Week 10: "Maps" – Tuesday 2nd May
2023
#TolkienTrewsday #TolkienTuesday #Tolkien
Welcome to #TolkienTrewsday #TolkienTuesday.
The hub for this Twitter-based event can be found here.
Tolkien Trewsday (the Hobbit name for Tuesday!) invites the #Tolkien community to form a fellowship to collectively tweet about a pre-selected theme about Tolkien, his works and his life.
Each week a new theme will be selected, often via a poll or by a guest host/curator, and together we will build a collective outpouring of creativity, knowledge and love for J.R.R. Tolkien and the adaptions based on his works.
The inspiration for this comes from the highly successful #FolkloreThursday which engaged lovers of Folklore, academics, artists and more to use Twitter to discuss it.
We only ask that if you are joining in, please do so with courtesy and kindness in your tweets. This is a positive-action community event, open to all and supportive of fan diversity. Intolerance, racism, bigotry have no place here.
💬 This week’s theme
Week 10: “Maps” – Tuesday 2nd May
2023
Following a close poll on Twitter, “Maps” was chosen as the theme for Week 10.
How to contribute
We are keeping it very simple. All you need to do to join is tweet something about the current week’s theme and use the following hashtags in your tweet:
#TolkienTrewsday #TolkienTuesday #Tolkien
Your tweet, besides following the theme, can be anything. Examples include:
- Middle-earth maps by J.R.R. Tolkien
- Non-Middle-earth maps by J.R.R. Tolkien
- Maps from adaptions
- Gaming maps
Week Ten – Maps
“I wisely started with a map…”
-- J.R.R. Tolkien, Letter 144 To Naomi Mitchison (25 April 1954)
Carpenter, Humphrey; Tolkien, Christopher. The Letters of J. R. R. Tolkien (p. 177). HarperCollins Publishers. Kindle Edition.
If there is one thing I can say with certainty, as a young boy discovering J.R.R. Tolkien, one of things that instantly drew me to him were maps: especially the map of Wilderland. That map had a power over me back then in the late 1970s/early 1980s and it still does now. It is my favourite Tolkien map.
The beautifully crafted maps of Middle-earth that J.R.R. and Christopher Tolkien produced are cartological wonders which fans have poured hours upon hours exploring.
Maps are essential to our understanding of Middle-earth, without them it would be so much harder to imagine the landscapes Tolkien so vividly described in his works. The journeys of his characters can be visualised as they cross the terrain and face difficulties as they do so.
There are many resources for
Tolkien’s maps on the Internet. The Tolkien Estate have an informative page
about maps on their website. Wikipedia also has a page about Tolkien’s
maps. Tolkien Gateway meanwhile has a page on the “General map of
Middle-earth” plus many, many more articles on maps. The sheer abundance of maps
appearing on the Encyclopaedia of Arda (main page) shows both the creativity of fan
resources and the love for the world Tolkien created.
Below are some relevant articles/resources across the Internet about Tolkien, mapmaking and the world of Middle-earth.
🚩 Map of Middle-earth (Bodleian
Library collection, Shelfmark: NNN.7521)
🚩 Tolkien Society on the Pauline Baynes map
🚩 Tolkien Society on the annotations of the Pauline Baynes maps
🚩 The Lord of the Rings Project (“LotrProject”)
created by Emil Johansson (Twitter: @lotrproject)
🚩 “Celebrating Christopher Tolkien’s Cartographic Legacy” (by Jonathan Crowe, 2020, on TOR.com)
🚩 “Mapping Middle-earth” (from
the Development Office, University of Oxford, 2016)
🚩 “J.R.R. Tolkien: Lord of the
Rings 'Middle-earth' unveiled” (on BBC News, 2016)
🚩 “The Medieval in Middle-Earth: Thror’s Map”( Thijs
Porck, 2015)
🚩 “In the Beginning was the Word:how medieval text became fantasy maps” (John Wyatt Greenlee and Anna Fore
Waymack, 2019/2020)
🚩 Interactive 3D model of Middle-earth at the Bodleian 2018 Tolkien exhibition
🚩 “Artist Re-Envisions NationalParks in the Style of Tolkien’s Middle Earth Maps” (Open Culture, 2018)
📚 Books and journal articles
Available:
The Atlas of Tolkien’s Middle-earth: by J.R.R. Tolkien
Karen Wynn Fonstad and Christopher Tolkien (2017)
Amazon link
Out of print:
The Maps of Tolkien’s Middle-earth
Brian Sibley (Author), John Howe (Illustrator)
Journeys of Frodo - an Atlas of J.R.R. Tolkien's 'The Lord of the Ring’
Barbara Strachey (Author)
📝 Journal articles:
“Military Cartography’s Influence on Tolkien’s Maps of Middle-earth”
Stentor Danielson
Journal of Tolkien Research, Vol.11 Iss. 2 (2020)
“Re-reading the Map of Middle-earth: Fan Cartography's Engagement with Tolkien's Legendarium”📜 Maps of locations and associated trails linked with J.R.R. Tolkien
Stentor Danielson
Journal of Tolkien Research, Vol. 6 Iss.1 (2018)
I have written a few blogs now and gathered resources about real-world places connected with Tolkien. You can find links and downloadable maps from the following blog pages here and here.
LOTRO Eriador map (author's screengrab)
🎮📹 Finally… adaptions
Gaming of course lends itself to maps, especially roleplaying games. From Iron Crown Enterprises’ Middle-earth Roleplaying (MERP) back in the 1980s to the current The One Ring and The Lord of the Rings Roleplaying (5E) games published by Free LeagueGames (Fri Ligan), there are gorgeous maps in roleplaying game books.
In Standing Stones Games’ The Lord of the Rings Online, maps are of course essential else players would not be able to explore the various regions of the game. The map style has changed over the years, not without some controversy (the older style was much beloved by fans), but you can see the variation in LOTRO maps here.
Amazon Studio’s The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power TV series understood the power of maps when the Twitter social media account made its first tweet as the following:
The account then, over the course of a month, revealed several maps alongside the Ring verse, which led to the reveal that Númenor would feature in the series so we knew it would be grounded in the Second Age of Middle-earth.
One of the Rings of Power maps.
The following maps were revealed in Ring verse order:
💍💍💍 “Three Rings for the Elven-kings under the sky,” (15 Feb 2019)
💍💍💍💍💍💍💍 “Seven for the Dwarf-lords in their halls of stone,” (18 Feb 2019)
💍💍💍💍💍💍💍💍💍 “Nine for Mortal Men doomed to die,” (25 Feb 2019)
💍 “One for the Dark Lord on his dark throne. In the Land of Mordor where the Shadows lie.” (6 March 2019)
💍 “One Ring to rule them all, One Ring to find them, One Ring to bring them all, and in the darkness bind them,In the Land of Mordor where the Shadows lie." (7 March 2019)
During and following the release of the first season of Rings of Power, I followed several of the journeys of characters across the maps, especially the Harfoots. You can read my Twitter breakdown of the Harfoot journey here. And one of the other aspects I looked at was how the map included a sea monster, which turned out to be real! You can read that Twitter thread here. There was an excellent fan-created map for Rings of Power here.
To conclude, map-making was an essential part of the foundation of Tolkien creating Middle-earth. But it wasn’t all plain sailing for Tolkien. In one Letter, he wrote:
“The map is hell!”
-- J.R.R. Tolkien, Letter 161 to Rayner Unwin (14 April 1955)
Carpenter, Humphrey; Tolkien, Christopher. The Letters of J. R. R. Tolkien (p. 210). HarperCollins Publishers. Kindle Edition.
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