Painted in 1969 and published the following year, Baynes’s large-format map presents Tolkien’s Middle-earth in both cartographic and pictorial form. The geography of the narrative – Mordor, Rohan, Eriador, Gondor, and beyond – is rendered with mountains, rivers, forests, and coastlines carefully transcribed from Tolkien’s own designs. Around this framework, Baynes added ten circular vignettes of key scenes and places, including Hobbiton, the Doors of Durin, and the Argonath.

A narrative border runs along the top, where the Fellowship departs on their journey, while the lower edge depicts their adversaries: Nazgûl, Gollum, and Shelob among them. Although Baynes herself worried the pictorial elements made the design too ornamental for use in editions of the novel, the map rapidly became an iconic representation of Middle-earth. Its lettering and visual style helped codify the now-standard look of fantasy maps, and it was reproduced widely on posters and merchandise throughout the 1970s.

Ex Carta

Pauline Baynes’s ‘A Map of Middle-Earth’ distils the epic landscape into a single decorative chart, surrounded by vignettes of its peoples and creatures in her vivid illustration style.

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In 1948, the publisher George Allen & Unwin invited five artists to submit work with a view to working on a new project, which they described as an ‘adult fairy tale’. This was J. R. R. Tolkien’s humorous, dark-ages-set fable Farmer Giles of Ham (1949) and Tolkien thought the work of Pauline Baynes (1922–2008) was the perfect fit, due to her portfolio of ‘pseudo-Anglo Saxon cartoons’.152 He later complimented her illustrations by complaining that he had been told they reduced his text to a commentary on the drawings.153 She would go on to have a close association with Tolkien and his work, producing not only illustrations, but cover art and, of course, maps. It was her relationship with Tolkien that led to her iconic work on C. S. Lewis’s Narnia series. Baynes also created the cover art for the 1973 edition of Watership Down.

Painted in 1969 and published the following year, Baynes’s large-format map presents Tolkien’s Middle-earth in both cartographic and pictorial form. The geography of the narrative – Mordor, Rohan, Eriador, Gondor, and beyond – is rendered with mountains, rivers, forests, and coastlines carefully transcribed from Tolkien’s own designs. Around this framework, Baynes added ten circular vignettes of key scenes and places, including Hobbiton, the Doors of Durin, and the Argonath.

A narrative border runs along the top, where the Fellowship departs on their journey, while the lower edge depicts their adversaries: Nazgûl, Gollum, and Shelob among them. Although Baynes herself worried the pictorial elements made the design too ornamental for use in editions of the novel, the map rapidly became an iconic representation of Middle-earth. Its lettering and visual style helped codify the now-standard look of fantasy maps, and it was reproduced widely on posters and merchandise throughout the 1970s.