This text is a part of Neglecteda sequence of obituaries of notable folks whose deaths, starting in 1851, went unreported in The Instances.
In 1977 Karen Wynn Fonstad makes long-term calls to American writer J. R. R. Tolkien within the hope of receiving a dream task: to create a complete atlas of Center-earth, the place the creator’s extensively fashionable “The Hobbit” and “The Hobbit” happen. The Lord of the Rings.
To her shock, an editor agreed.
Fonstad spent two and a half years on the venture, studying the novels line by line and painstakingly indexing each textual content from which he might extract geographical particulars. With two young children at residence, she labored largely at night time. Her husband left notes on her drawing desk reminding her to go to mattress.
Her ensuing guide, The Atlas of Center-earth (1981), amazed Tolkien followers and students with its extraordinary stage of topographical element; the most recent paperback version is in its thirty second printing.
“There is a gigantic quantity of knowledge,” wrote critic Baird Searles in a assessment of her guide in Asimov’s Science Fiction journal, “from a chart of the evolution of the languages of Center-earth to tables of the lengths of mountain ranges and rivers. It is a actual atlas (the creator is a geographer) and an excellent achievement.
Commissions quickly adopted for atlases of different imaginary locations with their very own devoted subcultures, together with Pern, the setting of the sprawling and best-selling Dragon Riders of Pern sequence, which the creator Anne McCaffrey started publishing in 1968. and two seminal worlds inside the Dungeons & Dragons franchise.
Fonstad’s atlases have change into the topic of a cult following, and immediately the ranks of the gaming business and fantasy and science fiction publications are crammed with cartographers influenced by her work.
“It was just like the Velvet Underground of fantasy mapping,” stated Jason Fry, co-author of Star Wars: The Core Atlas (2009, with Daniel Wallace), in an interview with The Atlas of Center-earth. “Everybody who learn it went out and acquired graph paper and drew one thing.”
Mike Schley, a contemporary fantasy cartographer, refers to her work in his personal analysis.
“Her diagrams and exposition gave her work seriousness and materiality,” he stated in an interview. “It is one factor to write down off a perform as, properly, magic. It is one other to really feel like you may get dust beneath your fingernails whereas exploring a spot.”
Karen Lea Wynn was born on April 18, 1945. in Oklahoma Metropolis to Estes (Wampler) and James Winn. She was raised in close by Norman, Oklahoma, the place her father ran a sheet steel store and her mom labored as a employed secretary.
After graduating from Norman Excessive Faculty, she enrolled on the College of Oklahoma, the place she studied artwork, then, envisioning a profession as a medical artist, modified her main to bodily remedy and graduated in 1967.
However a part-time job illustrating maps for the college’s geography division ignited her curiosity in cartography. In 1968 she was one in all a handful of girls accepted into the varsity’s graduate program in geography, the place she wrote a mode information to cartographic symbolism as her grasp’s thesis. Whereas a pupil, she met and married Todd Fonstad, Ph.D. pupil within the division. In 1971 the couple moved to Wisconsin, the place Todd taught on the College of Wisconsin Oshkosh.
Quickly after, a buddy lent her a duplicate of The Fellowship of the Ring (1954), the primary of Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings trilogy. Though not an avid fantasy reader, Fonstad was fascinated. She stayed up all night time to complete it, then went out the subsequent day to purchase the remainder of the trilogy.
Her son stated she learn The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings about 30 occasions earlier than tilting the atlas.
“I doubt if some other guide or books will ever seize my curiosity as a lot as these,” she wrote in her diary in 1975. “Each time I end studying, I instantly really feel like I have not learn them in weeks and I am lonely for them – lonely for the characters within the books, the extremely vivid descriptions, the entire essence.”
The concept for the atlas got here to Fonstad after the 1977 publication. of The Silmarillion, a dense, posthumous assortment of tales written by Tolkien involving the myths and historic historical past of Center-earth. (Tolkien died in 1973) She envisioned a set of maps spanning the various millennia of Tolkien’s legendarium, directing the geographer’s eye not solely to landforms but additionally to the migrations of peoples, the actions of troops on the battlefield, and the journeys of characters in novels.
