This article is part of Overlooked, a series of obituaries about remarkable people whose deaths, beginning in 1851, went unreported in The Times.
In 1977, Karen Wynn Fonstad made a long shot cold call to J.R.R. Tolkien’s American publisher with the hope of landing a dream assignment: to create an exhaustive atlas of Middle-earth, the setting of the author’s widely popular “The Hobbit” and “The Lord of the Rings.”
To her surprise, an editor agreed.
Fonstad spent two and a half years on the project, reading through the novels line by line and painstakingly indexing any text from which she could infer geographic details. With two young children at home, she mostly worked at night. Her husband left notes on her drafting table reminding her to go to bed.
Her resulting book, “The Atlas of Middle-earth” (1981), wowed Tolkien fans and scholars with its exquisite level of topographic detail; the most recent paperback edition is in its 32nd printing.
“There is an enormous amount of information,” the critic Baird Searles wrote in a review of her book in Asimov’s Science Fiction magazine, “from a diagram of the evolution of the languages of Middle-earth to tables of the lengths of mountain ranges and rivers. It’s a true atlas (the author is a geographer) and quite an achievement.”
Commissions soon followed for atlases of other imaginary places with their own devoted subcultures, including Pern, the setting of the sprawling and best-selling “Dragonriders of Pern” series, which the author Anne McCaffrey began publishing in 1968, and a pair of foundational worlds within the Dungeons & Dragons franchise.
Fonstad’s atlases became objects of cult veneration, and today, the ranks of the gaming industry and of fantasy and sci-fi publishing are filled with cartographers influenced by her work.
“It was like the Velvet Underground of fantasy mapmaking,” Jason Fry, a co-author of “Star Wars: The Essential Atlas” (2009, with Daniel Wallace), said in an interview about “The Atlas of Middle-earth.” “Everyone who read it went out and got graph paper and mapped something.”
Mike Schley, a contemporary fantasy mapmaker, has referenced her work in his own research.
“Her diagrams and exposition gave her work gravity and materiality,” he said in an interview. “It’s one thing to write off a feature as, well, magic. It’s another to feel like you can get dirt under your nails exploring a place.”
Karen Lea Wynn was born on April 18, 1945, in Oklahoma City, to Estis (Wampler) and James Wynn. She was raised in nearby Norman, Okla., where her father ran a sheet-metal shop and her mother did secretarial work for hire.
After graduating from Norman High School, she enrolled at the University of Oklahoma, studying art, then, envisioning a career as a medical artist, switched her major to physical therapy and graduated in 1967.
But a part-time job illustrating maps for the university’s geography department kindled her interest in cartography. In 1968, she was one of a handful of women accepted into the school’s geography graduate program, where she wrote a style manual of cartographic symbology as her master’s thesis. While a grad student, she met and married Todd Fonstad, a Ph.D. student in the department. In 1971, the couple moved to Wisconsin, where Todd taught at the University of Wisconsin Oshkosh.
Soon after, a friend lent her a copy of “The Fellowship of the Ring” (1954), the first in Tolkien’s “Lord of the Rings” trilogy. Though she wasn’t an avid reader of fantasy, Fonstad was entranced. She stayed up all night finishing it, then went out the next day to buy the rest of the trilogy.
Her son said she had read “The Hobbit” and “The Lord of the Rings” some 30 times before pitching the atlas.
“I doubt if any other book or books will ever grasp my interest as much as these,” she wrote in her journal in 1975. “Each time I finish a reading I immediately feel as if I hadn’t read them for weeks and I am lonely for them — lonely for the characters within the books, the tremendously vivid descriptions, the whole essence.”
The idea for an atlas came to Fonstad after the 1977 publication of “The Silmarillion,” a dense, posthumous collection of Tolkien-penned tales comprising the myths and ancient history of Middle-earth. (Tolkien died in 1973.) She envisioned a suite of maps spanning the many millenniums of Tolkien’s legendarium, bringing a geographer’s eye not just to landforms but also to the migrations of peoples, battlefield troop movements and the journeys of the novels’ characters.
