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Comment by jfaucett | Hacker News Reader

"It shows what Blackwell’s called “the exacting nature” of Tolkien’s creative vision: he corrects place names, provides extra ones, and gives Baynes a host of suggestions about the map’s various flora and fauna."

You've got to respect the man for his attention to detail. To the outsider it might seem as if it were near insanity levels (fully creating multiple language families for instance https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Languages_constructed_by_J._R....). But you feel the histories and mythology behind the languages in the works. There's just an amazing vitality and realism in his universe that I've personally never felt in another work of fantasy as good as those other books might be.

I read a biography about him many years ago, and if I remember correctly he wrote the stories for the languages not the other way around, since he discovered that his languages needed a mythology and history in order to be realistic.

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> You've got to respect the man for his attention to detail (...) fully creating multiple language families for instance

These things are related, but in the exact opposite way from what you're suggesting.

Tolkien was, first and foremost, a linguist. Language was his passion, and he was of the opinion that, e.g., Esperanto was much more of a dead language than Latin or Ancient Greek are, because Esperanto doesn't have a culture to call its own, whereas Latin and Ancient Greek have a wealth of culture attached to them, and, therefore, a life of their own.

Elvish and dwarfish weren't invented to give Middle Earth more detail. Middle Earth was invented so that the languages would be, in a sense, alive.

At least that's what he said. The Hobbit for example would / could have been told without the languages, and was at first independent of the Middle Earth.

Relevant quote: "All this only as background to the stories, though languages and names are for me inextricable from the stories. They are and were so to speak an attempt to give a background or a world in which my expressions of linguistic taste could have a function. The stories were comparatively late in coming." From letter 163.

> opposite way from what you're suggesting

You're saying the same thing so how is it opposite? Or was the last paragraph added after your reply?

The Dwarf Fortress guys remind me of this kind of obsession. Not that both have to do with dwarves, but that both need a world for their obsession to live in. The DF guys created a world for their incredibly detailed simulations, while Tolkein invented a world for his languages.

They're basically making Tolkien-the-software. I'm sure they consider the current language system to be just a placeholder for when they have the code to generate and mutate/mix grammars, phonology and vocabulary based on details of what happens to civilizations during the generated history.

I hope their work continues for quite some time.

Just thought I should point out The Dwarf Fortress guys have a Patreon if you would like to support them https://www.patreon.com/bay12games?ty=h

On the other hand, Tolkien had no clue about geology. If you think about how rivers flow from mountains to oceans, the map of Middleearth is unrealistic. Anduin heads straight towards hills and mountains (Emyn Muil and Osgiliath)? In the north west, Luhn/Lune flows south to the Grey Havens instead of the short way to the northern ocean? The sea of Rhun and Nurnen are both dead (no outflow)?

(disclaimer: I still love and respect Tolkiens work! Especially the Silmarillion.)

The map doesn't show elevations. Medieval maps work that way, they only show notable hills and cliffs, but no slow descents.

Here's similar from Norway

http://thumbs.dreamstime.com/z/old-map-norway-11431502.jpg

Tolkien being Tolkien, he probably chalks it up to the post Morgoth/Feanor and post Numenor sunderings of the world.

You do get situations where rivers cut through mountain ranges - it can happen when the river existed before the mountain range and as the mountains were pushed up the river continued to cut it's way through:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antecedent_drainage_stream

[NB I sure Tolkien would have approved of the idea of rivers being older than the mountains they cut through].

I studied geology and none of the river paths in the LOTR map seem particularly unrealistic. Tolkien's map shows local elevation but not absolute elevation, which, when it comes to a river's path, matters more than people think.

For example, the plain between the Misty Mountains and Mirkwood could be like the plain in front of the Colorado front range: dead flat, but still at 5,000+ feet in elevation. That would give it plenty of vertical drop to the sea. It's certainly possible that the absolute elevation of the Anduin at the ford at Carrock is similar to the summit of the mountain behind Minas Tirith!

And it takes doesn't take much elevation drop to make a river flow. The Lune would work as drawn if there were cliffs or hills only a couple of hundred feet high on the southern edge of the Bay of Forochel, which could happen with glaciation--and it is known as the bay of ice in the books.

> creating multiple language families for instance

I remember reading in one of the introductions that he enjoyed working on the languages for their own sake, and would work on that if he didn't feel like working on the story. It's not as though everything he did was at this level of detail -- architecture, technology, biology, it all varies in how much work he put into filling it out. But the languages were a passion for him.

I don't think it's so much that he created the languages in service to the world and the story as that it's a core piece of the expression. I think of the series as a work of hard linguistic fiction (by analogy with hard science fiction), and seen in that light, written by a professional in the field, it really doesn't seem crazy at all that they're as developed as they are.

I found Shippey's "J.R.R. Tolkien: Author of the Century" a compelling read. It examines Tolkien's fascination with myth (which, I suppose, is effectively redundant; can't very well write a biography of him without it).

There is a decent nerdwriter video on worldbuilding (and he talks about Tolkien's masterly production of the world of Middle Earth):

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mA6MQHNM2yE

I don't fully agree with the thesis of the video, but it's a worthy watch and well reasoned argument.

That was a very interesting video. Could you tell us why you disagree with the video's thesis?

Mainly because I really enjoy immersing myself in the lore of a story/book/series, even at the expense of the story :]

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