Courtesy of William Morrow
Karen Wynn Fonstad was a cartographer who exhaustively mapped J.R.R. Tolkien’s Middle-earth, the setting of “The Hobbit” and “The Lord of the Rings.”
She used a grid system to index locations without latitude and longitude (marked by letters and numbers along the edges), as ancient Middle-earth is canonically flat; the world only later became spherical.
She wrote that determining distances was a challenge: “Tolkien’s usage of leagues, furlongs, fathoms and ells added to the mystique and feeling of history — and to the bewilderment of the mapmaker.”
Fonstad’s accompanying commentary considers real-world forces that might have shaped fantasy landscapes — such as whether a caldera collapse formed Tolkien’s orc-filled Udûn valley.
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Overlooked No More: Karen Wynn Fonstad, Who Mapped Tolkien’s Middle-earth
This article is part of Overlooked, a series of obituaries about remarkable people whose deaths, beginning in 1851, went unreported in The Times.
In 1977, Karen Wynn Fonstad made a long shot cold call to J.R.R. Tolkien’s American publisher with the hope of landing a dream assignment: to create an exhaustive atlas of Middle-earth, the setting of the author’s widely popular “The Hobbit” and “The Lord of the Rings.”
To her surprise, an editor agreed.
Fonstad spent two and a half years on the project, reading through the novels line by line and painstakingly indexing any text from which she could infer geographic details. With two young children at home, she mostly worked at night. Her husband left notes on her drafting table reminding her to go to bed.
Her resulting book, “The Atlas of Middle-earth” (1981), wowed Tolkien fans and scholars with its exquisite level of topographic detail; the most recent paperback edition is in its 32nd printing.
“There is an enormous amount of information,” the critic Baird Searles wrote in a review of her book in Asimov’s Science Fiction magazine, “from a diagram of the evolution of the languages of Middle-earth to tables of the lengths of mountain ranges and rivers. It’s a true atlas (the author is a geographer) and quite an achievement.”
Commissions soon followed for atlases of other imaginary places with their own devoted subcultures, including Pern, the setting of the sprawling and best-selling “Dragonriders of Pern” series, which the author Anne McCaffrey began publishing in 1968, and a pair of foundational worlds within the Dungeons & Dragons franchise.