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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)
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