Looking at some old maps, because I'm thinking of drawing another version of the setting map. I currently have three versions of the setting map. By setting map, I mean general overviews of all of the DFX setting as a whole, as opposed to maps that I'm making specifically for campaigns. One of the maps was never meant to be more than a sketchy first draft, though, and the other was a one-off electronically generated map because I had a one month subscription to Inkarnate. But I still refer to them from time to time, and not just the later draft that replaced the sketchy draft. This new one will be a second "second draft" when I draw it.
This is an interesting approach, because rather than there being one, "canonical" map of the setting, I end up with various maps, all of which offer differences, some of them fairly significant, and I refuse to take a stand on the canonicity of any of them. The campaign specific maps are canonical for the campaigns that I'd be running, but once in another context, they would no longer be. Why would I do such a thing? Well, I like maps for their own sake so it's always fun to draw more, it's nearly impossible to get them to match up as well as I'd like anyway, so I embrace the differences, and I like having a variety of interpretations. In real life, prior to modern surveying being readily available, maps were not exact, although the mapmakers did their best to capture what they saw and measured and observed. These differences and variations offer an interesting approach, where perception of distance and scale and size could vary by the observer and the effect of having differing choices to go to could be a feature rather than a bug. Plus, my current maps prioritize a little too much the Hill Country, and I feel like Timischburg and Baal Hamazi have become somewhat shrunk from their original incarnations on the sketchy map, or even from the material that they made up before. The Boneyard and the Goldenwolds are fairly open and empty and yet take up loads of space that I kind of need for other features, which are in contrast, too crowded.
That said, as I've said many times before, my conception of how to draw fantasy maps was hugely influenced by the Christopher Tolkien maps of Middle-earth, as I saw them in the old Ballantine copies that I first had, printed in the 80s, with the Darrell K. Sweet cover art. Although it was obvious that there were some differences between that map and the larger one in the hardcover version of Unfinished Tales, I never gave much thought to the difference until recently. Let me go through a variety of Middle-earth maps that I'm familiar with and discuss where they came from.
This is the original Christopher Tolkien map, first done in 1953 for the first edition printings, and as I said, printed in color (such as it is) with Unfinished Tales. This is often called "The General Map of Middle-earth". At some point after 1970 it was slightly modified and a few river names and other features that didn't originally feature on the first version were added to the map as it was printed subsequently.
In 1980, Christopher Tolkien redrew the map, cropped a few portions off (especially in the south) and added more features that hadn't been present in the original version of the map. Because it was completely redrawn, it has some additional stylistic changes, but otherwise looks quite similar. This was what was included in, for example, my first printings of the books that I had, and is therefore the most familiar to me. The image below is that version, although obviously my version didn't have any red ink since it was printed in a mass market paperback. This one is often called "The West of Middle-earth" and it replaced the above map as the de facto standard. Few, if any, subsequent maps don't treat this version as the canonical version to follow. Not only had a few features been added in, but a few other errors were corrected, such as the spelling of Nan Curunir, for instance.
In 1994, Stephen Raw was hired to redraw the maps yet again, although he follows this "The West of Middle-earth" prototype extremely closely, and the main difference is that this new map was formulated for clearer printing in the mass market paperback environment; Christopher's maps didn't always print well when miniaturized and printed on cheap paper with cheap ink. The point wasn't at all to change anything, just to make them technologically a little easier to deal with. I'm also not aware of Raw having used any red ink, so it appears that that iconic affectation came to an end here.
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This is what you are most likely to see in any modern printing of the books, but as noted and as you can see yourself, it's similar enough to the 1980 Christopher Tolkien redrawing that you could be forgiven for not even noticing that it's not the same map.
Finally, for Peter Jackson's movies, the map was redrawn yet again, color was added, and it is perhaps a bit more decorative, but is also so similar that other than the fancy fonts and few other decorative flourishes, you could be forgiven for thinking that is merely a digital edit of the Christopher Tolkien map.
Which, actually, I can't confirm that it isn't. I can't find any credit for who drew it. I'll throw it out there. Obviously it arrived too late on the scene to have impacted my own map drawing techniques, which were mostly crystalized in the 80s, but which I've tinkered with a little bit here and there, but there are a few things that it does well enough that I've kind of adapted them more recently in place of what I was doing. This is especially true for the coastlines. I've seen this style of coastline spread throughout the fantasy mapmaking internet in general, and I presume that this is ultimately the source for it.
There are also a couple of other maps that I have, one or two of which I'll post here, that are noteworthy. One of them is a scan of the Pauline Baynes map, which was made in the 1960s, while Tolkien was still alive. It's a poster map, made as a promotional item, and it's pretty nifty, but other than color and the little illustrations in the bubbles, doesn't add anything that the Christopher Tolkien 1980s map didn't do just as well.
The next two, I'm not sure of the provenance of them, but they're in my folder and I found them online somewhere. I highlight them merely because I want to talk about a few minor stylistic differences, not because the content is, of course, really any different.
