For sale: Tolkien’s map of Middle Earth

You can own a map of Middle-Earth annotated by Tolkien. Some lucky so-and-so found the map slipped inside a copy of Lord of the Rings. It’s yours for £60,000.

The Guardian.

It shows what Blackwell’s called “the exacting nature” of Tolkien’s creative vision: he corrects place names, provides extra ones, and gives Baynes a host of suggestions about the map’s various flora and fauna. Hobbiton, he notes, “ is assumed to be approx at latitude of Oxford”; Tolkien was a professor of Anglo-Saxon at Oxford University.

The novelist also uses Belgrade, Cyprus, and Jerusalem as other reference points, and according to Blackwell’s suggests that “the city of Ravenna is the inspiration behind Minas Tirith – a key location in the third book of the Lord of The Rings trilogy”.

“The map shows how completely obsessed he was with the details. Anyone else interfered at their peril,” said Sian Wainwright at Blackwell’s. “He was tricky to work with, but very rewarding in the end.”

He also drew these maps:

middle-earth map 5 middle-earth map 4 middle-earth map 3 middle-earth map 2 middle-earth map 1