nine maps of Arda, in the order the book gets to them. The world is rearranged twice on the way through — once when Beleriand goes under the sea and once when the whole thing is bent into a globe — so it is worth seeing the before and the after rather than holding one map in your head and hoping.
All nine are drawn for this book, by the same image model that draws the chapters — which is why they are on notebook paper. None of them is Tolkien’s own map: the estate’s are in copyright and none is reproduced. The geography came off nine freely licensed maps at Wikimedia Commons, read one description at a time; each map says underneath it which one, and who drew it.
The Ages of the Lamps
Two enormous lamps on two enormous pillars, one at each end of a single continent, and the Valor Squad living on an island in the lake in the middle. This is the arrangement Melvin knocks over in chapter three, and the reason the map never looks like this again.
The Years of the Trees
After the lamps go over, the Valor Squad packs up and moves west to Aman, and the only light in the world is two trees in their garden — Telperion silver, Laurelin gold. Everything green and dark on the right of this picture is Middle-earth, which is where everyone else wakes up.
Arda in the First Age
The world is still a flat disc, the trees are dead, and the last flower and fruit have been hung in the sky as the Moon and the Sun. Note the ship in the middle of the sea, sailing west to Aman: that route is open, and closing it is what chapter 23 is about.
Beleriand
The one map to keep a thumb in. Almost everything between the oath and the drowning happens on this corner of Middle-earth: Thangorodrim and the Iron Mountains walling off the north, the hidden kingdoms scattered below them, and rather fewer rivers in between than anybody defending a border would like.
Tragic Tim's tour of Beleriand
Beleriand again, with the places the curse catches up with him numbered one to five. Two chapters of this book are that route. Reading it as a journey rather than as a list of disasters does not make it shorter, but it does make it clearer whose idea each leg was.
Arda in the Second Age
Hold this one against Beleriand above and you can see exactly what the War of Wrath cost: the whole theatre of the First Age is a pale smear of open water labelled “Beleriand drowned.” The new star-shaped island in the sea is the reward, and it is also chapters 19 through 23.
Númenor
A five-pointed star of an island with a mountain in the middle nobody is allowed to climb, and a sea to the west nobody is allowed to sail across. Every rule on this map is one somebody is going to break.
The Downfall of Númenor
What actually happens in chapter 23, drawn as a before and an after. The island goes under, Aman is taken out of the world altogether, and the flat disc is bent into a globe — so a ship sailing west now comes back round instead of arriving. This is the single largest thing anybody in this book breaks.
Read it with23
Middle-earth at the end of the Third Age
The map most people meet first, arriving last. The Shire is up in the north-west corner, Mordor is ringed by mountains in the south-east, and the whole of it sits east of a coastline that used to have Beleriand attached to it. The post-credits scene is set here.
