At 09:16 AM 6/5/2002 -0400, Chris Turkel wrote: > >... >Now Tolkien's maps, though beautifully done, irritate me. He basicly said >anything off to the east and south, off the map, were "darklands" and home >to barbarians so everytime I looked at the map south of Gondor I always >thought he should have written THIS IS WHERE THE WORLD ENDS. >... It represented the part of the world then known to the peoples he was writing about, more or less. (The Eldar didn't do a lot of travelling outside the northwest of Middle-Earth, and neither did the people of Gondor by that time. Hobbits didn't even leave the Shire or Bree much.) European maps in the Middle Ages were similarly pretty vague and inaccurate about the rest of the world (though they were more willing to make things up to fill up the blank spaces). Mike