Tag: Tolkien

Simon Ayrinhac’s Studies of Tolkien’s Maps and Geography, Plus a Middle-earth Globe

Published on by Jonathan Crowe
A globe of Tolkien’s Middle-earth.
Columbus Globes

Simon Ayrinhac is a French physicist who studies the maps and geography of Tolkien’s Middle-earth. I stumbled across his page of his talks and articles via the Tolkien Conference I posted about earlier this month. (The page also includes a couple of bibliographies that I will have to steal from in order to update my own reading list.) In French. Lots for me to go through.

Amongst Simon’s articles is one exploring how Tolkien’s Middle-earth can be displayed as a globe, occasioned by the release, by Columbus Globes, of Middle-earth globes in various sizes and levels of detail (12, 26, 30, and 40 cm, all but the smallest illuminated; €25-€399). The problem, which Simon also notices, is that the known parts of Middle-earth take up too much of the globe: it’s actually only a small part of the whole, with the rest of the world only roughly sketched out. (Also, the legendarium of Middle-earth is such that it was only round after a specific catastrophic event, and a lot of the geography did not survive it.)

Forthcoming Tolkien Conference Explores Maps and Landscapes

Published on by Jonathan Crowe

The third Tolkien Conference Switzerland, to be held in Lucerne on 13 March 2027, will have as its topic Maps and Landscapes in Tolkien’s Middle-earth.

Tolkien’s maps are never merely geographical. While they guide the traveller through the carefully drawn landscapes of Middle-earth, from mountains and forests to ancient kingdoms, they also chart moral and spiritual dimensions—from the corrupted wastes of Mordor to the timeless grace of Lothlórien. In Tolkien’s world, place is never neutral. 

In this conference, we will explore how Tolkien’s landscapes and cartographic imagination—from the vast plains of Rohan to the enclosed safety of the Shire—address deeper issues of belonging, loss and the meaning of home. How does the act of map-making reflect a longing for order, memory and possession? How should we interpret Tolkien’s geography in light of contemporary debates on ecology, mythology, and the human need to find safety in an unpredictable and perilous world?

Without reducing his world to mere allegory or escapism, the third Swiss Tolkien Conference will delve into the full imaginative depth of Tolkien’s spatial vision and examine what his Middle-earth landscapes might reveal about our own sense of belonging and the timeless question of what it means to lose it.

This conference couldn’t be more relevant to my interests, enough that I may have to work out whether I can manage to attend it myself. (One talk to be presented, Jost Schmid-Lanter’s “Fantasy Maps in the Context of Medieval and Early Modern Cartography,” even cites a couple of my articles. The other talks look just as compelling.)

Karen Wynn Fonstad’s Belated NYT Obituary

Published on by Jonathan Crowe

Karen Wynn Fonstad, the cartographer of fantasy worlds best known for her Atlas of Middle-earth, died in March 2005 aged 59. Nearly twenty years later, she gets a comprehensive obituary in the New York Times, replete with lots of examples of her mapmaking, as part of its Overlooked series, which gives belated obituaries to “remarkable people whose deaths […] went unreported in The Times.” Paywalled; workarounds via the usual suspects.

Middle-earth in Braille

Published on by Jonathan Crowe

A photograph of a braille/tactile map of Middle-earthAmong the tactile and braille maps sold by Adaptations, the store run by San Francisco-based LightHouse for the Blind and Visually Impaired, is this bundle of braille/tactile maps of Middle-earth. “The maps have raised lines, textures, and braille. There are 7 maps of Middle Earth, each focusing on different features (regions, settlements, mountains, forests, rivers and bodies of water). There are also two detailed maps: the Shire and Mordor.”

