The imaginary nature of Tolkien’s Middle Earth has not stopped fans from creating their own detailed pictures of the world. This map of Gondor is a small section of a gigantic map created for the Northwestern Middle-Earth Gazetteer by Mark Rabuck, 1992
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.
