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The Wisconsin cartographer who mapped Tolkien's fantasy world

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233 points bookofjoe | 1 comments | 11 Apr 25 17:26 UTC | HN request time: 0.383s | source
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zem ◴[14 Apr 25 22:19 UTC] No.43686912[source]▶
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.
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1. prawn ◴[15 Apr 25 03:57 UTC] No.43688847[source]▶
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.