"Tolkien’s Map and The Messed Up Mountains of Middle-earth" Article at Tor

[Daistallia]

Some may find this critique of Tolkien's geography interesting.

tl;dr can be summed up in the line "Middle-earth’s got 99 problems, and mountains are basically 98 of them."

http://www.tor.com/2017/08/01/tolkie...-middle-earth/

[Falconius]

There is also the issue of where all the food comes from, but there's not much point getting into it (even though the Shire seems to be the only place in the entirety of Middle Earth that has actual farms).

[Woolshed Wargamer]

There is also the issue of where all the food comes from, but there's not much point getting into it (even though the Shire seems to be the only place in the entirety of Middle Earth that has actual farms).

When you are telling a tale of high adventure, who actually grows the grain for bread and beer is background noise

[ladiestorm]

Okay, first of.all, one must.consider when these books were.written....I mean, the Hobbit was written in the mid 30's and the Lord of the Rings trilogy in the late 30's to late 40's! And Tolkien was primarily a writer, not a professional cartographer!

Everything was done in black and white back then, and I think the purpose of the map he made was to the locations of.major events...just because he didn't add farmland to his map, for example, doesn't mean it isn't there.

Lastly, this was a fictional story about a fictional place, full of magic and wonder, and someone wants to nitpick about how his mountain ranges are.formed? His map may not be topographically correct, but then, it doesn't have to be. Do the square mountain ranges take away from the story? Do we continue to understand what happened where?

Remember also, that the maps we.have of middle Earth were done by the characters, so some Lee way should be given.

[Falconius]

Don't take it personally. It's critique of the man's map, not the man.

[Redrobes]

I have a friend who has been working on some wild theories that may explain why the mountain shapes are the way they are. Originally I thought they were just fanciful based on requiring the story to have them in order to force the party over or under the range but there may be more to it. He may be writing a book on it and the bombadil mystery and has send off drafts to publishers and I think its getting refined at the moment. I have heard his arguments and at least most of them are very compelling - especially around the Bombadil area.

But hey - maybe its just stone giants throwing rocks around...

[Straf]

Crikey that bloke makes the River Police look over tolerant

[Falconius]

I always figured Morodor's mountains were formed by magic. Although I never understood why they (anyone, not just Frodo and his lackeys) just didn't go around to the back which is completely open. What all those right angles remind me of is the ocean trenches. What's more interesting than the mountains is that Tolkien appears to have gotten the rivers right. For instance I can see people being tempted to make the River of Lune go coast to coast, and he didn't. He must of done some geography research before making it.

[ladiestorm]

Lol Falcons, I know it's a critique of the map, and not the man, and believe it or not, I'm not taking it personally.

But it is a personal pet piece of mine, carried over from my school days, when we had to take perfectly good, enjoyable stories and pick them apart to find the hidden symbolism, the hidden meaning, the hidden agenda the author left behind. I was the one that always spoke up and asked 'cant the story just be a good story?'

My thoughts on the 'issues' of Tolkien's map, would be to wonder if it was deliberate. After all, the map that Tolkien made, in the story of the Hobbit, was actually made by Bilbo Baggins. I don't know what Bilbo did originally in the Shire, but I bet he wasn't a cartographer. So it stands to reason that his map might be somewhat flawed. Frodo's too.

[Straf]

You have a great point there ladiestorm. I don't think Bilbo carried a load of surveying equipment with him and I'm no expert on Middle Earth but there probably weren't that many GPS satellites in orbit at that time. Despite their best efforts Messrs Mason and Dixon took a lot of equipment with them and, not to take such a magnificent achievement away from them, there were inaccuracies in laying out that famous line of theirs. That dwarven party they took along with them may have had surveyors among them but they seemed to be quite keen to make haste rather than accurately map out the local terrain. Mason and Dixon did meet with hostility from natives, of course, but the orcs and Nazgul were perhaps a tad more formidable for Frodo and Sam than a marauding horde of Susquehannas.