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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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).
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.
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.
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.
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.
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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.
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’ve read The Silmarillion easily more than 20 times and I swear Of Beleriand and its Realms gets longer every time I read it.
It could be replaced on first read with a decent map. Or even a mediocre map. Or nothing; you just don't need it.
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 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.
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).
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Journeys_of_Frodo
https://kmalexander.com/free-stuff/fantasy-map-brushes/
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