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This article is a part Overlookeda series of obituaries on remarkable men whose deaths, beginning in 1851, were not reported by The Times.
In 1977, Karen Wynn Fonstad made a long and cold call to JRR Tolkien’s American publisher in the hope of landing a dream assignment: to create an exhaustive atlas of Middle-earth, the setting of the author’s widely popular “Hobbit” and “The Hobbit” Lord of the Rings.
To her surprise, the editor agreed.
Fonstad spent two and a half years on the project, reading the novels line by line and painstakingly indexing each text from which she could deduce geographical details. With two small children at home, she mostly worked at night. Her husband would leave notes on her drawing table reminding her to go to bed.
Her resulting book, The Atlas of Middle-earth (1981), delighted Tolkien fans and scholars alike with its exquisite level of topographical detail; the latest paperback edition is in the 32nd edition.
“There is an enormous amount of information,” wrote critic Baird Searles in a review of his book in Asimov’s Science Fiction magazine, “from diagrams of the evolution of the languages of Middle-earth to tables of the lengths of mountain ranges and rivers. It is a real atlas (the author is a geographer) and a great achievement.”
Commissions soon followed for atlases of other imaginary places with their devoted subcultures, including Pern, the setting of the sprawling and best-selling “Dragonriders of Pern” series, which author Anne McCaffrey began publishing in 1968, and two core worlds within the Dungeons & Dragons franchise. .
Fonstad’s atlases have become objects of cult worship, and today the ranks of the gaming industry and fantasy and science fiction publishing are filled with cartographers influenced by her work.
“It was like the Velvet Underworld of fantasy mapping,” said Jason Fry, co-author of Star Wars: The Core Atlas (2009, with Daniel Wallace), in an interview about “Atlas of Middle-earth.” “Everybody who read it went out and got graph paper and mapped something.”
Mike Schley, a contemporary fantasy map maker, referenced her work in his own research.
“Her diagrams and presentation gave her work weight 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 might get dirt under your fingernails while exploring a place.”
Karen Lea Wynn was born on April 18, 1945 in Oklahoma City to Estis (Wampler) and James Wynn. She grew up 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 in art at the University of Oklahoma, then, envisioning a career as a medical artist, changed her major to physical therapy and graduated in 1967.
But a part-time job illustrating maps for the university’s geography department sparked her interest in cartography. In 1968, she was one of the few women admitted to the school’s graduate studies in geography, where she wrote a stylistic manual of cartographic symbology as her master’s thesis. While a student, she met and married Todd Fonstad, 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. Although she was not an avid reader of fantasy, Fonstad was enthralled. She stayed up all night finishing it, then went out the next day to buy the rest of the trilogy.
Her son said she read The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings. some 30 times before tilting the atlas.
“I doubt if any book or books will ever occupy me as much as these,” she wrote in her diary in 1975. “Every time I finish reading them, I immediately feel as if I had not read them for weeks, and I am lonely because of them—lonely because of the characters in books, incredibly vivid descriptions, the whole essence.”
The idea for the atlas came to Fonstad after the 1977 publication of “The Silmarillion,” a dense, posthumous collection of Tolkien’s stories spanning the myths and ancient history of Middle-earth. (Tolkien died in 1973.) She envisioned a package of maps spanning many millennia of Tolkien’s lore, drawing the geographer’s eye not only to landforms but also to the migrations of peoples, troop movements on the battlefield, and the journeys of characters from novels.
“It’s one thing to write off a feature as, well, magic. It’s another to feel like you might get dirt under your fingernails while exploring a place.”
When she called Houghton Mifflin to present her idea, Fonstad was connected with Tolkien’s American editor, Anne Barrett, who was semi-retired but happened to be visiting the office that day. Barrett liked the concept so much that she got permission from the Tolkien estate within days.
As part of her research, Fonstad studied Tolkien’s original manuscripts and notes, archived at Marquette University in Milwaukee, near her home in Oshkosh.
The first edition of the “Atlas of Middle-earth” contained 172 maps drawn by hand by Fonstad. Each was accompanied by reflections on its methodology and assumptions, along with topics such as the morphology of the bedrock of the Shire, settlement patterns in Gondor, and plate tectonics in Mordor.
The 1991 revised edition included details from the nine volumes of “The History of Middle-earth,” a collection of previously unpublished Tolkien material edited by the author’s son Christopher. The revised atlas, which is still in print, has been translated into almost a dozen languages.
“It is by far the best and most careful reference work related to Tolkien,” Stentor Danielson, a Tolkien scholar and associate professor of geography at Slippery Rock University in Pennsylvania, said in an interview.
Fonstad followed her Middle-earth book with four similarly ambitious atlases. She traveled to Ireland to work with 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 novelist Stephen R. .Donaldson, author of “The Chronicles of Thomas Covenant” series for “The Atlas of the Land”, published in 1985.
In an interview, Donaldson recalled how Fonstad arrived with “a huge list of scenes and places” from his books and asked questions about little things he had never considered.
For TSR Inc., publisher of the Dungeons & Dragons role-playing game and then-ubiquitous tie-in novels, Fonstad published “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 on the franchise.
“Her work is one of those rare occasions when fantasy maps manage to approach ‘real cartography,'” Francesca Baerald, a contemporary Dungeons & Dragons map artist, wrote in an email. “The scientific approach she followed and her concern for every little detail is something incredible.”
Her atlases earned Fonstad a reputation among fantasy readers, but only a modest income, which she supplemented by teaching geography part-time at the University of Wisconsin Oshkosh and working as a physical therapist. In the 1990s, Fonstad occasionally produced maps for TSR and the City of Oshkosh, but devoted more time to committee and civic work, including a term on the Oshkosh City Council.
She was diagnosed with breast cancer in 1998 and went through almost seven years of treatment, remission and relapse. During this time, she began mapping CS Lewis’s “The Chronicles of Narnia,” but Lewis’ estate eventually denied permission for the atlas.
Fonstad died of complications from breast cancer on March 11, 2005, at her home in Oshkosh. She was 59 years old.
For all her devotion to fantasy worlds, Fonstad was baffled by the rise of fan culture. She rarely accepted invitations to congresses or conferences, claiming that she was too thin-skinned to take criticism. But her reluctance softened towards the end of her life, after Peter Jackson’s Lord of the Rings film trilogy made the characters of Frodo and Bilbo Baggins household names.
In 2004, at a conference in Atlanta, she met Alan Lee, the film’s Oscar-winning concept designer, who mentioned that her atlas was 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 really enjoyed those movies, even though she was in the 1 percent of people who could screw up every difference in the books.”
