Middle Earth with a twist

[MikeBeehan]

Hope you enjoy this Map of middle earth in relation to Europe


Hours of research

[adunakhor]

really great idea! love the map and the colors

[tilt]

fun stuff... I'd suggest putting it up as a jpg next time, the size will be smaller and it will be directly viewable in a browser window

[MikeBeehan]

thanks yeahh sorry lol totally forgot

[Redrobes]

Cool. Didnt JRRT put the shire notionally over Oxford tho ? I like the map and its very well done. I have heard lots about this relationship with Europe in the past and I am not real scholarly about it but it would seem odd that they would go to Rivendell all up the map and then sail down the Anduin to end up at Mordor. I leave all these interpretations to more knowledgeable people but even to me there seems to be a pretty strong correlation between the two and JRRT did mention that they were the same place at different times.

[feanaaro]

I think people already pointed out elsewhere (in the website were the map was originally published perhaps?) that the map had to go through extensive torsions and rotations to make it corresponds in this way. So, it is really "twisted" indeed, but it cannot correspond perfectly to ME as mapped by Tolkien. Though it is possible to imagine that in-between there has been a shift in Earth's axis and other cataclisms which shiftet the land's position and the like. But still, no perfect direct correspondence is here to be found.

[monks]

I saw this map some years ago when we first looked into the whole idea of M-E as Earth, I think it was on some UC Berkely site or something. Yes, its very interesting. Yes, Sarehole in Birmingham, and Florence as Minas Tirith. Going to Rivendell was just a case of travelling straight east, and it meant, apart from the Council of Elrond (very important), that they could travel on a decent road- but of course they ended up having to leave the road with Aragorn because of the Black Riders. Tolkien did say that he'd wished he'd planned from the beginning better for all of the geography and geology I think in his letters, but his ideas evolved through the years, and as anybody who knows who starts on a big project, sometimes in order to keep going forward, you have to accept some imperfections and regrets.I used the Carpathians for Mordor- you have to look at them on the map to see the visual similarity, then there's the so called Iron Gate from Roman times, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iron_Gate_(Danube)

monks