Tolkien's maps

• 1. Introduction

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  Tolkien's maps of Middle-earth began not as illustration but as infrastructure. Before a single chapter of The Lord of the Rings was written in its final form, Tolkien was bent over squared paper, sketching mountain ranges and rivers, assigning each two-centimetre square to represent a hundred miles. The maps were his engine, not his decoration.

  What did it mean that a novelist planned geography before plot? How did those hand-drawn lines on worn, yellowed paper become something later readers called iconic? And what happens when geologists take Tolkien's imaginary terrain seriously, measuring it against plate tectonics and drainage basins? The answers reach from a schoolboy's notebook margin to the frontispiece of a 19th-century romance, and they say something unexpected about why maps make fictional worlds feel real.

• 2. Map Before Story

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  In a letter written in 1954 to the novelist Naomi Mitchison, Tolkien described his method plainly: he had started with a map and made the story fit, attending with meticulous care to distances. Working the other way, he warned, lands a writer in confusions and impossibilities.

  The map he used for The Lord of the Rings was not a tidy draft. It was drawn on squared paper, each square representing a hundred miles, and accumulated annotations in pencil and a range of different inks added across many years. The older marks had faded until almost illegible. The paper itself had grown soft, torn, and yellowed through intensive use, and a fold down the centre had to be mended with parcel tape.

  Tolkien's process went beyond geography. He developed names and languages before he arrived at a plot. He had already drawn on Old Norse for the Dwarves of Dale in The Hobbit. He used modern English for the Hobbits of the Shire. When he chose Old English for the riders of Rohan, he was effectively constructing a linguistic map of Middle-earth, with different peoples, languages, and regions arranged across the terrain as deliberately as any mountain range.

  The cartographer Karen Wynn Fonstad, author of The Atlas of Middle-earth, found herself caught in exactly the same logic. She could not proceed with the atlas until she had mastered distances, chronology, geology, and terrain. Tolkien's working method had not been idiosyncratic; it had been, as Fonstad discovered, the only way.

• 3. The Physical Maps

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  The Hobbit, published in 1937, contains two simple maps and around fifty place-names. The critic Tom Shippey regards them as largely decorative, working in the tradition of the old cartographic convention sometimes called "Here be tygers". The first is Thror's map, which in the fiction had been handed down to Thorin. It shows little beyond the Lonely Mountain drawn in outline with ridgelines and entrances, parts of two rivers, a spider and its web, English labels and arrows, and two texts written in runes.

  The second map shows Wilderland, stretching from Rivendell in the west to the Lonely Mountain and Smaug the dragon in the east. The Misty Mountains are drawn in three dimensions. Mirkwood is rendered as a mixture of closely packed tree symbols, spiders and their webs, hills, lakes, and villages. Place-names are overprinted in red. Both maps carry a heavy vertical line near the left-hand side, the one on the Wilderland map labelled "Edge of the Wild". That line, it turns out, marked the printed margin of school paper, which came with the instruction: "Do not write in this margin".

  The Lord of the Rings carries three maps and over six hundred place-names. There is a large drawing of the north-west part of Middle-earth, showing mountains as if seen in three dimensions and coasts with multiple waterlines. There is a more detailed drawing of a part of the Shire. And there is a contour map of parts of Rohan, Gondor, and Mordor, drawn by Christopher Tolkien from his father's detailed pencil, ink, and coloured-pencil design on graph paper, enlarged five times in length from the main map. The finished map reproduced the contours and features faithfully, but omitted the route, with dates, taken by Frodo and Sam on their way to destroy the One Ring in Mount Doom.

  The pressure of that final deadline was acute. Tolkien recorded that he had to devote many days, the last three virtually without food or sleep, to drawing, rescaling, and adjusting the large map. Christopher then worked for twenty-four hours straight, from six in the morning to six the following morning, to finish redrawing it just in time.

• 4. Aesthetic and Purpose

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  Alice Campbell, writing in the J. R. R. Tolkien Encyclopedia, describes the style of Tolkien's maps as a mixture of illustrative principles and cartographical practice. They have, as Tolkien himself called it, an "archaic air", but they are not authentically medieval in style. One notable difference is that Tolkien allows for blank spaces between features. That was an 18th-century innovation, signalling that the features actually drawn were reliable rather than guessed.

  Campbell sees in Tolkien's mapping style an echo of William Morris's Arts and Crafts movement: functional, but with an eye to grace and beauty. The maps occupy a position somewhere between illustration and cartography.

  Tolkien was explicit about wanting more than mere indexing. He wrote that there should be picturesque maps providing more than an index to what the text says. His maps therefore serve at least three purposes: helping him build a consistent plot, guiding the reader through complex stories, and offering through the picturesque an aesthetic experience that draws the reader into the imagined world.