“It’s one thing to write off a feature as, well, magic. It’s another to feel like you can get dirt under your nails exploring a place.”
When she called Houghton Mifflin to pitch her idea, Fonstad was connected with Tolkien’s U.S. editor, Anne Barrett, who was semiretired but happened to be visiting the office that day. Barrett so loved the concept that she secured permission from the Tolkien estate within days.
As part of her research, Fonstad pored over Tolkien’s original manuscripts and notes, archived at Milwaukee’s Marquette University, near her home in Oshkosh.
The first edition of “The Atlas of Middle-earth” contained 172 maps, which Fonstad drew by hand. Each was accompanied by reflections on her methodology and assumptions, along with topics like the bedrock morphology of the Shire, settlement patterns in Gondor and plate tectonics in Mordor.
A 1991 revised edition incorporated details from nine volumes of “The History of Middle-earth,” a trove of formerly unpublished Tolkien material edited by the author’s son Christopher. The revised atlas, still in print, has been translated into nearly a dozen languages.
“It is far and away the best and most careful reference work related to Tolkien,” Stentor Danielson, a Tolkien scholar and an associate professor of geography at Pennsylvania’s Slippery Rock University, said in an interview.
Fonstad followed her Middle-earth tome with four similarly ambitious atlases. She traveled to Ireland to work alongside McCaffrey — the first woman to win a Hugo Award for fiction, in 1968 — on “The Atlas of Pern,” which Fonstad published in 1984. And she went to New Mexico to consult with the novelist Stephen R. Donaldson, author of “The Chronicles of Thomas Covenant” series, for the “The Atlas of the Land,” published in 1985.
In an interview, Donaldson recalled Fonstad arriving with “an enormous list of scenes and places” from his books and asking questions about minutiae he’d never considered.
“It’s one thing to write off a feature as, well, magic. It’s another to feel like you can get dirt under your nails exploring a place.”
For TSR Inc., the publisher of the Dungeons & Dragons role-playing game and then-ubiquitous tie-in novels, Fonstad released “Atlas of the Dragonlance World” (1987) and “The Forgotten Realms Atlas” (1990), both of which are sought-after collectibles still used as reference material by artists working for the franchise.
“Her work is one of those rare occasions when fantasy maps manage to get closer to ‘real cartography,’” Francesca Baerald, a contemporary Dungeons & Dragons map artist, wrote in an email. “The scientific approach she followed and her care for each small detail is something incredible.”
Her atlases earned Fonstad renown among fantasy readers, but only modest income, which she supplemented by teaching geography part time for the University of Wisconsin Oshkosh and by moonlighting as a physical therapist. In the 1990s, Fonstad made occasional maps for TSR and the City of Oshkosh, but she devoted more time to board and civic work, including a term on the Oshkosh City Council.
She was diagnosed with breast cancer in 1998 and underwent nearly seven years of treatment, remission and recurrence. During that time, she started mapping C.S. Lewis’s “Chronicles of Narnia,” but the Lewis estate ultimately withheld permission for an atlas.
Fonstad died of complications of breast cancer on March 11, 2005, at her home in Oshkosh. She was 59.
For all her devotion to fantasy worlds, Fonstad was bemused by the rise of fan culture. She rarely accepted invites to conventions or conferences, claiming she was too thin-skinned to field criticism. But her reluctance softened near the end of her life, as Peter Jackson’s “Lord of the Rings” film trilogy made the characters Frodo and Bilbo Baggins household names.
In 2004, at a conference in Atlanta, she met Alan Lee, the films’ Oscar-winning conceptual designer, who mentioned that her atlas had been a vital resource for his team.
“Nothing could have made my mother happier in the last few months of her life,” her son, Mark Fonstad, an associate professor of geography at the University of Oregon, said in an interview. “She very much enjoyed those movies, even though she was among the 1 percent of people who could have nitpicked every difference from the books.”
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