EGU Blogs

Middle Earth

Middle-Earth gets a geological makeover

As if J. R. R. Tolkien wasn’t brilliant enough with his creation of Middle-Earth, it appears that using his numerous maps and illustrations provided, supplemented by observations from within the texts themselves, a geological reconstruction can be achieved! I recently came across this old article from the Proceedings of the J. R. R. Tolkien Centenary Conference, Oxford, England, 1992, and figured it was worth sharing.

The first attempt at a geological history of Middle-Earth was Margaret Howes in 1967 in a piece entitled “The Elder Ages and Later Glaciations off the Pleistocene Epoch”. Here, she endeavoured to recapitulate the successive geomorphologies from the time when Morgoth (the real bad guy in Middle-Earth) was overthrown to beyond the time when Aragorn adopted rule over Gondor. However, this work has been recognised as being too far adrift from Tolkien’s original creations, drawing in too much from Earth’s own recent geological history.

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That’s no cloud..

Science is a deadly serious subject. Well, actually, no it’s not. In the slightest. Scientists are actually pretty fun people, despite their common depictions, and sometimes they have been known to publish smile-inducing articles.

Take one Radagast the Brown of Bristol University (UK). This may or may not be a pseudonym, but either way he’s published a cool paper late last year on the climate of Middle Earth. It’s free to access here, and well worth a look. Not only is it a fun read, but also shows how fantasy and science can cross over some times, and possibly help to reach new audiences by conveying aspects of science in novel ways. I don’t want to give any of the results away, so if you’re into you hobbitses, elvses, and general circulation models, then it’s well worth a read!