The Wisconsin cartographer who mapped Tolkien's fantasy world | Hacker News Reader

The Wisconsin cartographer who mapped Tolkien's fantasy world

wpr.org

233 pointsbookofjoe48 comments

Atlas of Middle-earth is a truly monumental feat.

I think the article writer misses how much of it is really about The Silmarillion, rather than about Lord of the Rings. Tolkien put a lot of work into First Age geography, an entire (interminable, excruciating) chapter of The Silmarillion. Very little of it would be familiar to viewers of the films, and a lot of it opaque even to readers just of LotR.

> an entire (interminable, excruciating) chapter of The Silmarillion

I’ve read The Silmarillion easily more than 20 times and I swear Of Beleriand and its Realms gets longer every time I read it.

I just wish it had been relegated to an appendix. A lot of people drop Silmarillion there, but you can just skip it and get on to much better material.

It could be replaced on first read with a decent map. Or even a mediocre map. Or nothing; you just don't need it.

> I just wish it had been relegated to an appendix.

It was; it wasn't even published.

Most of the Silmarillion can be read out of order, if you want. That should have been made more clear to the "casual" reader (as if casual readers pick it up!).

> as if casual readers pick it up!

I was a casual reader, but then I picked it up.

I picked it up with intent, aged 12.

I have The Silmarillion on Audible and use the chapter Of Beleriand and its Realms when I'm having trouble going to sleep.

My favorite parts of the Silmarillion were the ones where I learned the back story of the world: the Valaquenta, the Ainulindalë, and Of the Rings of Power and the Third Age. I don't have my copy here, but if I recall correctly that last section starts with Of old there was Sauron the Maia.... That's the stuff I wanted to know.

I was also impressed by Tolkien's creation myth. I'm not really familiar with the various religions or mythologies, whether invented by a single author or developed over time by pre-scientific societies, but his is the only one I know of where the creation was based on music.

It's a really great analogy for how God can allow his creations free will without it messing up His Work. Melkor uses his free will to try and make his own "music" discordant from Eru's but Eru just incorporates it into His music and makes the whole song better.

So you're saying that Eru and Miles Davis are one?

I'd never thought of that, but yes now that you mention it, I think that's exactly what I'm saying

You might be familiar with another musical creation story written by Tolkien's friend C.S. Lewis. In The Magician's Nephew, Aslan sings the land of Narnia into existence.

But Lewis story is a flat- carbon copy, with just characters appearance replaced /enhanced with fantasy elements. Its basically a fanfiction bible painted over.

It's the most satisfying creation myth I've ever come across. Makes more sense to me than any other "real" culture's idea of how the world / cosmos began. I'd like to live in a world where it is true. (Yes, I know: Tolkien, Catholicism; sure, fine. I specifically think Ainulindalë is better than the Bible, and I don't care if anyone, including Tolkien, would think me a heretic for saying so.)

The Bible, like any “real” mythology is full of inconsistencies and contradictions and unanswered questions. In contrast, a literary “mythology” created by a single author can be logically and tonaly consistent.

I think Tolkien appeals to people because it has the feel of mythology, legend and ancient history, but still is a literary creation which satifies modern need for logic and modern morality.

It's a mistake to look at the creation narratives in the Bible and talk about inconsistencies and contradictions. There's an implicit assumption when you go down that route that we're discussing a single text. We don't do the same thing with, say, the ancient Egyptians, who had at least four distinct creation traditions. We only do this with the Biblical creation narratives because the redactors of Genesis started out with one creation narrative and then followed with another. (And let's not forget about the other creation traditions found in Psalm 104 and Job 38-42, which are quite different from those in Genesis!) But notably, the redactors didn't rationalize those distinct traditions into a single, consistent narrative. That's a later reading. If we try to venture into the minds of the redactors, they probably saw value in preserving these distinct traditions.

Not to imply OP doesnt know this, but hoping someone gets to be one of the lucky 10k today.

Tolkien himself didnt “write” the Silmarillion the way people might assume. He spent decades writing and iterating on mythology, world building, creating languages. He had multiple versions of many stories and ideas, many drafts in various states, but he never pulled it all together into a single book or officially canon narrative.

