I’ve been listening to The Lord of the Rings on audio for the past few months, and usually in the car during my commute. Regularly I find myself trying to remember the layout of Middle Earth and find I am unable to do so. I resolve as soon as I get where I’m going I’ll look it up–surely there’s a map online somewhere. But invariably I forget by the time I get there.
Today I remembered. I really don’t remember it well at all. Whereas the flow of the story over the land runs mostly northwest to southeast, in my mind it goes more east-west. In reality, The Hobbit runs more east-west. Most of the important events in The Lord of the Rings occur within about four-hundred miles, though they travel two to three times that distance from The Shire to Barad-dur.
While perusing that map, I began wondering how the lands described in The Silmarilion line up with the geography, so I did some more searching. You would think it does, as there are some common land features, like the Blue Mountains, and the place on the map that that claims to be the old witch-realm of Angmar. But though some people have tried to knit the maps together, there is clearly something missing–something Tolkien never committed to paper himself. It’s difficult to say if we’ll ever really know how it all fit together.
But as I continued to study the maps I found my eyes continually drawn to the edges, and I find myself wondering what lies beyond. What would we find if we wandered beyond Rhûn, or headed east out of Mordor? What lays beyond South Gondor? And what would we find out beyond Harad? There’s always another frontier to explore.
I think, as rich as it was, there was a limit to even Tolkien’s imagination. Though me may have known the answers to some of my questions, I suspect there had to come a point when he’d have to say, “I don’t know, and it doesn’t matter to anything else I’ve written.”
And yet something there is, I suspect, innate to the human mind that always wants to know: What lies beyond this edge? As tempting as it might be to call that the curse of our species, I think it’s actually a gift.
Yeah, what is out there always went through my head, too. I HAVE, at least to my own mind, reconciled the maps in my own head.
You will love this link, Thom. A map with personal notes from the author himself was recently found in the library of his illustrator. http://i100.independent.co.uk/article/a-neverbeforeseen-map-of-middleearth-annotated-by-jrr-tolkien-was-found-in-a-copy-of-the-lord-of-the-rings–WJ9UZQ2zdg
Oh, you know my ever-geeky heart too well! That does sound like the Tolkien I just finished reading about. He was a real stickler and about drove his publisher nuts with the number and depth of edits he’d make to things even after they’d already judged it print-worthy. Not that they’re likely to be complaining now.