Lord of the Rings: The Animated Musical | Introduction to Maps
Location plays an essential role in The Lord of the Rings. Already in the first section of the Prologue, “1 Concerning Hobbits”, several place names have been revealed, although not discussed in detail. These place names appear in clusters. Westmarch and the Shire are home to modern Hobbits. Greenwood the Great, which became Mirkwood, the Misty Mountains, and Eriador were the lands of their oldest ancestors. Different groups travelled by foot through Weathertop and the Wilderland, by boat on the Great River Anduin to Loudwater, Tharbad, and Dunland; or using a combination of means from Rivendell down the River Hoarwell. The lengthy paragraphs of invented places continue while describing the complexities of Hobbit colonization, which becomes increasingly difficult to decipher when places bear multiple names in distinct invented languages.
Fortunately, the book provides seven pages of maps to determine distance and movement, while other maps are described but not appearing. As mentioned in “Note on the Maps” appearing at the back of Fellowship, the son of J.R.R. Tolkien, Christopher Tolkien, drew the maps for the original edition in 1954-55 and they were redrawn by artist Stephen Raw for the smaller paperback editions. Besides these official maps, cartographer Karen Wynn Fonstad published the complex The Atlas of Middle-earth in 1981, while World War cryptographer turned author Barbara Halpern Strachey published the simpler Journeys of Frodo the same year. Reviews of these works will certainly appear in future posts.
As a reader, I assume that the maps appearing in the books are replicas of ancient maps originally existing in Middle-earth and found along with the Red Book of Westmarch. This brings up several questions. What was the mapmaking tradition in Middle-earth? Who within the fictional world could have drawn these original maps? How could modern cartographers have altered these maps to better fit the worldview of modern readers? By studying the history of mapmaking in the real world, I hope to create a hypothesis for these original maps that would influence their design in the animated musical.
Here in the real world, the creation and study of maps is its own field, with its history overlapping with events previously discussed in this blog series. The earliest version of the word map, menaphah, appears in Mishnaic Hebrew, the language used to write the Dead Sea Scrolls. The word evolved into mappa in Talmudic Hebrew and then was borrowed into Latin according to research done by Ancient Roman educator Quintilian. Throughout that time, the word had the broader meaning of a cloth, banner, or napkin. Latin used a different word for map, carta, which is now found in the word cartography. By the late 1300s, the word appeared in English language by borrowing the French word mapemounde, or world map. The “mounde” portion was dropped by the 1520s, giving English the word used today.
As for maps themselves, these useful navigational tools have existed for thousands of years with different methodologies arising independently across the world. The oldest known maps might be the cylcons created by Aboriginal Australians around twenty thousand years ago, or 18,000 BC. The full name of these maps are cylindro-conical stone implements, a phrase coined by British paleontologist Robert Ethridge in 1916 during his time working at the Australian Museum, having previously worked at the British Museum. (Not for the last time will that institution appear on this blog.) Lines and circles carved into the cylcons represented the location of fresh water, crucial for life in the desert.
Over in France a few thousand years later, ancient humans painted murals inside Lascaux, a cave located in the Vézère Valley, which was declared a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 1979. One painting mapped the night sky from about 17,000 years ago. While visitors cannot visit the original cave due to preservation precautions, they can tour the replica, which I first learned about from a YouTube video by Tom Scott in 2022.
The oldest surviving Western style map, called Imago Mundi or the Babylonian World Map, dates from around 600 BC or 2600 years ago. The map centers on the famous Euphrates River, which appears frequently in the Hebrew Bible. This political map does not include the enemies of Babylon, like the countries of Persia and Egypt. The map was acquired by our old friend the British Museum in 1882. Elsewhere in the ancient world, Greek sailors used periplous or lists of ports to determine where they would stop on a trip, while Romans used itinerarium for road travelers, the origin of the English word itinerary.
By the 12th century AD during the European Medieval period, cross cultural exchange allowed for more accurate maps. The Tabula Rogeriana or Nuzhat al-mushtāq fī ikhtirāq al-āfāq (The Excursion of One Who Wishes to Penetrate the Horizon) was a collaboration between Roger II, Norman King of Sicily, and Muhammad al-Idrisi, Muslim cartographer from the Almoravid dynasty. Al-Idrisi hired a crew of fact checkers to visit locations on his map to ensure accuracy during the fifteen-year research project. While the map is by no means accurate, it was the best effort based on technology at the time. Later Medieval maps, called mappa mondi, were significantly less accurate and even fantastical, with cartographers drawing pictures of sea monsters in unknown waters.
Around the same time, China developed its own mapping system using a grid measured in li, a traditional Chinese unit of measurement currently standardized to about a third of a mile or 500 meters. During the last 14th and early 15th century, explorer Zheng He improved Chinese nautical charts by using Arabic maps as cross references, although these were unfortunately inconsistent in scale and orientation. An interactive version of one map, named Mao Kun after one of its possible previous owners, is now hosted by the University of California Santa Barbara.
By the European Age of Exploration and Colonization, countries took turns being the leader in the cartography industry. Germany took the lead as a map maker in the 14th and 15th centuries. The island of Majorca off the coast of Spain rose to prominence in the late 15th century. This island served as a refuge for Sephardi Jews expelled by Isabella I of Castile and Ferdinand II of Aragon by the Alhambra Decree the same year that they funded the voyage of Cristóbal Colón to the Caribbean. Together with their sometimes allies, sometimes rivals in Genoa, Italy, the cartographers of Majorca used the portolano system to create nautical charts. Instead of the vertical and horizontal gridlines familiar to modern map users, the charts employed a rhumbline network, also called windrose lines. Sixteen or thirty-two lines radiated out from a compass rose to represent directions.