Middle-earth in 3D

Published on by Jonathan Crowe

Screenshot of Middle-earth 3D map showing an oblique view of Gondor and the Bay of Belfalas.
Screenshot

Micah Vander Lugt’s Esri-powered 3D map of Middle-earth is a departure from the usual fantasy-style map in that it uses an elevation layer. It’s a fascinating perspective, and lots of fun to play with. Though not without quibbles: for example, the labels and 3D rendering don’t always agree with each other, and I’m having a hard time imagining either Minas Tirith or Caras Galadhon as 25-30 km across. [Maps Mania]

The Tolkien Estate’s New Website Includes Manuscript Maps

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The Tolkien Estate now has a website, which among other things includes J. R. R. Tolkien’s own paintings, illustrations—and maps. But the maps aren’t from the published editions of The Lord of the Rings and The Silmarillion: those were drawn by his son Christopher. These are Tolkien’s own maps, drawn during the writing process. We see rough sketches of Arda, originals of the Hobbit maps, and the maps of Middle-earth that grew and changed as he wrote The Lord of the Rings. [Kottke]

Celebrating Christopher Tolkien’s Cartographic Legacy

Published on by Jonathan Crowe

It turns out that I wasn’t finished talking about the maps drawn by Christopher Tolkien. My latest piece for Tor.com, “Celebrating Christopher Tolkien’s Cartographic Legacy,” went live at Tor.com this morning. It looks at the collaborative process between J. R. R. Tolkien and his son Christopher as father and son tried to make the narrative agree with the map, and vice versa; takes a deep dive into Christopher’s mapmaking technique; and tries to assess the impact of his maps on fantasy mapmaking.

Previously: Christopher Tolkien, 1924-2020.

Christopher Tolkien, 1924-2020

Published on by Jonathan Crowe

Christopher Tolkien, map from The Fellowship of the Ring (Unwin, 1954). The British Library.

Christopher Tolkien, the third son of J. R. R. Tolkien and the executor of his literary estate and editor of his posthumous works, died yesterday at the age of 95. But one of his legacies is likely to be overlooked: he drew the map of Middle-earth that appeared in the first edition of The Lord of the Rings. That map proved hugely influential. It helped set the norm for subsequent epic fantasy novels: they would come with maps, and those maps would look rather a lot like the one drawn by Christopher Tolkien.

Christopher Tolkien himself was self-deprecating about the execution of his map, and about the design choices he made. Regarding a new version of the map he drew for Unfinished Tales, he took pains to emphasize that

the exact preservation of the style and detail (other than nomenclature and lettering) of the map that I made in haste twenty-five years ago does not argue any belief in the excellence of its conception or execution. I have long regretted that my father never replaced it by one of his own making. However, as things turned out it became, for all its defects and oddities, “the Map,” and my father himself always used it as a basis afterwards (while frequently noticing its inadequacies).

However hastily it was drawn, it was pivotal all the same.

How to Navigate the Seas of a Flat Fantasy World

Published on by Jonathan Crowe

How does navigation work on a flat world? Admittedly this is not a question that comes up outside flat earth societies, at least not in the real world, but fantasy worlds aren’t always spherical. Tolkien’s Middle-earth, for example, started off as a flat world, but became round during a cataclysmic event. Before that, the Númenóreans (Aragorn’s ancestors, for those not totally up on their Tolkien lore) were held to be the greatest seafarers in the world: “mariners whose like shall never be again since the world was diminished,” as The Silmarillion puts it. The problem is, a flat earth has implications for navigation: many known methods simply wouldn’t work.

“Mithlond” by Jordy Lakiere

In a piece I wrote for Tor.com, “The Dúnedain and the Deep Blue Sea: On Númenórean Navigation,” I try to puzzle out how they could have navigated the oceans of a flat world. I come up with a solution or two, within the limitations of my math abilities. (I’m sure readers who have more math than I do will be able to come up with something better.) It assumes a certain familiarity with Tolkien’s works, and it draws rather heavily on John Edward Huth’s Lost Art of Finding Our Way, which I reviewed here, not at all coincidentally, last month.

