The Atlas of Middle Earth

J.R.R.Tolkien succeeded both in creating fabulous new worlds and rendering them utterly believable. Reading his trilogy has become a rite of passage for many in several generations. An updated atlas of Middle -Earth provides a definitive guide through hundreds of maps and drawings. (In advance of the movie Lord of The Rings scheduled for release in December, we'll be writing and talking about the trilogy itself as well as other works the original books have inspired.)

The Atlas of Middle Earth author Karen Wynn Fonstad pages 210 publisher Houghton Mifflin rating 8 reviewer Jon Katz ISBN 0-618-12699-6 summary The Geography of Middle-Earth

If you really want to know what Middle-earth is based on, it's my wonder and delight in the earth as it is," Tolkien told an interviewer, "particularly the natural earth." He also wanted to provide a new, Brit-centric mythology for the world, so he took the literal earth and changed it just enough to make it "faerie."

With the cinematic trilogy of his books under production -- three separate films are scheduled for release over the next two years -- Middle Earth is going mainstream. These films will probably be nearly as big as Star Wars, if they're half as good, touching mythological and creative nerves that revolve around what we like to call science fiction in its varied forms.

As is often the case with culture The Lord Of the Rings, The Hobbit and The Silmarillion -- provided comfort, stimulation, and escape for a particular sub-set of the human species, especially young, enchanted brainiacs growing up apart from the mainstream and eager -- desperate, maybe -- for other worlds to explore.

If you want to enter Tolkien's world, the best way is to read The Lord of the Rings, The Hobbit, and the The Silmarillion. For hard-core Tolkien lovers who have already done that, I'd highly recommend -- there's plenty of time before the first movie in December -- The Atlas of Middle-Earth (Houghton Mifflin), by Karen Wynn Fonstad, a University of Wisconsin cartographer who has drafted unbelievably detailed maps of Middle Earth from the First Age through the Third, including thematic and other maps, guides, places and events (the mapping of the The Silarillion is astounding).

Tolkien created the details of Middle Earth for himself, for his own creativity and intellectual exercise. He was, Fonstad writes, envisioning his world much as our medieval cartographers viewed our own.

Fonstad's descriptions of the pain-staking process she used to create these hundreds of details maps are almost as interesting as the stories upon which they're based. The atlas is a composite of the physical surface with the imprint of the "Free Peoples." A number of basic map types are included -- the physical, including landforms, minerals, and climate; the political (spheres of influence); battles; migrations (closely tied with linguistics); the traveller's pathways and finally, situation maps -- towns and dwellings, all arranged roughly in sequence. Fonstad even includes detailed pathway tables -- the distance Frodo spent on his pony on dozens of trips, the length of marches, the treks of elves, the flights of refugees.

Fonstad concedes that an almost endless series of questions, assumptions and interpretations were necessary in creating these maps. But each line has been drawn with a reason behind it, she says. And she explains the reasoning.

Middle Earth was the creation of a world, and is deserving of its own geography. Fonstad's atlas is well and clearly written, even for the casual fan of Tolkien. And the hundreds of maps she created offers a new prism through which to look at these works. This is by no means a book for everybody, and even die-hard fans of the trilogy might ask why they need to know so much. The hard-core fanatic will know.

You can purchase this book at Fatbrain.

Comments

I have this book!

[cavemanf16]

I have had this book for at least five years now, and I have to agree with Katz on this one. It is really detailed (far more detailed than I could have imagined just reading Tolkien's books), and offers a lot of help when reading through Tolkien's books, especially the Silmarillion. I'm a die-hard Tolkien fan (just got The Hobbit millenium edition, and the Lord of the Rings is on the way!), so I'm very familiar with the history and imagery of Middle-Earth, but the Atlas reviewed here really does justice to the series. It might be interesting to note that Karen Wynn Fonstad has done lots of other fiction cartography work for other popular book series' out there (I think D&D and other related stuff), so she's pretty good at giving the fantastical flair to her work (at least I think so). Get this book and reread through the Silmarillion. It's a much better read with maps like this in hand (The Silmarillion maps do take up approximately 1/2 of the Atlas of Middle Earth - IIRC).

Re:I have this book!

[cube farmer]

I also own a copy of this book; it adds immeasurably to the pleasure of re-reading Tolkien's works. Fonstad has also written The Atlas of the Land , The Atlas of Pern , and atlases for both Forgotten Realms and Dragonlance.

