Silver's Helpful Writing Tips

What Writers Get Wrong About Lord of the Rings Fanfiction: Locations and Travel

It's a dangerous business, Frodo, going out your door. You step onto the road, and if you don't keep your feet, there's no knowing where you might be swept off to.

A warm welcome to you all, and welcome to this weeks article on Locations and Travel, and what writers get wrong about them (it happens A LOT). If you didn't know, Middle Earth is vast, and that is probably an understatement to some extent. 

When creating this world, Tolkien fleshed it out in such detail that he made flora and fauna, and laid out the geography of each area, its climate, populations, and language.

It's crazy.

Locations

The things I find (or lack thereof in fanfiction) is any detail of the locations and proper descriptions for each. It's one big vanilla cake, which can leave a reader feeling like something is missing. Let's take a look at a few of the most common places you will find in a LotR fanfiction, shall we?

Gondor:

The region of Gondor is cut in half by the White Mountains (Ered Nimrais) and extends the width of Gondor. These are called the White Mountains because they are almost never without snow on their peaks.

Many rivers flow from this range, and the Paths of the Dead also lay within these mountains. The seasons here will differ wildly from the north-eastern region of Middle Earth, such as where Mirkwood lay. In Gondor, they will have a mild winter and a warm summer, whereas Mirkwood will have a colder winter and a mild summer.

It may not seem like a big thing, but having this in your story can improve it and make the reader feel more immersed in it.

Lothlórien:

Many people will incorporate this beautiful elven kingdom into their stories in some way, but it's important to know that they did not typically have drastic changes in the seasons. 

Lady Galadriel, the arguably the most powerful elf in Middle Earth during the Third Age, carried a ring of power known as Nenya. 

"Nenya's power was preservation, protection, and concealment from evil. Galadriel used these powers to create and sustain Lothlórien."

 — She held sway over it all, and while there, her power upheld everything within the borders of Lorien, which to some degree included the weather. So when you're writing, keep that in mind.

The Shire:

Here you will have mild winters and mild summers. Based on where the Shire is located they probably get more rain than snow (similar to a typical Oregon winter where it just rains from September until June).

You have more rolling hills in and around the Shire, patches of forest, rivers, but no mountains. The closest ones are the Blue Mountains, and those are many miles away.

These are just three of the thousands of places located in Middle Earth, and if you're planning on doing a story that goes beyond one or two areas, you'll want to make sure you have at least a basic understanding of what the areas are like so you can write it correctly.

Travel times:

Travel in Middle Earth is probably one of the more challenging aspects of writing a LotR story due to its sheer size. For instance, it took the Fellowship a little over a year to get to Mordor and complete their quest.

I've seen many people struggle with this in their stories (myself included) and they have their characters get from A to Z in three or four days when in reality it should have been two weeks. Thankfully, there are many resources you can use to help you out with this. 

The first being The Eowyn Project, where some saint worked out travel times for you between the most commonly seen places in the book. I've used this page many times while writing my series, and it's saved my bacon on several occasions when I thought I had the timing down right...however, I didn't. The second, and probably the best all around, is Karen Wynn Fonstad's The Atlas of Middle-Earth. This book has almost everything you could ever want when it comes to mapping out Middle Earth. It gives you detailed information on how Arda was at creation, with beautifully drawn pictures of Valinor, Middle Earth, Beleriand, the movement of characters, people groups, and so much more.

I got this book for Father's Day, and I was over the moon excited. I dove into it, reading about an array of things that I didn't even know existed in Tolkien's world!

In the back, it also gives you some distances walked by the Fellowship, troop counts for the battles (talk about mind-blowing!), along with brief histories of certain areas, its importance, and how it was effect by certain events.

The Alas of Middle Earth is a must-have item for any Tolkien fan, and doubly so for anyone writing in Tolkien's world.

Hopefully, you got a few gems of information, as well as a couple of resources that you can have at your disposal. Most of the information I used was pulled from the Atlas, as I could not find much information out there that differed from it.

Next, we'll be looking at Timelines, and important events to make sure you are aware of depending on the time (Age) you're writing in. 

That's all for now folks! If you have any questions, I'd love to talk with you more about any of the subjects we've discussed so far in this series.