‘The Perplexing River Systems of Middle-earth’

Published on by Jonathan Crowe

Having ruffled fannish feathers with a post critiquing Middle-earth’s mountains and another admitting that they don’t like fantasy maps, Alex Acks returns with a Tor.com post about the problems with Middle-earth’s river systems. Specifically, the Anduin, which breaks all kinds of hydrological rules: it cuts across mountain ranges (and parallels the Misty Mountains), it lacks tributaries along one side and it doesn’t seem to have much of a drainage basin. “Even if you grant the mountains as things created by the Valar doing their Valar-thing—which means my mental excuse for the Anduin cutting through mountain ranges is void—it still looks weird from a geological perspective.”

Another point Acks makes, about Tolkien’s influence on fantasy maps in general, that I should file for later:

Just as Tolkien’s novels have had a massive influence on epic fantasy as a genre, his map is the bad fantasy map that launched a thousand bad fantasy maps—many of which lack even his mythological fig leaf to explain the really eyebrow-raising geography. The things that make me cringe about the geography of Middle-earth are still echoing in the ways we imagine and construct fantasy worlds today.

Previously: ‘The Messed Up Mountains of Middle-earth’; Two Views on Fantasy Maps; The Territory Is Not the Map.

Simplified Middle-earth

Published on by Jonathan Crowe

While we’re on the subject of fantasy maps, here’s Camestros Felapton with a thing: “I thought I’d look at the most classic of fantasy maps again but from a different perspective. Part of the problem and the attraction of Tolkien’s original map is the additional detail and a sense of a bigger explorable world. What happens if we strip that away and while we are at it making the right-angle problem a bit worse?” What happens is my eyeballs bleed: that’s what happens. (The right-angle problem is probably a reference to Alex Acks’s critique.)

‘The Messed Up Mountains of Middle-earth’

Published on by Jonathan Crowe

Science fiction/fantasy novelist Alex Acks, a geologist by training, has some issues with Middle-earth’s mountain ranges. “Middle-earth’s got 99 problems, and mountains are basically 98 of them.” Basically it comes down to how Tolkien’s mountain ranges intersect at right angles—and mountains don’t do that.

And Mordor? Oh, I don’t even want to talk about Mordor.

Tectonic plates don’t tend to collide at neat right angles, let alone in some configuration as to create a nearly perfect box of mountains in the middle of a continent. […]

To be fair to J.R.R. Tolkien, while continental drift was a theory making headway in the world of geology from 1910 onwards, plate tectonics didn’t arrive on the scene until the mid-50s, and then it took a little while to become accepted science. (Though goodness, plate tectonics came down—I have it on good authority from geologists who were alive and in school at the time that it was like the holy light of understanding shining forth. Suddenly, so many things made sense.) Fantasy maps drawn after the 1960s don’t get even that overly generous pass.

And here I thought Tolkien’s mountains were better than most—but then I’m no geologist, and also than most may not be saying that much.

Fantasy Maps: Middle-earth vs. Westeros

Published on by Jonathan Crowe

In the latest instalment of Hannah Stahl’s series of posts on fantasy maps at the Library of Congress’s map blog (see previous entry), she takes as a starting point my argument that Tolkien’s map of Middle-earth is the progenitor map from which the modern fantasy map design is descended, and compares that map to maps of Westeros from George R. R. Martin’s Song of Ice and Fire series.

Previously: The Library of Congress Looks at Fantasy Maps; Review: The Lands of Ice and Fire.

Tolkien’s Annotated Map On Display for One Day Only

Published on by Jonathan Crowe

Tolkien’s annotated map of Middle-earth, recently purchased by Oxford’s Bodleian Libraries, is being put on display—but only for one day. Mark your calendars: Thursday, 23 June 2016, from 9:30 AM to 5:00 PM, Weston Library. [Tony Campbell]

(The only other instance of a single-day map exhibition I can think of was when the Austrian National Library put the infinitely more delicate and valuable Tabula Peutingeriana on display for a single day in 2007.)

Previously: Bodleian Library Acquires Annotated Tolkien Map; Map of Middle-earth, Annotated by Tolkien Himself, Discovered.