XPost: alt.obituaries, alt.fan.tolkien
Big Mongo <
bigmongo1963@biteme.com> wrote:
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/01/13/obituaries/karen-wynn-fonstad- overlooked.html
Overlooked No More: Karen Wynn Fonstad, Who Mapped Tolkien’s Middle-earth
She was a novice cartographer who landed a dream assignment: to create an atlas of the setting of “The Hobbit” and “The Lord of the Rings.”
By Brian Kevin
Jan. 13, 2025
This article is part of Overlooked, a series of obituaries about
remarkable people whose deaths, beginning in 1851, went unreported in The Times.
In 1977, Karen Wynn Fonstad made a long shot cold call to J.R.R. Tolkien’s American publisher with the hope of landing a dream assignment: to create
an exhaustive atlas of Middle-earth, the setting of the author’s widely popular “The Hobbit” and “The Lord of the Rings.”
To her surprise, an editor agreed.
Fonstad spent two and a half years on the project, reading through the
novels line by line and painstakingly indexing any text from which she
could infer geographic details. With two young children at home, she
mostly worked at night. Her husband left notes on her drafting table reminding her to go to bed.
Her resulting book, “The Atlas of Middle-earth” (1981), wowed Tolkien fans
and scholars with its exquisite level of topographic detail; the most
recent paperback edition is in its 32nd printing.
The first edition of “The Atlas of Middle-earth” contained 172 maps, which
Fonstad drew by hand. Each was accompanied by reflections on her
methodology and assumptions, along with topics like the bedrock morphology
of the Shire, settlement patterns in Gondor and plate tectonics in Mordor.
A 1991 revised edition incorporated details from nine volumes of “The History of Middle-earth,” a trove of formerly unpublished Tolkien material edited by the author’s son Christopher. The revised atlas, still in print, has been translated into nearly a dozen languages.
I believe I have the first edition (somewhere on a shelf)
and should probably get the second.
Nonetheless,I was underwhelmed when I got the one I read
because of its being pitched as the work of a professional
geographer yet lacking the one thing that would clearly
distinguish a "real" atlas from the maps-of-fantasy-worlds
one sees in works of fiction...typeset rather than handwritten
lettering.
If you want to "suspend disbelief" that the map you see
is of an imagined rather than concrete realm,that is the
key element...without it,one only has more of what the
books already have,not something different.
For all her devotion to fantasy worlds, Fonstad was bemused by the rise of fan culture. She rarely accepted invites to conventions or conferences, claiming she was too thin-skinned to field criticism. But her reluctance softened near the end of her life, as Peter Jackson’s “Lord of the Rings”
film trilogy made the characters Frodo and Bilbo Baggins household names.
In 2004, at a conference in Atlanta, she met Alan Lee, the films’ Oscar- winning conceptual designer, who mentioned that her atlas had been a vital resource for his team.
His artwork may have merit,his complicity in filmmaking can not.
“Nothing could have made my mother happier in the last few months of her life,” her son, Mark Fonstad, an associate professor of geography at the University of Oregon, said in an interview. “She very much enjoyed those movies, even though she was among the 1 percent of people who could have nitpicked every difference from the books.”
Never leave any nit unpicked when it comes to Tolkien purism!
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