Fantasy | Cartography
A Map of Middle Earth in the Third Age
Me Tolkien nonsense
There have been attempts in the past to create a map of all of Middle Earth during the Third Age, towards the end of which the events of The Lord of the Rings take place. At the beginning of the Third Age the Earth, or Arda, was made round, having previously essentially been flat. J. R. R. Tolkien (hereafter simply Tolkien) provided maps of the world in earlier ages but did not do so for the Third Age. He only provides maps for those parts of Middle Earth where the events of The Lord of the Rings take place or places referred to in the text.
My intention was not to redraw Tolkien’s maps, but to come to some resolution about what the rest of the world looked like. I would not say my map is “correct.” However, I believe it is as close to Tolkien’s intentions and legendarium as possible.
The Sources
My map of Middle Earth is based on:
- Tolkien’s existing maps.
- Tolkien’s descriptions of the geography of Arda.
- Tolkien’s assertion that his fictional world is the world we live in today.
Tolkien’s maps can be divided into approved canon, being the ones actually published, and the semi-canonical sketch maps that were not published. Only the published maps can be considered truly canonical, as we must allow Tolkien’s creativity to go through its process. It is what went into print which was what Tolkien had finally decided on as being correct. However, the sketch maps may provide information when no other source is available.
In some cases we have to go by Tolkien’s descriptions. In this case other sources of information, such as those Letters which were written after the publication of Lord of the Rings, may be considered authoritative.
Middle Earth is our Earth
The world of The Lord of the Rings, Arda, is the Earth we are currently living on. This is expressly stated in many of Tolkien’s Letters.
Letter 151: “The new situation, established at the beginning of the Third Age, leads on eventually and inevitably to ordinary History, and we here see the process culminating.”
Letter 165: “ ‘Middle-earth’, by the way, is not a name of a never-never land without relation to the world we live in (like the Mercury of Eddison). It is just a use of Middle English middel-erde (or erthe), altered from Old English Middangeard: the name for the inhabited lands of Men ‘between the seas’. And though I have not attempted to relate the shape of the mountains and land-masses to what geologists may say or surmise about the nearer past, imaginatively this ‘history’ is supposed to take place in a period of the actual Old World of this planet.”
Letter 183: “Middle-earth is not an imaginary world. The name is the modern form (appearing in the 13th century and still in use) of midden-erd > middel-erd, an ancient name for the oikoumenē, the abiding place of Men, the objectively real world, in use specifically opposed to imaginary worlds (as Fairyland) or unseen worlds (as Heaven or Hell). The theatre of my tale is this earth, the one in which we now live, but the historical period is imaginary. The essentials of that abiding place are all there (at any rate for inhabitants of N.W. Europe), so naturally it feels familiar, even if a little glorified by the enchantment of distance in time.”
Letter 211: “I have, I suppose, constructed an imaginary time, but kept my feet on my own mother-earth for place.”
The location of Tolkien’s maps on the Earth are also clearly defined:
Letter 294: “The action of the story takes place in the North-west of ‘Middle-earth’, equivalent in latitude to the coastlands of Europe and the north shores of the Mediterranean. But this is not a purely ‘Nordic’ area in any sense. If Hobbiton and Rivendell are taken (as intended) to be at about the latitude of Oxford, then Minas Tirith, 600 miles south, is at about the latitude of Florence. The Mouths of Anduin and the ancient city of Pelargir are at about the latitude of ancient Troy.”
This makes it very easy to overlay Tolkien’s maps onto a map of the world, providing the map projections do not clash too much.
Continental Shelves
The events published in the Silmarillion are the earliest that Tolkien imagined. The tales of Beleriand, then lost below the waves, followed by the history of Numenor, subsequently also lost below the waves, resonate with the accounts of Lyonesse, Avalon, Atlantis, and Hybrasil.
Tolkien would have presumably had access to maps of the North Atlantic, perhaps in The Times Atlas.
It is easy to imagine Tolkien peering over a map such as this and imagining the legends of those sunken lands. In Tolkien’s later years the actual mechanism by which this occurred, Plate Tectonics, would have been well known to any Oxford scholar, and you could imagine the land shattering as the continent was ripped apart to make the Atlantic Ocean.
When Tolkien sat down with a large piece of gridded paper and started drawing his map the outline of the continental margin seemed to influence the outline of Beleriand, the lost lands that figure in the Silmarillion, and which was the first map of Middle Earth he created. The map of Middle Earth that was first published for Lord of the Rings also shows a land which resembles the nearer continental margin of Europe.
As we know little of the world beyond the lands referred to in Lord of the Rings, but we also know that the world of Middle Earth is the world we actually live in, it would seem appropriate to start with a base map of the world. Although there is reference to continents equal to the Americas I will be neglecting that in my map as there is no information about their nature other than their existence. As it would seem that the world in the Third Age has a lower water level than the present world judging by the exposed Continental Shelves, an outline of other continents should reflect that.
The resulting outline of the disposition of land is then modified by the incorporation of Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings map, and I also added the outline of Beleriand of earlier ages. One part of the world I did fiddle with was Japan, which should really be connected to the continental shelf of Asia. However, it occurred to me that The Land of the Rising Sun might be Tolkien’s Land of the Sun.
The position of Numenor is not especially relevant to my intentions, but I created an outline traced from Tolkien’s plan, made it to scale, and found a place for it. All we know about its location is that it was closer to Valinor than to Middle Earth, but that does not help us if Valinor is no longer on the Earth at all. However, it is about the right size and actually a similar shape to the shallows around the Azores, so that is where I have placed it.
