The beautifully rendered geography is part of the draw, after all. What one immediately notices about these maps are the dramatic landscapes. Someday I need to write about the use and abuse of umlauts and apostrophes in fantasy naming by people who lacked the linguistics background of Tolkien. Map of Alagaësia from Christopher Paolini’s Inheritance cycle. Map of Faerûn, nowadays the flagship setting for Dungeons and Dragons. The thing about maps, as the title image of this post will show, is that they tend to imitate Tolkien’s style doggedly. Mapmaking was a particularly key aspect of this – some day I will need to make a blog post about the surviving fantasy maps from my childhood. Players have a lot of options for the setting of the action – countless published and intricately detailed worlds are available, but I and so many others took special delight in designing our own worlds, with their own histories, cultures, and themes. It, along with The Lord of the Rings, was a primary motivator for my initial forays into the study of medieval history at adolescence. Like so many in my generation, the RPG Dungeons and Dragons formed a big part of my imaginary exploration throughout my childhood and has continued to be a fallback for time spent with friends. Surely those few docks can’t supply a town of such magnitude? Note the lack of infrastructure outside of the city walls, apart from what appear to be the outlines of farms in the distant hinterland. The city of Waterdeep in the Dungeons and Dragons world of Faerûn. There are thousands upon thousands of literary and film examples on top of this that this article will not be able to address, but I would love to hear of additional examples or counterexamples from my readers!
POPULATION OF MIDDLE EARTH SERIES
While we could look at any number of examples, I will focus primarily on examples from the well-known tabletop roleplaying game Dungeons and Dragons and the video game series The Elder Scrolls (Skyrim, the fifth installment, being the most famous). Like many other tropes that can be traced back to his work and its influence (sturdy, gruff Dwarves, immortal, beautiful Elves, etc.), the notion of vast swathes of wilderness peppered with small, isolated settlements infects almost the entirety of the genre of medieval fantasy.
![population of middle earth population of middle earth](https://fictionhorizon.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/10/Where-do-Dwarves-live-in-Middle-Earth-04-1024x475.jpg)
![population of middle earth population of middle earth](https://images-na.ssl-images-amazon.com/images/I/91LEhIgTmcL.jpg)
Middle-earth is supposed to feel empty and depopulated.Īnd yet, this theme is not just limited to Tolkien’s work. It makes sense within Tolkien’s mythology: the Third Age is an era of decline, when the Elves depart over the Western Sea, the Dwarves isolate themselves underground, and Humanity is only just beginning to come into its destiny of dominion which will characterize the Fourth Age. In the world of Middle-earth, the wilderness is never far away, always lurking just outside of the few and far between outposts of civilization. “Into the Wild.” That’s where the rugged and mysterious Ranger of the North Strider says he is taking the Hobbits after they agree to follow him out of the town of Bree in Peter Jackson’s The Fellowship of the Ring (2001).