  Shippey offers a precise account of how the last function works. Readers, he argues, do not analyse place-names etymologically as Tolkien did. They take names as labels, in a very close one-to-one relationship with whatever they label. Maps then become extraordinarily useful to fantasy because they weight the fictional world down with repeated implicit assurances that the labelled places exist, along with their nature and history. Shippey's verdict is that the names and maps of Middle-earth give it an air of solidity and extent, in space and time, that its successors in twentieth-century fantasy conspicuously lack.

• 5. Geomorphological Scrutiny

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  Robert C. Reynolds in 1974, and then William Sarjeant in 1992, used Tolkien's illustrations, maps, and text to attempt a reconstruction of Middle-earth's geology. Their work treated the fictional terrain with the same tools applied to real continents.

  The geologist Alex Acks, writing on Tor.com in 2017, identified the core difficulty: Tolkien's mountain ranges do not match the geomorphological processes that shape the Earth. Mountains form mainly next to subduction zones where oceanic crust slides under continental crust, or where continents collide and crumple. What mountains do not typically produce are right-angle junctions, such as those seen around Mordor and at both ends of the Misty Mountains. Acks also noted that isolated inland volcanoes like Mount Doom are possible but unlikely; most occur in roughly straight-line groups as crust moves over a mantle hotspot, and most are islands.

  Tolkien's rivers presented a separate problem. The Anduin runs more or less as a single large stream for hundreds of miles, parallel to the Misty Mountains rather than directly away from them. One of its few tributaries, the Entwash, branches into a river delta, a basically flat place where a river typically meets the sea; but the Anduin continues flowing past this point, downhill, which does not follow.

  Acks excused one apparent oddity: the Anduin cuts through a gap between the White Mountains of Gondor and the Ephel Duath of Mordor. That can happen when a river predates the mountains it appears to cross. The Colorado River cuts across the mountainous Basin and Range Province by exactly that mechanism.

  Hazel Gibson, writing for the European Geosciences Union, concurred with Acks that several mountain ranges make absolutely no sense. Real mountain chains can meet nearly at a right angle, but, in her words, you have to work really hard to find them. Mordor is her most egregious example: a square plain fenced by mountains at right angles to each other is, she writes, practically impossible.

  The Harvard Lampoon's 1969 parody, Bored of the Rings, took note of all this. Its double-page map by William S. Donnell depicted places including "The Square Valley Between the Mounts", "The Mulsanne Straight" as a straight-line mountain range, and "The Intermittent Mountains".

• 6. Before and After Tolkien

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  The frontispiece to William Morris's 1897 novel The Sundering Flood showed a map of a wholly invented world, depicting a city on a great river, a region called "The Wood Masterless", a Desert Waste, and towns with English names including "Westcheaping" and "Eastcheaping". That map is thought to have been the first fantasy map in the modern sense. Tolkien stated that he wished to imitate the style and content of Morris's romances and that he drew on elements from them.

  Other models Tolkien may have had in mind include the maps Jonathan Swift included in Gulliver's Travels in 1726, and Robert Louis Stevenson's map in his 1883 adventure story Treasure Island.

  After Tolkien, the inclusion of a map became a near-standard expectation for fantasy novels. Peter Jackson chose to use Tolkien's Middle-earth map in his Lord of the Rings film trilogy. George R. R. Martin used maps in all his A Song of Ice and Fire books, beginning with A Game of Thrones.

• 7. Derived and Disputed Maps

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  In 1969, Allen & Unwin commissioned the illustrator Pauline Baynes to paint a map of Middle-earth. Tolkien supplied her with copies of his draft maps for The Lord of the Rings and annotated her copy of Christopher's 1954 map for The Fellowship of the Ring. The publisher released the finished painting as a poster in 1970, decorated with a header and footer showing some of Tolkien's characters and vignettes of locations from the stories. Baynes was one of the few illustrators of whom Tolkien approved, and the poster map became iconic of Middle-earth.

  A later redrafting by HarperCollins for a new edition of The Lord of the Rings drew criticism from Campbell. She described the result as bland, modern, and professional illustration, an unintentional reversion to decorative but technically inaccurate medieval-style maps. In her view the redrafting was misguided because Tolkien had desired accuracy more than decoration. The hand lettering, which had suggested the illusion of Bilbo's own fair copies of older maps from a culture without printing presses or engraving, was lost in the process.

  Fan cartographers have also taken the terrain seriously. Fonstad's The Atlas of Middle-earth represents the most sustained published effort, and it required, as its author noted, mastering the same interlocking disciplines Tolkien himself had worked through before a single sentence of his stories was written.