After his death his son Christopher took on that monumental task, with great care and understanding of his father’s work. Combing through who knows how many mountains of notes, unfinished stories, and contradictions to create what we know as the Silmarillion. Tolkien himself often said of things in the LOTR canon “I don’t know” or something loke “I havent translated/uncovered that yet”. He looked at it all as if he was a literary archaeologist, translating passed down texts. So with that came lots of uncertainty and hearsay. The fact that his son tackled that, maintained that mystique, and created the Silmarillion is really exciting and lucky in my opinion. Good kid, I guess!

I'm sure you know this, but to clarify for those that don't, it goes way deeper than the volume published as The Silmarillion. In The History of Middle Earth, Christopher pulled together all / most of the drafts and published those, along with notes and commentary that relate them to each other and try to put them into their linear and creative context. It got up to I think fourteen volumes, and there's probably no more-complete record of a great artist's life-long creative process. It is, as you say, a truly monumental work.

If only version control had been invented earlier.

Some of the in–progress versions of the stories are quite hilarious. In the earliest drafts of the story of Beren and Luthien, Beren sets off to cut a Silmaril from the Iron Crown of Morgoth and is more or less immediately captured by one of Morgoth’s lieutenants, Tevildo. Who is a talking cat. With a whole castle full of talking cats that mostly laze about on the terraces but occasionally waylay passersby and make them serve as scullery maids. Christopher Tolkien calls him “the appalling Tevildo”.

By many changes small and great Tolkien went from Tevildo, Prince of Cats to Sauron, Lord of the Rings. If you ever write a book, keep that in mind when you hesitate to cut or rewrite what seems like your best ideas.

I once applied for a house-share with some people who'd named one of their cats "Tevildo". I knew immediately what to talk to them about! (Unfortunately Tevildo was, indeed, appalling.)

But this is also, what makes tolkiens lore so deep. The iceberg tips of the past, tipping out of the ground as the ruins of angmar, the sunken lands in the west, numenor - run down kings of fallen empires walking the wild as striders. The great-great-servants barely holding once great kingdoms together, fallen citys that are the background of battles.

A wonderful atlas -- my favorite are her trail maps where she depicts a character's daily journey in the book.

The article (almost) footnotes her other work which was equally impressive:

* She also created atlases for the worlds of fantasy authors Anne McCaffrey, creator of the “Dragonriders of Pern” series, and Stephen R. Donaldson, who wrote “The Chronicles of Thomas Covenant” series.

I love fantasy in general, and have read a ton of it. other than tolkien, I have never read a novel with that strong a sense of geography in a constructed world - specifically, that there is an entire rich land out there, and not just a graph of interesting places with the focus shifting from one point to another. when the hobbits have to go from the shire to rivendell, or aragorn has to take the paths of the dead to reach his destination in time, tolkien really manages to convey the experience of a difficult journey that takes a significant amount of time even when nothing plot-significant is happening along the way.

Pratchett's Discworld is pretty well mapped out and that which is left to the imagination is well described. Death's house and garden seem almost tangible ...

pratchett is my all time favourite writer, and I love the discworld series, but I never got a good sense of the "spaces between" the way tolkien could do it - e.g. the logistics of traveling from ankh morpork to the ramtops were alluded to, but the journey scenes never really came alive for me in the way that scenes set within ankh morpork did.

the deverry series did come close, and to some extent the wheel of time books (though it's been a while since I read those).

I'm a couple of pages from finishing The Two Towers and feel like Frodo and Sam's journey there is an especially good example of the spaces between. They pass through a broad variety of landscapes and you get a great sense of the transitions from craggy rocks down gullies to marshes. Or from badlands to Ithilien.

Agreed. Whenever he is describing the terrain somewhere it is either fairly generic or specifically a parody. Hence the plains around Ankh Morpork where all the farms grow brassicas and nothing else. Cabbages, broccoli, turnips, mustard, collard greens, and so on for hundreds of miles around.

On the flip side, given how difficult the journey was from the Shire to the Misty Mountain, it always bugged me that it seemed like Bilbo got home pretty easily.

Bilbo crossed the Misty Mountains back during the spring.

