Tolkien and maps

[nancylebov]

Watch on YouTube

A dive into Tolkien and maps. In particular, that Tolkien said in a letter to Naomi Mitchison, that "I wisely started with a map". What could he have meant?

We find out that Tolkien certainly didn't start with a map. As we all know, Tolkien started with the languages. Or with an inspiration for the first line of The Hobbit. Or with having a substantial education in old literature and languages. The maps came later, and started with maps of localities where movement needed to be clear, rather than a map of middle earth.

However, apparently some creators take the quote about starting with a map very seriously, and they shouldn't. The video ends with a rant about not letting world-building distract you from writing, though world-building can be a great hobby in itself. There's a lot about the excuses people make to avoid writing, and I don't know how sound it all is.

There is scholarship about Tolkien and maps. Of course there is. I hadn't realized how vague the maps and geography in The Hobbit are compared to LOTR, and how much doesn't match up. I now imagine the Necromancer from The Hobbit waking up in The Lord of the Rings and saying, "Huh? What?".

Anyway, "the Fiery Mountain [from The Hobbit], whose actual placing seems to be entirely vague", from Christopher Tolkien, who made the finished map for LOTR.

The brings back a bit of my headcanon for the Silmarillion. There's mention of a wingless dragon; A wingless dragon seemed a bit odd to me, but alright, it's a wingless dragon. Later in the story, Morgoth(?) has a battle where a dragon would be helpful, but the dragon can't get there in time. And I had a vision of Tolkien with a map and miniatures (I don't think he actually used miniatures, and I don't know whether a literal map was involved) considering how the dragon could be kept out of the fight. I don't know at what point of writing the story Tolkien came up with the dragon.

The video guy is from a game called Monstrous. I needed to sort out that this isn't related to the graphic novel Monstress, which has fabulously beautiful art though I wasn't that interested in the story.

Comments

[calimac]

The video is basically correct. Tolkien worked with a map while writing LR, and tried to make the text match the map rather than vice versa (when they do conflict the map is correct), but the world-creation and story-writing went on at the same time. The important thing the video is trying to say is, Tolkien didn't create the entire world before writing the story. (When elsewhere Tolkien says that he started with the languages, that's also only sort of true, and in any case the creation of the language and of the story went on at the same time, rather than his finishing the one before starting on the other - the story generated new language ideas.)

The video is a little confused about Naomi Mitchison's relation to all this. Mitchison had been reading page-proofs of vols. 1-2 in preparation for writing a book review. The proofs didn't have the maps, hence she had some difficulty understanding the geography. But Tolkien was not already still writing the text at that point (though he was still niggling with the appendices, hence there were yet no proofs of vol. 3).

[thnidu]

"not already still writing the text"? Cannot parse.

[calimac]

"the text" = the story of LR itself, as opposed to the appendices, which he was still working on.

"not already still writing" = he'd finished writing it

[madfilkentist]

Wingless dragons aren't that unusual, especially in Chinese legends.

[andrewducker]

Yup. The dragons in Raya And The Last Dragon also don't have wings. https://www.google.com/search?q=sisu+dragon