the Belcadiz arrive in the Highlands claiming the lands as their own...