Tolkien's maps

J. R. R. Tolkien's maps, depicting his fictional Middle-earth and other places in his legendarium, helped him with plot development, guided the reader through his often complex stories, and contributed to the impression of depth and worldbuilding in his writings.

In the view of the Tolkien critic Tom Shippey, the maps are largely decorative in the "Here be tygers" tradition, adding nothing to the story.

[2] The first is Thror's map, in the fiction handed down to Thorin, showing little but the Lonely Mountain drawn in outline with ridgelines and entrances, and parts of two rivers, decorated with a spider and its web, English labels and arrows, and two texts written in runes.

Mirkwood is shown as a mixture of closely packed tree symbols, spiders and their webs, hills, lakes, and villages.

The finished map faithfully reproduced the contours, features and labels of his father's design, but omitted the route (with dates) taken by the Hobbits Frodo and Sam on their way to destroy the One Ring in Mount Doom.

The other is a smaller-scale drawing of the central region of the same area, with coasts, mountains, and rivers but without forests, overprinted in red with the names of the leaders of the Elves in each part of Beleriand.

[9] Campbell states that Tolkien's mapping style echoes William Morris's Arts and Crafts: "they are functional, but with an eye to grace and beauty", and in her view lie somewhere between illustration and cartography.

[10] In 1954, Tolkien wrote in a letter to the novelist Naomi Mitchison that[T 10] I wisely started with a map, and made the story fit (generally with meticulous care for distances).

[9] In Shippey's view, "the names and the maps give Middle-earth that air of solidity and extent both in space and time which its successors [in 20th century fantasy] so conspicuously lack".

[17] That in turn makes maps "extraordinarily useful to fantasy, weighing it down as they do with repeated implicit assurances of the existence of the things they label, and of course of their nature and history too.

"[17] The geologist Alex Acks, writing on Tor.com, outlines the mismatch between Tolkien's maps and the geomorphological processes of plate tectonics which shape the Earth's continents and mountain ranges.

A river like the Anduin, on the other hand, has very few branches: it runs more or less as a single large stream for hundreds of miles, and parallel to the Misty Mountain range, rather than directly downhill and away from it.

[19] The frontispiece to William Morris's 1897 The Sundering Flood was a map showing the city on a great river, "The Wood Masterless", a "Desert Waste", and towns with English names like "Westcheaping" and "Eastcheaping".

[25][10] Among later bestselling fantasy authors, George R. R. Martin has used maps in all his A Song of Ice and Fire books, starting with A Game of Thrones.

[26][27][28][29] Campbell writes that the redrafting of the maps by the publishers HarperCollins for a later edition of The Lord of the Rings made the cartography "bland, modern, professional illustration".

[1] In addition, the redrafting loses what she calls "the illusion of Bilbo's own fair copies of older maps and which suggested a culture without printing presses or engraving", through Tolkien's own "charming hand lettering".

Detail from Tolkien's revised map of Wilderland for the first edition of The Hobbit , 1937 [ 1 ]
Detail from J. R. R. Tolkien 's preliminary map of Wilderland. The publishers asked for the map to be redrawn to suit line-block printing better, and with improved lettering.
J. R. R. Tolkien's design for his son Christopher's contour map on graph paper with handwritten annotations, of parts of Gondor and Mordor and the route taken by the Hobbits with the One Ring , and dates along that route, for an enlarged map in The Return of the King [ 5 ]
Detail of finished contour map by Christopher Tolkien , drawn from his father's graph paper design. The Hobbits' route has been omitted. The city of Minas Tirith (lower left) with its large encircling wall (the Rammas Echor) and the ruined city of Osgiliath astride the River Anduin nearby are shown. [ 6 ]
A linguistic map: Tolkien invented parts of Middle-earth to resolve the linguistic puzzle he had accidentally created by using different European languages for peoples in his legendarium. [ 11 ] [ T 10 ]
Issues with the geomorphology of Middle-earth, identified by Alex Acks [ 18 ] [ 19 ]
The "iconic" poster map by Pauline Baynes went far beyond Tolkien's cartography, adding header and footer paintings and inset vignettes. [ 26 ] [ 27 ] [ 28 ]