Zooming in to this detail from a lovely map of Zurich by Janssonius (1680), you can clearly see the shaded symbols used for mountains, the little trees that indicate forests, and towers rising up from the cities. The entire map comes alive and one can almost picture little people working in the fields, or deer prancing in the wood.
I saw this seventeenth century map of Bergen by the Dutch cartographer Jan Janssonius and thought it looked an awful lot like Tolkien’s map of Beleriand. Of course I have it all backward, because Tolkien copied Jansson’s style, but I read Lord Of The Rings when I was a kid, so that is how the association works in my mind. To this day when I think about maps, I think about sugarloaf mountains and little trees.
