Karen Wynn Fonstad was a cartographer who exhaustively mapped J.R.R. Tolkien’s Middle-earth, the setting of “The Hobbit” and “The Lord of the

Overlooked No More: Karen Wynn Fonstad, Who Mapped Tolkien’s Middle-earth

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2025-01-14 01:30:04

Karen Wynn Fonstad was a cartographer who exhaustively mapped J.R.R. Tolkien’s Middle-earth, the setting of “The Hobbit” and “The Lord of the Rings.”

She used a grid system to index locations without latitude and longitude (marked by letters and numbers along the edges), as ancient Middle-earth is canonically flat; the world only later became spherical.

She wrote that determining distances was a challenge: “Tolkien’s usage of leagues, furlongs, fathoms and ells added to the mystique and feeling of history — and to the bewilderment of the mapmaker.”

Fonstad’s accompanying commentary considers real-world forces that might have shaped fantasy landscapes — such as whether a caldera collapse formed Tolkien’s orc-filled Udûn valley.

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.”