Tolkien was at pains to ensure that everything was drawn accurately. This map shows us just how specific he was in his conceptions of this world – it wasn’t just dreamt out of nothing. This rare piece of Tolkien ephemera captures many of the same preoccupations, and provides direct insight into the author’s creative imagination, his conception of Middle-earth, and its relationship to the real world.īased on earlier designs by Tolkien’s son Christopher, the map was extracted from an edition of The Lord of the Rings in the late 1960s, and served as a working document – used by Tolkien and illustrator Pauline Baynes to develop a new poster depicting Middle-earth.
‘Whether it was Piers Ploughman or Beowulf, it was an important medieval motif: the question of how different landscapes, real or imagined, actual or symbolic, might relate to one another.’ ‘The whole idea of place was very important to him, and to the kind of early literature in which he was interested’, explains Dr Christopher Fletcher, Keeper of Special Collections at the Bodleian Library. The acquisition was made possible thanks to generous support from the V&A Purchase Grant Fund, the Kenneth Rose Fund and the Friends of the Bodleian.įor Tolkien, maps played a central role in storytelling, and in enriching the authenticity of his imagined world. The Bodleian Library has recently acquired a rare, annotated map of Middle-earth, the fantasy world setting for J R R Tolkien’s novels The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings.
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