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It is no secret that J R R Tolkien borrowed most of his concepts and images from European culture and history to create The Lord of the Rings. It is also well-known that Tolkien relied on Europe to design his Middle-earth, and many of his mountain ranges appear to be merely flipped from their real counterparts. That is what makes criticism of the physical aspects of Middle-earth so strange.

Earlier this month, an obscure online science fiction blog, Tor, ran an article criticizing Tolkien’s map of Middle-earth. Their problem was one of geology, and the headline blares, “Tolkien’s Map and The Messed Up Mountains of Middle-earth.”

From the beginning, the author declares, “To understand all of the hair-tearing I do every time I look at this map, we need to understand where mountains come from…. The big thing to keep in mind is that mountain ranges are the fingerprints left behind by tectonic activity.”

On the surface, this seems fine. However, the article provides an extremely simplistic summary of mountain formation and ignores the effects of erosion in shaping hills and valleys. The writer spends most of the time talking about general plate tectonics, which cannot apply because there is no information available to understand the structure of tectonic plates in Middle-earth.

This problem gets worse when the writer claims, “Which brings us back to the map of Middle-earth. There’s some weird stuff going on with these mountain ranges. To illustrate, I’ve added some lines to the map so you can more clearly see what I see whenever I look at it…. But when you throw in the near perpendicular north and south mountain ranges? Why are there corners? Mountains don’t do corners.”

Here is the map the author created:

The use of hard lines ignores many mountains and hills that surround these areas, providing a much softer curvature than what is on the map. Furthermore, this is a sketch that does not reveal elevation or serve as a relief map of the locations, making it difficult to provide such a claim.

Ignoring these major flaws in the argument, there is something more: the map is based on the actual mountains of Europe.

Here is how Europe looks using the same simplistic mountain line technique:

Furthermore, a more honest approach to describing the map undermines all of the critical points lodged against Tolkien’s map. Here is a Middle-earth map with lines drawn from peak to peak:

Large valleys and plains no longer have lines drawn through them. We are able to see the space where the vast Pelennor Fields belong and the “Gap of Rohan” is now a gap once more. Curves of the mountain ranges are now more obvious. The spacing between ranges are now more obvious.

Now, the matching locations are more obvious. For instance, Gondor has similar features to the Carpathian Mountains and the Alps:

Similarly, Mordor matches the Carpathian Mountains on their own taken at another angle:

The structure of Middle-earth in the revised map now more closely resembles features of the Alpine belt, which dominates much of Europe, turned 180 degrees at some points. This was intentional, as Tolkien explained in a letter (#294, The Letters of J.R.R. Tolkien) that the geography was parallel to Europe’s: “The action of the story takes place in the North-west of ‘Middle-earth’, equivalent in latitude to the coastlands of Europe and the north shores of the Mediterranean.”

This is not to claim that Middle-earth is Europe or that the two can be conflated. Instead, aspects of Middle-earth are based on physical and cultural aspects of Medieval Europe to provide a familiar landscape to readers.

Every geological feature the writer criticizes in Tolkien’s map can be found in Europe. When the writer says, “all you have to do is look at a topographic map of the world around us to get a sense of where mountains might naturally grow. There aren’t right angles in the mountain ranges of Earth. Trust me, I’ve looked,” then how do you explain the Carpathian Mountains?

The Tor article demonstrates the fundamental problem with clickbait articles: they make broad claims without backing them simply to latch onto something popular. Often, they play hard and loose with the facts and ignore where the author originally got his information. If this writer looked into Tolkien’s background and then looked at a map of Europe, then this article probably would not exist.

Editors’ Note: The first paragraph was slightly reworded to clarify Tolkien’s reliance on cultural, historical, and topographical aspects of Europe.