The Wisconsin cartographer who mapped Tolkien's fantasy world

I love fantasy in general, and have read a ton of it. other than tolkien, I have never read a novel with that strong a sense of geography in a constructed world - specifically, that there is an entire rich land out there, and not just a graph of interesting places with the focus shifting from one point to another. when the hobbits have to go from the shire to rivendell, or aragorn has to take the paths of the dead to reach his destination in time, tolkien really manages to convey the experience of a difficult journey that takes a significant amount of time even when nothing plot-significant is happening along the way.

Pratchett's Discworld is pretty well mapped out and that which is left to the imagination is well described. Death's house and garden seem almost tangible ...

pratchett is my all time favourite writer, and I love the discworld series, but I never got a good sense of the "spaces between" the way tolkien could do it - e.g. the logistics of traveling from ankh morpork to the ramtops were alluded to, but the journey scenes never really came alive for me in the way that scenes set within ankh morpork did.

the deverry series did come close, and to some extent the wheel of time books (though it's been a while since I read those).

On the flip side, given how difficult the journey was from the Shire to the Misty Mountain, it always bugged me that it seemed like Bilbo got home pretty easily.

Bilbo crossed the Misty Mountains back during the spring.

I am currently re-reading LOTR in my forties and having done quite a lot of hiking since my childhood read-throughs, and filming various landscapes from the air, I think I have a much greater appreciation of his descriptions. The journeys remind me a lot of backcountry hiking. A friend is reading the books to his son and they are finding the landscape descriptions thoroughly tedious. To me, they rarely seem long-winded and I enjoy slowing down to make sure I have more than a vague idea of what he's describing.

I wonder quite frequently whether he had photos or views of actual places, or a strong and consistent imagination for each area, or perhaps just that this was something that mattered enough personally that he put in the detail where others did not.

I'm a couple of pages from finishing The Two Towers and feel like Frodo and Sam's journey there is an especially good example of the spaces between. They pass through a broad variety of landscapes and you get a great sense of the transitions from craggy rocks down gullies to marshes. Or from badlands to Ithilien.

This time Bilbo had Maiar escort (and full attention) all the way, and local orcs were basically just wiped out. Makes things a lot easier.

Agreed. Whenever he is describing the terrain somewhere it is either fairly generic or specifically a parody. Hence the plains around Ankh Morpork where all the farms grow brassicas and nothing else. Cabbages, broccoli, turnips, mustard, collard greens, and so on for hundreds of miles around.