The Seas and Mountains
Mountains play a big part in the tales of Middle Earth, and they figure prominently on the maps Tolkien drew, and also in the descriptions of topography beyond the area of those maps. Although Tolkien asserts that Middle Earth is indeed our Earth, the topography is very different in his maps from that of our Earth. Some people have suggested that it is meant as a ruse to avoid people finding precise counterparts in present-day geography with places in Tolkien’s maps.
Having lived through World Wars, Tolkien was aware of the effect of nationalism and hatred. Making a precise correlation with the “Dark Lands” of his stories and somewhere on Earth is something he probably wanted to avoid. Even now when people share the possible locations of, for example, “Mordor,” certain people with glee say “Oh it’s Turkey (or Serbia or Bulgaria, etc.) that makes sense”. Hence I suspect he may have deliberately been obscure. I have seen attempts to make Tolkien’s topography fit that of present Europe, but that is not what I am trying to do here.
The mountains and seas beyond the Lord of the Rings map never seem to have been mapped by Tolkien for the Third Age. However, he did create sketch maps of earlier ages for a work that was to be called the Ambarkanta. Map V of the Ambarkanta details the lands of Arda after the War of the Gods and before the Changing of the World, that is before the start of the Third Age.
The Earth, before the Changing of the World, is flat, and essentially “floats” in the Outer Sea. It does, indeed, look very similar to our Earth, with what looks like Africa, Eurasia, and a large continent called “The Dark Lands which is rather reminiscent of Lemuria, another “lost continent” popular in the late 19th and early 20th century but disproven in the 1960s.
Some of the features that existed in earlier ages are absent in Map V, including the Mountains of the Wind that supposedly surrounded Hildórien, the place where humans first awoke. This world is changed at the end of the First Age, when Beleriand and much else is lost, and at the end of the Second Age when the world is made round and Valinor is no longer a part of the world as such. There is no canonical map for the entire earth of the Third Age.
The chief features of the world that may continue into the Third Age from Map V are the Red Mountains or Orocarni, which ran north-south in the east of Middle Earth, the Grey Mountains, which seem to run through what must be Africa, The Iron Mountains in the North, and the great Inland Sea, the Helcar.
It has been suggested that the Helcar largely dried up by the Third Age, and all that is left of it may be the Sea of Rhun. However, as this is our Earth we are talking about, there seem to be plenty of bodies of water that could be the remains of the Helcar. For my map, I raised the water level of the Caspian, which thereby became a vast inland sea that includes the Aral Sea. With a little modification of the land between the Caspian and the Black Sea, it would be quite easy to suggest that they could have been one big inland sea for fictional purposes. Given that Tolkien’s Middle Earth is the present world, this seems more reasonable than ignoring the possibility.
So on my map the Sea of Helcar is mostly comprised of the Caspian, Ural, and Black Seas combined.
Of the mountains, the Grey Mountains in Africa are tricky. I could put something in incorporating the existing mountains, but their northern ranges would actually be within the area of the published maps of Middle Earth which include Umbar. The Atlas Mountains would be a good candidate, but they are submerged at this time according to the maps.
The Orocarni or Red Mountains are difficult to place unless they got completely turned around and are the Himalayas. However, there are mountainous highlands going through central China that could be the basis of something, including the Greater Khingan Range, the Qinling Range, and the Hengduan Mountains. These have been incorporated into the Red Mountains on the map.
The Iron Mountains were built by Morgoth to protect his fortresses in the North. These would have probably suffered some damage in the wars with the Valar, so the array of east-west trending ranges in the North could be all that is left.
The Map
The completed map has had the natural vegetation zones added essentially as they are at present. One exception is the Tibetan plateau, which has been slightly changed from Tundra to Taiga, or pine forest. This provides a vast woodland, the Wild Wood, in which all the world’s elves lived until they were encouraged to travel West.
For curiosity, I have tried to work out where Angband and Utumno were.
Angband, the later capital of Morgoth, is included in a sketch map made by J.R.R Tolkien, but it was left off of the map finished and published by Christopher Tolkien. Some people have used some text regarding how far it was for an orc to march to suggest it is further North, but I prefer the location on Tolkien’s sketch map. I have it in about the position of Rockall.
Utumno, the first great fortress of Morgoth, of which Angband was just a gate, is also debateable. However, the Ambarkanta Map V (above) shows it just north of the Iron Mountains about the same longitude as the Blue Mountains. This places it on my map about the location of the Faeroe Islands.
One further place I have included is Hildorien, where humans first awoke. Although by looking at Ambarkanta maps it would seem to be somewhere in East or Southeast Asia, I have put it in China partly because it is the location of the Peking Man site of Zhoukoudian (there is a small dot on the map). As Tolkien would probably have been aware, the origins of Modern Humans in China were something that had great traction in the mid-20th century, only surpassed as accepted canon by 1967 when Africa was shown to be the most likely origin.
Our understanding of our world changed a great deal between the publication of The Lord of the Rings in 1954 and Tolkien’s death in 1973. Plate tectonics changed how we understood the formation of the features of the Earth. In 1958 Tolkien had said in a letter (№ 211) that the events of Lord of the Rings were set six thousand years ago, but the development of Radiocarbon Dating extended Prehistory further back. Six thousand years ago we saw the foundations of urban civilisation in the Ubaid Period of southern Iraq.
So it is hardly surprising that Tolkien’s views on his creation changed over this time. Hopefully, he would look on my map and think I had given it a good try, then write a four-page letter on what I had got wrong.
