A History of the 20th Century in 100 Maps by Tim Bryars & Tom Harper

Author:Tim Bryars & Tom Harper [Bryars, Tim]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: The University of Chicago Press
Published: 2014-03-12T16:00:00+00:00

The most obvious reason for the map being so intrinsic to the book is that the tale is essentially one long journey (by the character Frodo Baggins) from one side of Middle Earth to the other. We use maps to follow journeys and Tolkien, a First World War veteran who had learnt to draw and navigate unfamiliar places through maps, fully appreciated the value of cartography as an aid to understanding place. He used it masterfully to embellish his own fantasy world.

Published in 4,500 copies by George Allen & Unwin in the first edition, first impression of The Fellowship of the Ring,86 the map is an elegant offset lithographic print with red lettering, produced from a design drawn by Tolkien’s son Christopher, which was created in turn from numerous sketches made by his father. It is a bird’s-eye view, a suitably antiquated style of map, which also serves to accentuate the dramatically high mountains and other improbable geographical features. Tolkien was certainly no geographer, however. He was an Anglo-Saxon scholar and Oxford professor, who from 1917 had been working on a pre-history of the world, supposedly to compensate for the lack of a half-decent one in the English tradition.

Tolkien cleverly used the map to reinforce the reality of Middle Earth. He had it drawn in such a stylised way that it appeared actually to have originated there. The whole work, in fact, archaic writing style included, was constructed as a true-to-life transcription of events by the main characters.87 The geography of Middle Earth was broadly similar enough to Europe—in coastal shape anyway—to support the pre-historical illusion. Many places shown on the map were never to be encountered in the story, suggesting that Middle Earth was real.

The map could exist independently of the book, and was redrawn and reproduced in different mediums to satisfy the increasingly vast commercial popularity of The Lord of the Rings in print, film, music and popular culture. Tolkien’s own anti-urban, pro-rural ideology, which shone through in the ecological sub-theme of the book (talking tree-shepherds attacking industrialist wizards, to name but one episode), made his work extremely popular in the 1960s. The book was also able to capitalise on the limitations of the map: significant portions of the tale occur in forests and underground; and in the episode of greatest spatial confusion—the tortuous journey through dwarf mines—the lack of map for either party or the reader adds immeasurably to the sense of disorientation.

It is impossible to say how many times the average reader might have flicked to the back of the book to cross-reference a name or ponder the travel dilemmas of Frodo and friends (who incidentally never used maps). The map became endowed with the tales themselves. As the Tolkien Encyclopedia explains, ‘while the story unfolds over hours of reading, the map allows the story to be recalled at a glance’.88

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