Despite this, it’s pretty topographically accurate to the original maps that Tolkien first created. We’re guessing those will probably be opened closer to the The Desolation of Smaug‘s release date. Why else would you have a Middle Earth map and not feature Hobbiton, Osgiliath, Isengard, or even Mordor? Instead, all we get is Trollshaw, Rivendell, and Dol Guldur, with “locked” markers at Thranduil’s Hall, Lake Town, and The Lonely Mountain.
Unfortunately, it’s not a complete map, and appears to only show locations that were featured in the last movie installment, An Unexpected Journey. Now they’ve given us an interactive map of Middle Earth to play around with. Then there was the Street view TARDIS easter egg, located… well, wherever the hell it wants, because it’s a time machine. First there was their Street view tour of Diagon Alley, located at the Warner Brothers studios in England. This map taken here from professor Bird’s page at UCLA.Google Maps has been good to us nerds. The Bay of Belfalas is the western part of the Mediterranean.Haradwaith is the eastern part of North Africa, Umbar corresponds with the Maghreb, the western part of North Africa.The Sea of Rhûn corresponds to the Black Sea.
To the north is Mirkwood, further east are Rhovanion and the wastes of Rhûn, close to the Ural mountains.Also in Germany, but to the north, near present-day Hamburg, is Isengard. Rohan is in southern Germany, with Edoras at the foot of the Bavarian Alps.Mordor is situated in Transylvania, with Mount Doom in Romania (probably), Minas Morgul in Hungary (approximately) and Minas Tirith in Austria (sort of).Gondor corresponds with the northern Italian plains, extended towards the unsubmerged Adriatic Sea.The mountain chain of Ered Nimrais is the Alps.Helm’s Deep is near the Franco-German-Swiss border tripoint, close to the city of Basel.The Grey Havens are situated in Ireland.The Shire is in the South-West of England, which further north is also home to the Old Forest (Yorkshire?), the Barrow Downs (north of England), the city of Bree (at or near Newcastle-upon-Tyne) and Amon Sul (Scottish Highlands).Bird, a professor of Geophysics and Geology at UCLA, has overlapped the map of Middle-earth with one of Europe, which leads to following locations: The correct term for the total world is Arda – probably derived from German Erde (‘Earth’) and only first mentioned posthumously in the Silmarillion (1977) and Eä (for the whole Universe).īut, as Tolkien states in the prologue to ‘The Lord of the Rings’, it would be fruitless to look for geographical correspondences, as “Those days, the Third Age of Middle-earth, are now long past, and the shape of all lands has been changed…” And yet, that’s exactly what Peter Bird attempts with the map here shown. That term doesn’t thus describe the entirety of the world Tolkien thought up. The world of men is the one in the middle, called Midgard, Middenheim or Middle-earth. Tolkien didn’t create Middle-earth ex nihilo: ancient Germanic myths divide the Universe in nine worlds, inhabited by elves, dwarves, giants, etc.
At the time of the events described in ‘The Hobbit’ and ‘The Lord of the Rings’, Middle-earth is moving towards the end of its Third Age, about 6.000 years ago. Tolkien’s invented mythology centered on an epic story of the struggle between Good and Evil, but it also included an elaborate backstory, a complex of languages, genealogies, cultures and peoples – and a map.Ĭreated by Tolkien somewhere in the 1930s, the map shows the ‘mortal lands’ of Middle-earth, which according to Tolkien himself is part of our own Earth, but in a previous, mythical era.