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| This looks to merely be an edit of the Stephen Raw map, with a border added, some parchment looking color layer put on as well, and most of the water lines removed. |
First off; again, not focusing on the content but the stylistic differences between them, let's look at what they choose to do for some of the elements.
Mountains. In almost all of them, mountains are stylized and drawn; illustrative more than cartographic. This is now the default for almost all fantasy maps; they looks like little isometric mountains with shading and stuff on them. While many fantasy maps have the light source to the West (i.e., shadows on the right) Christopher did it the other way, and that's always been my default too. The mountains are also quite exaggerated and pointy, and have a fair bit of variety. Although my own drawings of them had simple black shading, that's probably because that's all that I could see in the shrunken and cheap printings of the mass market paperbacks. I've since been a bit more detailed and "pretty" with my mountains and shading, and that actually looks more like the originals than I thought.
Hills. While largely similar to mountains except lower, some of the hills have much less defined shading; in fact, in the original Christopher Tolkien map from the 50s, many of the hills don't have any shading at all. My own hills have often been too moundlike and boring, but as I've gotten older and more experienced, they became more like some of the later versions of the mountains—just smaller and lower.
Forests. I never really liked the approach Christopher Tolkien took of drawing massive clumps of stylized individual trees. Not that it doesn't look fine; I did that on some early maps when I was in junior high, and I quickly found the process time-consuming, tedious and frustrating. I think I may be more open to it now, as my "cloud forest" approach has become fairly tedious too, just in order to get it that leafy look instead of a puffy cloudy look. I also really like the approach taken in the movie version of the map, although I've never tried to do that one myself. It doesn't look hard, and it looks pretty good. Christopher Tolkien seems to have used a similar style in a map of Beleriand that he drew, so that's probably why it was used again here. It actually has more of an old J. R. R. Tolkien drawn The Hobbit map look to it as well, so it's an interesting callback. The final version shown above has a more "dispersed tree" forest look.. Lots of maps use a similar style, but I've never been a huge fan unless your trees are dispersed but close enough together that they don't look like it, so it's very tedious with lots of trees needing to be drawn.
Coastlines. I also did coastlines like the 1980 Christopher Tolkien map for a little while until I thought that all of these extraneous lines were... well, extraneous. I didn't really pay attention before, but the original Christopher Tolkien map didn't have those, so it was an artifact of a relatively brief window of time, I suppose. But I really like the coastline approach that the movie version of the map does, which is also similar to what the bottom "wrinkled parchment" version looks like.
Rivers, settlements and roads. All versions are pretty similar here. Rivers are thick lines, getting thicker as they get wider, settlements are usually just little icons; squares, although occasionally a triangle or little tower-like icon, and roads are dotted lines. In the movie version of the map, roads are dashed lines and done in red ink like the lettering., and each settlement is an individualized little icon... but I like the little squares or circles just fine.
Lettering. In all versions of the map, the lettering has a hand drawn look, although in the more "professional" versions below, they probably aren't actually hand drawn. The red lettering is also a unique affectation, so much so that black hand drawn maps with red lettering gives a map a distinctive Tolkienesque look.
Negative space. All of the versions of the map also make considerable use of white space, and don't overdo decorative or other details; many entire regions are detailed by nothing so much as a label, like Minhiriath, Enedwaith, Forodwaith, Harondar, etc. I've actually started filling in more of these with at least some small details, just to give the map more of a "full" feel, but I understand the appeal of the blank space map. The Lord of the Rings maps were specifically designed to showcase areas that were part of the plot of either The Hobbit or The Lord of the Rings or were mentioned in the appendices or in offhand references in the text. This isn't necessarily meant to imply that there wasn't anything in the empty spaces of the map, merely that there wasn't anything that was mentioned. My maps don't quite serve the same purpose, so large blank spots isn't really what I'm going for.
Very briefly, because this is already a longish post with a lot of images, here's a map of the Warhammer Old World, or at least a portion of it. I found this online, but I have the majority of this same area in an old White Dwarf from the early/mid 90s, and the vintage of the map has to be late 80s or early 90s, although I don't know who drew it or exactly when it first appeared in print. As you can see, it clearly follows most of the drawing conventions of Christopher Tolkien. A few notable comments or exceptions:
- It uses the original Christopher Tolkien coastlines style, without lines going out all the way into the water, although otherwise the redrawn 1980 map is closer in style.
- Forests are drawn a bit differently, but honestly it looks nearly as tedious regardless.
- The lettering isn't red. The khaki land and light blue water color was added, I presume, later; the original version in my White Dwarf is just black and white. The lettering is also typeface, not hand drawn in appearance. I presume the original is just black and white.
- The map is a bit fuller in general than the Middle-earth maps, with much less white space.
- The map is also more illustrative. A lot more features are drawn, not necessarily with labels, and the features are also more decorative. Look at the big ledge east of the mountains in the south, or the Plain of Bones, for example. Or even just features scattered throughout the Dark Lands in general, like the Sentinels, or the Flayed Rock.
- The images in the ocean are clearly copied and pasted from other illustrations that Warhammer had already commissioned elsewhere, and don't originally belong to the map at all.
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