I also have The Atlas of the Land, which details the world described in the Thomas Covenant books by Stephen R. Donaldson. This is an excellent and extremely well done reference.

Re:I have this book!

[DHartung]

I've got one as well -- the first edition, from about 20 years ago.

At first it just seemed like more supplementary material for the ravenous fan, but I came to appreciate that while Fonstad obviously simply began to merge her own geography skills with her love for Tolkien's world, it went far beyond that. Certainly by the time she began to prepare these maps she had taken a much more analytic and critical approach to the material.

Katz didn't mention it, but the original maps were done as her master's thesis in cartography! That tells you right off this isn't a casual work.

Fonstad begins by telling us that Tolkien himself was unhappy with the geography of his world. The original map was done by Christopher Tolkien from his father's notes and sketches around the time of the 2nd printing of the trilogy [sic], as I recall, and the trouble was that the map sketches dated from very early in Tolkien's own conception of the stories. Remember that Tolkien wrote the Silmarillion first, partly while inhabiting a trench in WWI (!), and the Hobbit came much later. He wasn't even sure they were part of the same universe, so to speak (without the experience of modern marketing of sf/fantasy universes, this was not a trivial question). The LoTR maps had to conform to the Hobbit map more than anything, but there was at least one major problem: scale.

Fonstad's careful textual analysis of the Hobbit and the Rings books showed that, for example, the Fellowship {Rings} made its way to Rivendell on foot at a speed roughly 50-100% faster than the Grey Company {Hobbit} on ponies. Tolkien, of course, hadn't made any such detailed effort to conform these accounts (nor does Fonstad suggest he should have). Instead this is just another example of how the Rings stories evolved organically over the course of Tolkien's lifetime.

Other important and useful things Fonstad does include developing workable hypotheses for the types of geologic history that could have produced Middle-Earth, and on a more detailed level, geographic descriptions that tell us how the types of areas that the characters traverse came to be. What are the Barrow-Downs, really? Why does the Anduin come to an escarpment and flow down a great falls at Rauros? What could have produced the arid region of Mordor so close to verdant Ithilien?

The answers to these questions are not always wholly satisfying, but they do help the careful reader get a sense of a more realistic world and underscore just how much information and observation Tolkien gave us. I've always thought that he's a terrifically visual writer (one reason the story should make a great screenplay). This brings out the colors in his story and makes them more vivid.

Get it at Amazon

[throx]

Go to Amazon - it's $16.80 there as opposed to $19.20 at Fatbrain.

Not just the maps...

[Gregoyle]

I have been in love with Tolkien's work since I was 11 or 12 years old, and the love hasn't ceased growing yet. Some comments:

Although the great maps Tolkien obviously created to detail the civilizations, migrations, and geography/geology of his world(s) have a huge impact on their shocking reality, I think there are many other factors that contribute as much or more. First of all is the languages. Look at the appendices of Return of the King if you want to know what I mean. These languages are in depth, realistic, and utterly amazing. Many of them closely parallel structure and syntax of North-Germanic languages (e.g. Norwegian, Danish, Old English). They parallel them enough that it isn't entirely inconceivable that the Common which is spoken in Middle Earth is in fact written as it sounds. It sounds just like English. Notice how Tolkien doesn't use very many words of Latin origin (which can often give a clinical feel to speech). This gives the books a hominess (sic?) and a feeling of old beauty.

Also, the mythology. My favorite Tolkien book of all is the Silmarillion because of the great mythology it presents for Middle Earth. Also look how closely it mirrors our own mythologies, particularly Norse, Greek, and Christian. The stories are so rich and so human (even though many of them take place before humans are invented :-)), we could almost accept them as our own natural mythos rather than one invented by a telented writer. Harry Harrison's "Warriors of the Way" trilogy has opened up some new intellectual doors for me regarding Asgardian myth (particularly the role of Loki), and I plan to re-read as much of Tolkien's work as I can to look into the topic further. This stuff never ceases to amaze me.

Details?

[JoshuaDFranklin]

Does anyone else wish there were some details about this? Number of maps? A ToC?

• A larger picture of the cover [Amazon].
  
  
• A Table of Contents [Barnes & Noble]
  
  
• Some Samples [Tolkien Online]
  

This is the kind of info that should be IN THE REVIEW.

Re:Other works...

[Ian Wolf]

Didn't you know that Sauron personifies rampant corporatism in 1930's England. And, the Nine represent the nine largest "Company Men" of the day.

I think Jon's starting to get to me.