After Majorca and Genoa came the Netherlands in the 16th and 17th centuries, followed by France in the 17th and 18th centuries. During this time, cartographers invented new types of map projections and created increasingly more accurate maps recognizable to modern travelers. Additionally, the maps became more complete with the inclusion of the Americas, southern Africa, and Australia. Unfortunately, these projections came with their own biases. Europe appeared at the top and center of maps, appearing disproportionately large compared to the Global South.
The modern era of map making arguably began in the United States with the Land Ordinance of 1785 proposed by Thomas Jefferson. This created the Public Land Survey System (PLSS), also known as the Rectangular Survey System, the first national survey project. As I learned in a recent documentary produced by YouTuber flatypus, this system laid out the grids found in the Midwest, simplified both the mapmaking and traveling process, and eased the designation of public lands like the National Parks and National Forests. Crucial to the early survey was the Louis and Clark Expedition of 1804 to 1806, which famously included sixteen-year-old Lemhi Shoshone interpreter Sacagawea and her baby Jean Baptiste, featured on the American gold dollar from 2000 to 2008.
Through these maps, American politicians of the East gained a greater understanding of the land now owned by the United States government and developed the ideology of Manifest Destiny, the belief that God had granted untouched land for White settlers to improve by building farms and ranches. This concept briefly appeared on the blog during the first Parked at Home talk of the 2023 season, as Dr. Megan Kate Nelson discussed her book Saving Yellowstone about the creation of the first National Park. The idea first arose during a speech given by politician Daniel Webster (W-MA) at Plymouth, MA in 1820 at the two hundredth anniversary celebration of the landing of the Mayflower in 1620. Webster’s own last appearance on the blog was in a completely different role, overseeing the estate now known as Moffatt-Ladd House & Gardens after the death of its owner. The Democratic Party coined the actual phrase during the 1844 election season. In any case, similar types of romantic nationalism developed across Europe throughout the 19th century as countries fought for independence from monarchies and broke up fragmented empires, causing the frequent redrawing of maps.
The link between maps and warfare grew with the advent of airplanes and World War I. For the first time, militaries used aerial reconnaissance, putting photographers in airplanes, dirigibles, and balloons to get an accurate picture of the enemy’s territory. The Royal Flying Corps (RFC) of Great Britain took pictures of the battlefields to supplement Napoleonic era maps of France. These photographs also documented the extreme environmental destruction caused by warfare, as trenches were dug throughout the countryside and areas of heavy shelling were as bare and pocketed as the surface of the moon. Over 5 million photos were taken in 1918 alone and now live in the UK National Archives. Aerial photography for map creation continued after the war with companies like Aerofilms finding new jobs for air veterans, as documented on the website Britain from Above.
The need for accurate aerial imaging became increasingly important with the advent of global positioning systems and online maps. While creating a new map was once an expensive, time consuming job requiring government funding for which a handful of cartographers were qualified, modern systems like Google Maps and Open Street Map allow users to crowdsource their information, keeping highly detailed world maps up to date within minutes. These free and accessible systems allow researchers to quickly and safely investigate an area of interest, whether environmentalists search for evidence of clearcutting in satellite imagery or historians use street view to retrace paths taken by historical figures.
While the field of cartography has changed considerably in medium and level of accuracy across the millennia, motivations for creating maps have remained the same. Everyday users want to navigate efficiently to their destination, while political leaders convey the power of their governments through borders and place names. Having a single, physical map available gives authority to the mapmakers and whoever hired them. However, some of this power is beginning to fade. Like in The Lord of the Rings, places in the real world have multiple names. By using a digital map or comparing multiple digital maps, modern users choose how locations are identified based on the language used by their browser or device and even modify the names if these are incorrect. While borders cannot yet be crowdsourced, this new method of travel enabled by digital maps allows all people with internet access to contribute to how others view the mapped world.
As for the questions I presented in the third paragraph, I will assume that the mapmaking tradition in Middle-earth followed the same chronology as that in the real world. Ancient nomadic and cave dwelling people, such as the Elves, Dwarves, and Hobbits, would have created the earliest forms of maps. Each race might have derived their own mapmaking tradition and over time shifted from carving or painting in stone to drawing on portable surfaces like paper or vellum. Hobbits would not draw these original maps, as “maps made in the Shire showed mostly white spaces around its borders” (The Fellowship of the Ring, 46). Dwarves would not draw these maps, as they prefer to live below ground in their mines and would not be interested in recording above ground. Elves would not draw the maps either, as it includes Dwarfish territories like Erebor and the Iron Hills, although Khazad-dûm is listed as Moria Gate.
A clue comes in the orientation of the map itself, where a center line runs down the page like the Greenwich Prime Meridian, an international standard of longitude since 1851, and a middle line acts like the Tropic of Cancer dividing the north from the south. Assuming that the top of the map acts similarly to the Arctic Circle, as indicated by an arrow pointing to the Icebay of Forochel, the position of Rivendell aligns with that of Greenwich, suggesting that the commissioner of the maps is Elrond, ruler of Rivendell, described as “fair in face as an elf-lord… as venerable as a king of dwarves, and as kind as summer” (The Hobbit, 51), not to mention politically savvy. As for changes made by modern cartographers, the original map would have used the Elvish script Tengwar rather than the Latin alphabet, and the directional device would likely have looked different than the compass rose.
Read past installments of Lord of the Rings: The Animated Musical