Comment by KineticLensman | Hacker News Reader

Comment by KineticLensman | Hacker News Reader

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IMO the features look Tolkienish, but the fonts don't.

Tolkien himself said 'I wisely started with a map, and made the story fit'. However, the geography itself isn't realistic. This is discussed in [0], with the tagline 'Middle-earth’s got 99 problems, and mountains are basically 98 of them.' In summary, the mountains are essentially linear features that create barriers useful from a plot point of view. The Misty Mountains run north-south, and form a right angle with the Ered Nimrais, which run E-W and separate Gondor from everything else. The Ered Nimrais themselves have a right-angle with the Ephel Duath, which are the western side of the three-sided square of mountains (!) that form the border of Mordor.

The main river of Middle Earth - the Anduin - runs parallel with the Misty Mountains - and itself appears to emerge at 90 degrees from the Ered Mithrin, the mountains that run E-W along the top of the Middle Earth map.

Real geographic features tend not to form right angles.

[0] https://www.tor.com/2017/08/01/tolkiens-map-and-the-messed-u...

Middle Earth (which is one continent on the world called Arda) didn’t evolve by natural geological processes, it was created by a god-like being (one of the Valar) called Aulë [1]. These beings would continue to personally shape and transform the world over its short history (a few thousand years), compared to the real world. I think it’s entirely reasonable for the features to look designed when in fact it is.

[1] http://tolkiengateway.net/wiki/Middle_Earth#History

Well yes. There was also some fairly extreme post-creation remodelling, e.g. the flooding of Beleriand and then the Drowning of Númenor.

> Real geographic features tend not to form right angles.

This is a common criticism of Tolkien's maps, that the mountains are "unnatural". It's a peculiar criticism since the most egregious example, the 90 degree angles at Mordor, are actually taken from a real life mountain range, the Carpathian Mountains!

see http://www.newsandtimes.com/2017/08/in-defense-of-tolkiens-m...

The mappings in the linked article have one or two issues themselves. The first map of Europe, for example, represents the Massif Central [0] as linear feature at right angles to the Pyrenees, when it is actually a large plateau.

In general what Third Age Middle Earth doesn't have is ranges like the Rockies that rise over hundreds of miles to their centres. Tolkien's characters often see lines of peaks on the horizon with minor foot hills, rather that gradual inclines than take weeks to traverse.

[Edit]

> are actually taken from a real life mountain range, the Carpathian Mountains!

I'm not aware that Tolkien explicitly based the mountains that surround Mordor on the Carpathians or anywhere else for that mattter.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Massif_Central#/media/File:Fra...

"massive rivers that run parallel to those mountain ranges for long distances"

Doesn't the Brahmaputra run fairly parallel to the Himalayas for quite a long distance?

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

> Real geographic features tend not to form right angles.

Assuming they were created by normal geological processes and not magic. I could see why an evil wizard would want to create a 'natural' castle around his fortress with mountains.

> I could see why an evil wizard would want to create a 'natural' castle around his fortress with mountains.

Yes, but Mordor was created before Sauron achieved his power. Perhaps it was long-range contingency planning by Melkor (Sauron's original boss).

It was the Valar. Whatever theory you come up with has to accommodate the geography of the Hidden City of Gondolin (search Google Images to see it illustrated). Aule, Ulmo, or Melkor, someone fashioned it in such a way that it was able to preserve Turgon and the other elves for 400 years until it was betrayed to Morgoth.

Reading the article, the author posed that as the most likely (well, the only) explanation for Mordor.

I think the author is also severely underestimating how early Tolkien starting working on his maps. The Hobbit (published in 1937) already came with a somewhat fleshed out map of the Misty Mountains and surroundings, and it is fair to assume that from this the remainder of Middle-Earth was fleshed out. (I cannot quickly find somewhere when he first drew a complete map of Middle-Earth, but Wikipedia notes that "The paper became soft, torn and yellowed through intensive use, and a fold down the centre had to be mended using parcel tape" [1]. So he probably knew what Middle-Earth looked like for quite some time, maybe even late 1930s?

To presume that Tolkien would have had an understanding of the then state-of-the-art theories around continental drift is a bit hopeful. In fact, plate tectonics did come to be accepted until the 50s/60s, so Tolkien could barely have known of the theory when writing LOTR and especially not when drawing the initial map.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tolkien%27s_maps#The_Lord_of_t...

I don't have a better link than yours, but books I own talk about maps of the wider Middle Earth (first age) being developed in the 1920s and 30s (e.g. a recognizable Silmarillion Map from the 1930s).

The mapping in The Hobbit was finalised in 1936 and published in 1937, and was started in the late 1920s. Detailed maps of Middle Earth for TLOTR were produced in the 1940s, e.g. a contour map of Minas Morgul from 1944, although I can't find a date for the first rough maps.

To my mind there is a bit of a tension between Tolkien's "I started with a map..." comment and the fact that the story took a while to settle [0] down on the core theme of the One Ring and the need for a quest through Middle Earth (hence the map) that would destroy it.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Lord_of_the_Rings#Writing

Regarding your last point: if I remember the foreword to the 2nd edition Tolkien describes his writing process as essentially being spatially. He moves his characters from place to place, and seems to only have put in a core theme later on. This also agrees with the whole "Tolkien wrote a book so he could talk about cultures/languages/something" theme. This would also suggest that he had in his mind something of a map or layout of Middle-Earth very early on. And than there is the complicated interaction with the Silmarillion, which was developed long before the Hobbit even (1914), but also during writing of the Hobbit and TLOTR. [1] So disentangling where exactly he came up with what seems almost impossible (and something that many Tolkien scholars, including Christopher Tolkien, have spent quite some time studying!)

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Silmarillion#Development

> So disentangling where exactly he came up with what seems almost impossible (and something that many Tolkien scholars, including Christopher Tolkien, have spent quite some time studying!)

Yes. To be honest I read several of CT's books on the history of Tolkien's writing but intentionally stopped when he reached TLOTR because I didn't want to see one of my favourite books deconstructed, e.g. the 'too many hobbits' versions, before the hobbit Strider became the ranger Aragorn, for example. I suspect reading those volumes may make the interrelationships clearer but I probably won't do that.

One thing to note about mountains is that they can have been artificially created during earlier times. The misty mountains were for instance intentionally created to be hard to pass[1]. Angles might make more sense then.

[1] https://lotr.fandom.com/wiki/Misty_Mountains

http://www.shadedrelief.com/world/Data/map1_type.jpg a good map of mountain ranges to search for counterexamples. Lake Maracaibo in Venezuela is surrounded by mountains on three sides and the Magdalena river runs parallel with the Andes and has some squarish curves. It also seems likely that the map could be thought of as not being accurate itself with the "real world" geography of Middle Earth given its sketchy design.

Indeed. The lettering is not Tolkien-map-style, and it uses the movie "style" of dropping unnecessary (and incorrect) tengwar diacritics all over to make it look "fantasy".

I was just re-reading it (LoTR) the last few days and I often found myself thinking that the geography didn't seem very natural; delightful to read this in the light of that!

It seems to have been submitted a handful of times in the past without getting traction, but maybe do so again? It's an excellent read and a shame it hasn't got much attention in the past.

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