Erik MH:

More “Map­ping Mordor”

Some of you might know that my “new” plan for the “Map­ping Mordor” chapter had been to get all top­onym­ic research done before the sur­gery, so that I could simply write between then and Yule — sub­mit­ting a text draft in late Decem­ber (only six weeks late) and telling the edit­ors how many graph­ic images I’d be sup­ply­ing (and where they’d need to go and what size they’d need to be) — and pre­par­ing the graph­ics in Janu­ary while the edit­ors and lay read­ers were look­ing at my draft text.

Hav­ing spent the last four days amass­ing 292 cita­tions for Eph­el Dúath alone (with two or three dozen left to go, prob­ably), I’ve real­ized that this will not work, tim­ing-wise. (FWIW, I have com­pleted research on Ered Lithui, Lith­lad, Nurn, Lake Núrnen, and the Nar­gil Pass; pretty much everything else you can think of in Mordor is not yet tackled.) Were I to con­tin­ue with this plan, I might be able to get the research alone done by the end of the year — assum­ing I could resume work very shortly after return­ing home from the hos­pit­al. This would def­in­itely be too late for pub­lic­a­tion in the World­build­ing volume.

And so, reluct­antly, I’m shift­ing to a course which will cost me a bit more time in the long run (when con­sid­er­ing both “Map­ping Mordor” and my Big Pro­ject™), but which might mean that I could still have a draft chapter fin­ished by the end of Decem­ber. Essen­tially, writ­ing the chapter the old-fash­ioned way:

I’ll be trawl­ing through Chris­toph­er Tolkien’s The His­tory of Middle-earth (esp. books 6, 7, 8, 9, and 12, of course) for CT’s ana­lys­is of the lay­ers and stages of his father’s work with Mordor, and assess­ing his ana­lyses of his father’s vari­ous maps and sketches. I’ll be build­ing up my own timeline of changes to how his fath­er pic­tured the geo­graphy and struc­tures of Mordor, com­bin­ing inform­a­tion from the manu­scripts and drafts with ana­lys­is of the sketches and maps in a way that will be both more focussed and more hol­ist­ic than Christopher’s (CT ten­ded to ana­lyze sets of texts and then present maps sep­ar­ately). This always was (in a smal­ler way) going to be step #2, of course — but now it becomes big­ger, and it becomes step #1.

With luck, this will still allow me to get a good pol­ished draft to the edit­ors by Yuletide.

Thanks to you all for your com­ments here and by e‑mail, and thanks, too, for under­stand­ing my lack of replies!

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