Cover not available
Part of
Maps and Mapping in Children's Literature: Landscapes, seascapes and cityscapes
Edited by Nina Goga and Bettina Kümmerling-Meibauer
[Children’s Literature, Culture, and Cognition 7] 2017
► pp. 221–237

Chapter 12
Mapping Middle Earth

A Tolkienian legacy

In this chapter, J. R. R. Tolkien’s fantasy maps in The Hobbit (1937) and The Lord of the Rings (1954–55) are assessed and analyzed. The analysis shows that the five maps – two in The Hobbit and three in The Lord of the Rings – are less uniform than one would assume. It is also clear that the maps in The Hobbit represent a more child-oriented aesthetics than in the latter work. A few examples are then given of how Tolkien’s maps have influenced subsequent writers of fantasy. Finally, it is demonstrated how the Tolkienian fantasy map is transformed when it is moved from the printed page to the screen.

Article outline
  • Introduction
  • The map iconotext
  • Maps in travel tales and adventure stories
  • The Hobbit: The map of Wilderland and Thror’s map
  • The three maps of The Lord of the Rings
  • In the Tolkien tradition: A Song of Ice and Fire
  • The Chamber of the Painted Table
  • Dynamic maps: From Middle Earth to Westeros
  • Author queries
  • Notes
  • References
Published online: 14 August 2017
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/clcc.7.13sun
References

Primary sources

Adams, Richard
1972 Watership Down. London: Rex Collings.Google Scholar
Beard, Henry N. & Kenney, Douglas
1969 Bored of the Rings. New York NY: Signet.Google Scholar
Benioff, David & Weiss, D.B.
(producers) 2011ff Game of Thrones (TV series). USA: HBO.Google Scholar
Haggard, H. Rider
2008 She. London: OUP (first published 1887).Google Scholar
Jackson, Peter
(director) 2001 The Fellowship of the Ring. New Zealand: Wingnut.Google Scholar
Martin, George R. R.
1996 A Game of Thrones. New York NY: Bantam.Google Scholar
2011 A Storm of Swords. New York NY: Bantam (first published 2000).Google Scholar
Milne. A. A.
2005 Winnie-the-Pooh. London: Penguin (first published 1926).Google Scholar
Perumov, Nick
2010 Alvklingan. Stockholm: Coltso (first published 1993).Google Scholar
Rowling, Joanne K.
1999 Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban. London: Bloomsbury.Google Scholar
Stevenson, Robert Louis
2011 Treasure Island. Oxford: OUP (first published 1883).Google Scholar
Swift, Jonathan
1992 Gulliver’s Travels. London: Wordsworth (first published 1726).Google Scholar
Tolkien, John R. R.
1968 The Lord of the Rings. London: Allen & Unwin (first published 1954–1955).Google Scholar
2002 The Hobbit. New York: Harper Collins (first published 1937).Google Scholar

Secondary sources

Anderson, Douglas
1988 The Annotated Hobbit. London: Unwin.Google Scholar
Appelo, Tim
2011 Secrets behind “Game of thrones” opening credits. Hollywood Reporter. 19 April 2011. [URL] (21 February 2015).
Bracher, Frederick
1944 The maps in “Gulliver’s Travels”. Huntington Library Quarterly 8.1: 59–74. [URL] (21 February 2015).
Brückner, Patrick
2008 “Until the dragon comes”: Tolkien’s dragon-motif as a poetological concept. In Tolkien’s Shorter Works: Essays of the Jena Conference 2007, Margaret Hiley & Frank Weinreich (eds), 101–135. Zurich: Walking Tree.Google Scholar
Campbell, Alice
2006 Maps. In J. R. R. Tolkien Encyclopedia: Scholarship and Critical Assessment, Michael D. C. Drout (ed.), 405–408. New York NY: Routledge.Google Scholar
Carpenter, Humphrey
2011 The Letters of J. R. R. Tolkien. Boston MA: Houghton Mifflin.Google Scholar
De Certeau, Michel
2002 The Practice of Everyday Life. Berkeley CA: University of California Press (first published 1984).Google Scholar
Ekman, Stefan
2010 Writing Worlds, Reading Landscapes: An Exploration of Settings in Fantasy. PhD dissertation, Lund University.Google Scholar
Genette, Gerard
1997 Paratexts: Thresholds of Interpretation, trans. J. E. Lewin. Cambridge: CUP. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Goga, Nina
2015 Kart i barnelitteraturen. Kristiansand: Portal Akademisk.Google Scholar
Hallberg, Kristin
1982 Litteraturvetenskapen och bilderboksforskningen. Tidskrift för litteraturvetenskap 3–4: 163–168.Google Scholar
Hammond, Wayne G. & Scull, Christina
1995 J. R. R. Tolkien – Artist and Illustrator. Boston MA: Houghton Mifflin.Google Scholar
Honeyman, Susan E.
2001 Childhood bound: In gardens, maps, and pictures. Mosaic: A Journal for the Interdisciplinary Study of Literature 34(2): 117–132.Google Scholar
Lefebvre, Henri
1991 The Production of Space, trans. Donald Nicholson-Smith. Oxford: Basil Blackwell (first published 1974).Google Scholar
Meissner, Corey
2011 “Reading is meant for training”: Maps, Nation and Empire in British Children’s Literature, 1800–1940. MA thesis, University of South Carolina.Google Scholar
Mendlesohn, Farah
2008 Rhetorics of Fantasy. Middletown CT: Wesleyan University Press.Google Scholar
Nelson, Dale
2006 Literary influences, nineteenth and twentieth centuries. In J. R. R. Tolkien Encyclopedia: Scholarship and Critical Assessment, Michael D. C. Drout (ed.), 366–377. New York NY: Routledge.Google Scholar
Nikolajeva, Maria & Scott, Carole
2001 How Picturebooks Work. New York NY: Garland.Google Scholar
Pavlik, Anthony
2010 “A special kind of reading game”: Maps in children’s literature. International Research in Children’s Literature 3: 28–43. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Sundmark, Björn
2014a “Dragons be here”: Teaching children’s literature and creative writing with the help of maps. In Thinking through Children’s Literature in the Classroom, Agustín Reyes-Torres, Luis S. Villacañas-de-Castro & Betlem Soler-Pardo (eds), 64–77. Newcastle-upon-Tyne: Cambridge Scholars.Google Scholar
2014b “A serious game”: Mapping Moominland. The Lion and the Unicorn 38: 162–181. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
2014c “En hobbit och ett mumintroll skulle kunna mötas i bästa sämja”: Receptionen av Bilbo, en hobbits äventyr (1962). Barnboken 37(2): 1–17.Google Scholar
Tolkien, J. R. R.
2001 On fairy stories. In Tree and Leaf, by J. R. R. Tolkien. London: Harper Collins. 11–70 (first published 1934).Google Scholar
Cited by

Cited by 1 other publications

Goga, Nina
2017. Chapter 13. Landscapes of growth, faith, and doubt. In Maps and Mapping in Children's Literature [Children’s Literature, Culture, and Cognition, 7], DOI logo

This list is based on CrossRef data as of 12 april 2024. Please note that it may not be complete. Sources presented here have been supplied by the respective publishers. Any errors therein should be reported to them.