Tol Morwen, Beleriand, and Europe

[obloquy]

Great stuff on this Saxon Cross substack. In particular, his series of posts on Middle-Earth and maps of ice age Europe. This post is one in that series. Rockall: The Ruin of Beleriand, Hy Brasil, and the Grave of Turin Turambar. Sample:

I just had just re-read The Silmarillion and was scouring through it looking for more hints from Tolkien as to the real world locations of lands or landmarks of Beleriand.

And as I read, I came across this.

Of the isle of Tol Morwen, the final resting place of the hero Turin Turambar, and the location of the Stone of the Hapless, Tolkien writes this:

"It is told that a seer and harp-player of Brethil named Glirhuin made a song, saying that the Stone of the Hapless should not be defiled by Morgoth nor ever thrown down, not though the sea should drown all the land; as after indeed befell, and still Tol Morwen stands alone in the water beyond the new coasts that were made in the days of the wrath of the Valar".

Now, I had never even realized that in Middle-Earth there was a third island-remnant of Beleriand in addition to the larger two islands more normally seen on maps.

But this seemed an obvious hint that we should still be able to locate Tol Morwen in our modern day… assuming I was correct that the Professor was intentionally making these references to our real world and that Middle-Earth is literally just our own world in the ancient past.

[Huinesoron]

I love a good map, and this is a fascinating work. For quick reference, the Saxon Cross mapwork is split across four posts:

How Tolkien Disguised Ice-Age Europe as Middle-Earth
Lost Lands of Arda
Rockall: The Ruin of Beleriand, Hy Brasil, and the Grave of Turin Turambar
Morgoth's Realms

The work is an intriguing mix of rigour and vagueness. In the first post, the author asserts that the maps (Ice Age Europe and Third Age Arda) only work with the very specific choice of Osgiliath = Constantinople... and then shows a map where none of the features under discussion quite line up. In the second post, the overlap map and the "how Tolkien hid the Mediterranean coastline" map use very different geographies (the overlay puts the mouths of Anduin in Italy, while the Med map moves them somewhere east of Crete), but they're claimed to match up. Then in the third post, the fact that "Tol Morwen" is south of eastern "Tol Fuin", rather than south-west of the whole island, is just brushed off, despite previous assertions that the map is amazingly accurate.

All of which, I think, goes to show that you can't trust the maps.

There are some fascinating insights in these posts. I love the find in part 2 that Tolkien specifically calls out the Brown Lands as potentially being flooded by the Great Sea later - a line which makes the interpretation of Osgiliath as Constantinople fit almost perfectly. That would make the Agaean the vastly swollen Mouths of Anduin, and actually preserves the Crete = Tolfalas claim made elsewhere.

I also appreciate a lot of the little bits around the edges of the map: Tol Morwen, the Icebay, Nenuial, and Numenor all jump out (parts 2 and 3). The work the author puts into figuring out what Tolkien could have heard of, and what he might have on his mind, is admirable.

But you can't trust the maps! Longitude (east-west) is basically impossible to measure without clockwork or telescopes*, and most ancient maps are more schematic than accurate. Even the "accurate" ones tend to inflate the maker's own lands at the expense of others. So (and this is an entirely different thread I want to make) who made the maps? Hobbits, Dwarves, Elves, and Gondorians would make very different world maps.

(*I recommend Dava Sobel's excellent Longitude on this subject. In Middle-earth, they would have either mapped by estimating the distance over the ground, or - in a very few times and places - by predicting eclipses of the moon.)

So I'm happy to accept that Tol Morwen is further east than Bilbo recorded in his Translations from the Elvish, that a bunch of Hobbits didn't accurately record their west-east distances, and that nobody bothered to draw in that big square penninsula of Andrast (nobody lives there, it's not important). It makes me want to put together the "real" map of Middle-earth, though there's still the intractable problem of the Misty Mountains. It's really fascinating stuff, even if you can't actually make it all line up as well as Saxon Cross wants it to.

hS

[Mithadan]

Two other islands remained after the drowning of Beleriand following the War of Wrath. The peak of Himring was one, identified in Unfinished Tales. The second, Mentioned in HoME, is Tol Fuin, a fragment of Dorthonion or Taur-nu-Fuin.

[Huinesoron]

Originally Posted by Mithadan

Two other islands remained after the drowning of Beleriand following the War of Wrath. The peak of Himring was one, identified in Unfinished Tales. The second, Mentioned in HoME, is Tol Fuin, a fragment of Dorthonion or Taur-nu-Fuin.

Faroe and Iceland respectively, on the Saxon Cross map. (Iceland in particular is hard not to see as a match.)

Apropos my statement that "you can't trust the maps", Aragorn actually says as much: "I don’t know if the Road has ever been measured in miles beyond the Forsaken Inn, a day’s journey east of Bree. Some say it is so far, and some say otherwise. It is a strange road, and folk are glad to reach their journey’s end, whether the time is long or short." An in-universe interpretation of the map is that it was compiled from multiple sources (either by Bilbo or a later contributor to the Red Book), and that where the measurements didn't exist, they just sort of guessed.

hS