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!
— Ð
See also:
- About the ‘Mordor’ project (Sept. 28)
- Walking into Mordor (Sept. 4)
Comments (5)
I understood almost none of that, since I've only read Hobbit, but I could imagine that one challenge in mapping a place you can't physically examine is that ambiguities lead to guesses that only slowly emerge as impossible--and perhaps Tolkein is guilty of creating a place that isn't possible in our quotidian forms of geometry, which would be slow and difficult to discover, given the possibility that apparent impossibility is in fact due to errors or assumptions you don't even realize you're making. And you might find cases where other experts disagree on this or that point. But I actually can share something that is quite possibly useful: there are statistical methods for analyzing messy data like this, and one involves similarity as the basic unit of data, where you can collect differing opinions of similarity and calculate a probable reality that is actually reliable even though the data points from any given individual might not be. So, for example, plug in each expert's opinion of which two places are closest, then which two are next closest, etc., and some analytical magic later, the result is a graph of these points in space that is usually quite correct--although you do have to determine where "you" are located in the graph's space to know whether you're viewing it from inside or above earth, for example.
Oh, and I can relate to the problem of mapping a place you can't physically examine. Before I could move into this house, I was trying to draw a floor plan and populate it with the larger of my possessions, so that I could more effectively direct movers where to deposit things. Despite having taken countless photographs and measurements and even drawn lots of sketches of pieces of the floor plan, actually constructing a floor plan in OmniGraffle proved quite challenging. If I hadn't photographed an early design diagram I'd found among the files, which was not entirely accurate vs the completed house, I don't think I could have done it.
Erin, this is great to know about — thank you! We're actually still at a very early stage in Tolkien Studies, such that we don't really yet have much in the way of "differing opinions of similarity," at least in terms of geography, which is what I'm looking at. This makes the work very exciting (well, to *me*, at least!), but also means that a lot of this is uncharted territory, as it were. (Ooh, I'll make sure to use that phrase in my chapter!) You might be interested in work that Michael Drout (at the "good" Wheelock College) is doing at the intersection of Big Data analysis and literature: a new field he's calling "lexomics." He's been working with many texts in several different languages, but he's an Anglo-Saxon scholar, so his main focus has been _Beowulf_. Here's his description of lexomics: > When applied to literature as we do here, lexomics is the analysis of the frequency, distribution, and arrangement of words in large-scale patterns. More specifically as relating to our current suite of tools we have built and use, we segment text(s), count the number of times each word appears in each segment (or chunk), and then apply cluster analysis to build dendrograms (branching diagrams or trees) that show relationships between the chunks. https://wheatoncollege.edu/academics/special-projects-initiatives/lexomics/ Oh, and isn't OmniGraffle an awesome app?!
Just reading this, I am in awe of the undertaking!!
This post is now visible on my own blog at https://erikmh.org/post/2017/more-mapping-mordor/