Apostrophe S

I stumbled across an excellent scalable vector-drawn map of Middle-Earth, of which the above image is a tight crop of, courtesy of Lords of Blah. (Although their Website seems to be flooded. And by that I don’t mean overcome with hits, I mean completely covered in water. Anyway…)

Reading “The Silmarillion” has greatly added to my understanding of Tolkien’s work and intentions with the LOTR trilogy. If the works of Tolkien have one thing, it is a commanding sense of space. Very few created worlds have the depth of detail and history that Tolkien’s Arda (his name for the world) has. Even the universe of Dune, which I would nominate as another enormously detailed fantastic world, doesn’t have that “these places once existed” feel to it that Middle-Earth has.

Anyway, I love this scalable map, because if I ever wanted to make a wall mural of Tolkien’s Middle-Earth, I wouldn’t have to draw it by hand. That said, I think the vector graphics take away much if not all of the hand-drawn quality found in maps included in Tolkien’s works. I may have to take this map and add some color, perhaps mess with some background colors.

Also, the whole reason I sought out Middle-Earth maps was to figure out why the map in the back of “The Silmarillion” seemed to have no relation to the map in the trilogy. Turns out parts of Middle-Earth were torn asunder in a great war written about in a chapter I’ve yet to get to. The map of Beleriand deserves a vector treatment as well. Maybe I’ll make that a project…