Silmarillion Maps

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Foundedin 2005, the Silmarillion Writers' Guild exists for discussions of and creative fanworks based on J.R.R. Tolkien's The Silmarillion and related texts. We are a positive-focused and open-minded space that welcomes fans from all over the world and with all levels of experience with Tolkien's works. Whether you are picking up Tolkien's books for the first time or have been a fan for decades, we welcome you to join us!

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Tuor finds creative ways to deliver Ulmo's prophecies and convince the people of Gondolin that The End Is Near. Voronwe tries to keep Tuor out of trouble while coping with his own traumatic experience of being chosen by Ulmo. Humour, mostly.

Tolkien Fanfiction Survey data shows that authors view comments as driving their motivation to create fanfiction. However, perception of comments by authors is part of a larger shift in fandom around how and how often fans interact with each other.

The arrival and departure of ships across the Great Sea carries mythic significance for the peoples of Middle-earth. The image of ships crossing out of and back into a mysterious West appears as well in Beowulf and is alluded to in Tolkien's tower analogy in his lecture "Beowulf: The Monsters and the Critics," where the tower allows those who climb it to observe the passage of the ships.

So gathered they were to Bree, what lieutenants who could be spared, from their scattered watches west and east, for their chieftain had returned from his long sojourn in lands godless and mountains strange.

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Maps were essential to the creation of Tolkien's legendarium. He drew them not only as aides for the reader in his published works, in forms which were extended and perfected by his son Christopher, but as aids to composition and conception in his private notes, in forms he never meant to be published. I discovered when researching the maps and plans I've made around Tolkien's work that if you know his maps, then reading the stories feels completely different. You can track the narrator's eye as it roves over the face of a spatially coherent geography.

Like so much in The Silmarillion, this major event is condensed to a few lines and the full implications are easily overlooked. Yet while most fan maps focus on later Ages, Casei Solus came in at the same point as the Valar, creating the only vision of Arda I know of in its primordial state.

Matej Cadil, a traditional artist and illustrator from Prague for whom Tolkien is a great love and inspiration, responded to an Inktober prompt layers" with his stylised version of The Ambarkanta, cleverly combining the different layers of atmosphere from Diagram I with the lands shown in Map V.

Italian fantasy artist and art teacher Fabio Porfidia felt it was a pity that such a beautiful idea had never been refined to a proper illustration, and decided to re-create a personal version of this view of Arda while keeping as faithful as possible to the original design. Although created with digital media, his use of simulated pen and ink lends the drawing a classic feel well suited to the subject, while rendering it in this angle of view affords us an added sense of depth and placement of the features.

Considering that they had no precedent, we can perhaps forgive the Valar for being rather unimaginative in their initial ordering of the lands and sea, keeping everything all neatly symmetrical: a round island centred in a circular lake at the middle of the world. The two Lamps they built to illuminate it each mirrored the other, one to the north, one in the south, so that their light met and mingled at the centre.

Behind the walls of the Pelri the Valar established their domain in that region which is called Valinor; and there were their houses, their gardens, and their towers. In that guarded land the Valar gathered great store of light and all the fairest things that were saved from the ruin; and many others yet fairer they made anew, and Valinor became more beautiful even than Middle-earth in the Spring of Arda.9

After the toppling of the Lamps and the utter ruin of Middle-earth, the Valar moved west to set up home in Valinor on the continent of Aman. The only visual references Tolkien gave us for these lands are the rough sketches of his two Ambarkanta maps, containing just a few major landmarks. As such fans have had to extrapolate locations for the rest from the various texts, and this has resulted in the widest range of cartographic interpretations. (Other than the lands to the east and south of Middle-earth, as we shall see in Part IV.

Jamie Whyte created his own interpretation of the Undying Lands in the form of a relief map, providing us with a good idea of the path of the light of the Trees through the Calacirya, and the immense height and steepness of the Pelri Mountains.

