![]() I’m sure the professor would not mind, as he said himself that he knew the scale of Middle-Earth did not match Europe, and only by changing the scale in this way is it possible to see the true nature of his world.įor this to make sense then, I needed two definite geographic points in Europe. The second thing I did was discard the normal scaling of Tolkien’s map, and lengthened and compressed it to fit the whole of Europe. The Ice Age landscape of Doggerland fits the bill perfectly. Tolkien told us that the Europe of Frodo’s day looked very different from ours- "Those days, the Third Age of Middle-earth, are now long past, and the shape of all lands has been changed." Tolkien made estimations in his letters of how long ago his stories would have taken place, and the period before the sinking of Doggerland in 6500 BC does come close to his estimations. The landscape shown in this map would have been the general look of Europe until around 6500 BC when Doggerland finished its gradual sinking into the waters. The map below shows Europe during the last glacial maximum, when the British Isles were still connected to the mainland by a landmass called “Doggerland”. Tolkien’s story is set in an ancient European pre-history, and must be set before the great floods and events that “changed all lands”. I did two things differently than most that have tried to overlay these maps.įirstly, I decided to try a map of Ice-Age Europe instead of a modern map. I wanted to test if there is something more to his map-making, and his world of Middle-Earth that feels so real.Īfter doing this, I believe I can prove that Tolkien’s Middle-Earth is a map of Ice-Age Europe. With the exception of the Shire, nothing ever looked to be in its proper place. I never thought these map projections felt right. It seems an entirely fictional map of an entirely fictional world.īut if you know much about Tolkien, you know that his intent was to write European mythology, not “fantasy”. Mordor is in the Mediterranean, the sea of Rhün is in the middle of nowhere, the misty mountains are in the ocean, etc.
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