This time Bilbo had Maiar escort (and full attention) all the way, and local orcs were basically just wiped out. Makes things a lot easier.

I am currently re-reading LOTR in my forties and having done quite a lot of hiking since my childhood read-throughs, and filming various landscapes from the air, I think I have a much greater appreciation of his descriptions. The journeys remind me a lot of backcountry hiking. A friend is reading the books to his son and they are finding the landscape descriptions thoroughly tedious. To me, they rarely seem long-winded and I enjoy slowing down to make sure I have more than a vague idea of what he's describing.

I wonder quite frequently whether he had photos or views of actual places, or a strong and consistent imagination for each area, or perhaps just that this was something that mattered enough personally that he put in the detail where others did not.

One of my biggest takeaways from the first time I saw her work was that Beleriand was actually situated to the west of Middle Earth prior to sinking. I had seen far too many erroneous maps placing it north of Middle Earth (https://static0.gamerantimages.com/wordpress/wp-content/uplo...)

The infamous lung map! David Day must've introduced so many people to the various interesting aspects of Tolkien's world but there's so much fanfiction mixed into his works. Though in the case of the map it's not really fanfiction, it's just wrong.

In my ~35 years of being a Tolkien fan I've never actually seen this. Wow, so inacurrate.

The Journeys of Frodo is also worth a look if you like this kind of thing. The author isn’t a professional cartographer and it’s more focused on LOTR locations than general world building. Anyway, I was completely captivated by it as a child when I stumbled across it in my high school’s library.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Journeys_of_Frodo

In a similar vein, if interested in that type of thing, is Flora of Middle-Earth: Plants of J.R.R. Tolkien's Legendarium.

For rich, authentic old-style maps you want to make at home on the PC (or iPad) is there any better resource than K. M. Alexander's?

https://kmalexander.com/free-stuff/fantasy-map-brushes/

Do I love maps because of the fantasy books I read as a kid? Did I love (and still love) the fantasy books because I love maps? I may never know.

I've heard of the Atlas of Middle Earth but never knew this amazing story behind it. Thanks for posting it, bookofjoe!

Also, really cool to know she did D&D maps too. Maps are just rad

I love that she could build so much of the world from the geographic descriptions, of things like mountains and rivers.

I think it’s the latter for me. We had a 1960s Reader’s Digest atlas when I was a kid that gave me countless hours of entertainment examining the various maps of the world and the regions within it (there were also maps showing continental drift, a new(!) idea at the time, the paths of the 15th–16th century explorers and I forget what else. The endpapers were reproductions of a 16th century world map.

Karen also did the Atlas of Krynn, the world of the Dragonlance Saga. I still have my copy. Wonderful illustrations and maps.

Every time I read a chapter from LOTR and then hike with my dog, I imagine myself being Frodo and my dog being Samwise, and I find myself talking to the dog, sometimes yelling at him - hey don't go there, there might be Orcs there or maybe Dark Riders were here etc. Of course my dog doesn't care, but I love this silly monologue with him.

Just ordered this book and can't wait to start reading LOTR again!

What a wonderful thing to do.

Map making is such an amazing skill.

Indeed. I started off making a general "land" for the small city a friend is working up for a prospective module of Dungeons and Dragons. I quickly found myself re-adjusting various distances, estimating the impacts of elevation, considering "rain shadows" caused by mountains, coming up with a new scale of "how far can one reasonably ride on horseback per day?" as a kind of measurement, considering climates and microclimates (then making adjustments based on trying to justify what I wanted), looking at historical patterns of settlement growth, checking in on that set of tables of population centers and occupations long ago, and so on.

If you do not consider these things, you get Monster Hotels and general ridiculousness. If it falls too close to reality, it is boring. At the same time, things can be Too Much. So, for my philosophy, you want the mountains to be taller and the valleys to be deeper ... but only sometimes. Spaces to breathe for the beleagured traveler, but then drips and splashes and slashes of Tolkien, The Black Company, and even a little whimsy to break it up.

I still have my copy, less the paper book cover. In storage at the moment, but I’m pretty sure it was first edition.

What a wonderful article (public radio!) and what wonderful work.

Heartening to see amidst a time of attacks on higher education.

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