Nelman Black experienced the utility of this when he began work on The Aman Project as an aid to faithfully recreating the Undying Lands within Minecraft Middle-Earth. Starting with extensive research drawn from all parts of the legendarium, he soon found himself making a map as an easy way to understand how everything fitted together across the continent, ultimately providing a solid base upon which to lay out a believable world. He says:

It was suggested to Bunn that she make a map of Tirion, so she did! And in the process quite likely put a lot more thought into realistic details than Tolkien did, resulting in this creative work of cartographic art.

Tirion is supplied with water from a reservoir in the foothills of the Pelri, via an aqueduct that runs to the great tower of the Mindon Eldaliva, where Ingw lived when he first came to Valinor. The large building with two wings next to it on the Great Square is the House of Finw, built with Light-gardens to the west, and a Star-garden to the east.

When Finw remarried, Fanor moved out and got married himself. I think his house is one of the houses about halfway up the hill, conveniently located for access to the warehouses and workshops of the Fanorian Quarter, clustered in the best light beside the gate.

In the Years of the Trees, the light in Tirion came from the west and slightly from the south, so that the lake of Luvailin, or Shadowmere, was always in the shadow of the hill, and the lights on the star-side of Tirion reflected in the water.

This imaginative map of the City of Bells was created for The New Notion Club Archives, an open project wiki dedicated to subcreation within Tolkien's world. Originally set up to preserve out-of-print and fan-made material for roleplaying games, it expanded to include the broader field of subcreation. As such, most of the content contains headcanons more than canon.

Although a Tolkien fan since childhood, Anrea only discovered this fandom in 2021. With just a smattering of creative nonfiction and no academic writing experience, she's somewhat surprised but delighted to find herself writing now. She spends far too much time diving down enticing rabbit holes (and their tangential warrens) in the name of research, and there are usually more deleted words in any of her works than the final word count. She nonetheless thoroughly enjoys the process. She particularly appreciates serving as SWG art editor because it provides the perfect excuse to devote hours to scrolling through Tolkien fanart.

Haha! Ok, I promise I'll at least share it with you, when I find it in the chaos that is my half-moved state for the next however long. (Long story, more suitabl to be shared over wine and chocolate than comments!)

....especially old maps, and Tolkien maps - original, professional or fan-made - have always fallen into the "old maps" category in my head (especially as I worked for a city government engineering department for several years drawing boring technical maps of roads, sewer and utility lines and new junction layouts). The inventiveness and beauty of the maps you've talked about here are fantastic, and I look forward to reading and discovering more.

Characters and stories associated with J.R.R. Tolkien's works remain the property of his estate. Creative work using this material has been written solely for the enjoyment and enlightenment of its creator and their associates. No profit is made on the materials shared on this site.

ANSWER: I am not aware of any such maps, although I have reviewed many attempts to join them. Unfortunately I cannot find the reference as I write this article (hence, my memory of the passage may be wrong), but I believe that Christopher Tolkien suggested in The History of Middle-earth that (one of) the Silmarillion (maps) and (one of the) Lord of the Rings maps could be viewed side-by-side if the Silmarillion map was adjusted to half-scale.

Assuming one reproduced scans of these grid-lined maps such that four of the Silmarillion grid-boxes fit within 1 of the LoTR grid-boxes, you might be able to approximate an overlap between the two regions.

UPDATED 2020: The Tolkien Compass published a reasonable attempt to combine the maps on Facebook. You can see the graphic here (no Facebook account required). But see below for why this is a misleading hybridization.

One such difference may be the Isle of Balar, which should have still existed at the beginning of the Second Age (even if it had begun to sink) simply because that was where Gil-galad, Cirdan, and most of the last surviving Sindar and Noldor (and maybe some Edain) had taken refuge. Also, when the Gulf of Lune was created, were the mountains pushed apart or were some mountains simply destroyed so that they sank?

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