Middle-Earth November 19, 2007
Posted by Adam Parrish in : Inspired by my assignment , trackbackGrowing up, I was a big fan of the works of J.R.R. Tolkien (I still am, actually)—I was also a geography nerd, so it’s not hard to imagine that Karen Wynn Fonstad’s Atlas of Middle-Earth was among my favorite books. Tolkien, of course, was an avid imaginary cartographer, and drew detailed maps of his own fictional world. Fonstad, a professional cartographer, compiled and redrew these maps for her Atlas, adding new maps that depicted, in detail, the political and physical geography of Middle-Earth. The Atlas serves primarily as an exegesis of Tolkien’s works: it contains world maps, maps of battle theatres, and maps of regions and cities that Tolkien described but never drew.
But The Atlas of Middle-Earth is also a kind of apologetics: Fonstad spends a great deal of the book trying to reconcile the way that physical geography works in Middle-Earth with the way that physical geography works in real life. (For example, Middle-Earth was, for part of its history at least, flat.) She must reconcile what Tolkien said with what he must have meant, in order to preserve the illusion in his work of internal and external integrity. She must be faithful at once to the principles of cartography and geography, to Tolkien’s original maps, and to Tolkien’s text.
In a way, then, Fonstad’s elucidation of the geography of Middle-Earth is an inversion of the varieties of mapping we’ve discussed in class. She isn’t creating an abstraction of a complex data set. Instead, she’s working backwards from an abstraction—Tolkien’s descriptions of Middle-Earth, both as maps and description—and trying to “fill in the details,” in order to make the abstraction compatible with a more conventional understanding of geography and cartography. Her atlas actually contains more information than the data it’s based on. These maps don’t filter; they elaborate.
I see this practice as falling somewhere between literary analysis and fan fic, a kind of “critical fiction.” It’s both deeply technical and deeply creative—no wonder I loved it as a kid.
Resources
Some maps from The Atlas of Middle-Earth, including Arda before and after the breaking of the world (when Tolkien’s world became round instead of flat)
Geo-referencing Middle-Earth: Notes on how to map Middle-Earth locations to real-world coordinatesWhere on Earth Was Middle-Earth? (from Strange Maps)
Karen Wynn Fonstad on her process (you might need to be on-campus or using the NYU proxy to view this)
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