“It is one factor to write down off a perform as, properly, magic. It is one other to really feel like you may get dust beneath your fingernails whereas exploring a spot.”
When she known as Houghton Mifflin to pitch her concept, Fonstad was linked with Tolkien’s American editor, Anne Barrett, who was semi-retired however occurred to be visiting the workplace that day. Barrett appreciated the idea a lot that she secured permission from Tolkien’s property inside days.
As a part of her analysis, Fonstad delved into Tolkien’s authentic manuscripts and notes archived at Marquette College in Milwaukee, close to her residence in Oshkosh.
The primary version of The Atlas of Center-earth contained 172 maps that Fonstad drew by hand. Every was accompanied by reflections on its methodology and assumptions, together with subjects such because the morphology of the Shire’s bedrock, settlement patterns in Gondor, and plate tectonics in Mordor.
The 1991 Revised Version. consists of particulars of 9 volumes of The Historical past of Center-earth, a set of beforehand unpublished Tolkien materials edited by the creator’s son Christopher. The revised atlas, which continues to be in print, has been translated into practically a dozen languages.
“That is by far one of the best and most considerate reference work on Tolkien,” Stentor Danielson, a Tolkien scholar and affiliate professor of geography at Slippery Rock College in Pennsylvania, stated in an interview.
Fonstad adopted her Center-earth quantity with 4 equally formidable atlases. She traveled to Eire to work alongside McCaffrey, the primary lady to win a Hugo Award for fiction in 1968. – on the Atlas of Pern, which Fonstad printed in 1984. And he or she went to New Mexico to seek the advice of with author Stephen R. Donaldson, creator of the Thomas Covenant Chronicles sequence, for The Land Atlas, printed in 1985.
In an interview, Donaldson recalled Fonstad arriving with “an enormous record of scenes and areas” from his books and asking questions on particulars he had by no means thought of.
“It is one factor to write down off a perform as, properly, magic. It is one other to really feel like you may get dust beneath your fingernails whereas exploring a spot.”
For TSR Inc., the writer of the Dungeons & Dragons RPG and the then-ubiquitous associated novels, Fonstad printed Atlas of the Dragonlance World (1987) and “The Forgotten Realms Atlas” (1990), each of that are sought-after collectibles which can be nonetheless used as reference materials by artists engaged on the franchise.
“Her work is a kind of uncommon situations the place fantasy maps handle to return near ‘actual cartography,'” Francesca Baerald, a recent Dungeons & Dragons map artist, wrote in an electronic mail. “The scientific strategy she adopted and her consideration to each little element is one thing unbelievable.”
Her atlases earned Fonstad notoriety amongst fantasy readers, however solely a modest revenue, which she supplemented by educating geography part-time on the College of Wisconsin Oshkosh and dealing as a bodily therapist. Within the Nineteen Nineties, Fonstad made occasional maps for TSR and the Metropolis of Oshkosh, however she devoted extra time to board and civic work, together with a time period on the Oshkosh Metropolis Council.
She was recognized with breast most cancers in 1998. and endured practically seven years of remedy, remission, and relapse. Throughout this time she started mapping by CS Lewis The Chronicles of Narnia, however the Lewis property finally denied permission for an atlas.
Fonstad died of issues from breast most cancers on March 11, 2005. at his residence in Oshkosh. She was 59.
For all her dedication to fantasy worlds, Fonstad was confused by the rise of fan tradition. She not often accepted invites to conventions or conferences, claiming she was too thin-skinned to supply criticism. However her reluctance softened towards the tip of her life when Peter Jackson’s Lord of the Rings movie trilogy made the characters Frodo and Bilbo Baggins family names.
In 2004 at a convention in Atlanta, she met Alan Lee, the movie’s Oscar-winning conceptual designer, who talked about that her atlas was a significant useful resource for his crew.
“Nothing might have made my mom happier in the previous few months of her life,” her son, Mark Fonstad, an affiliate professor of geography on the College of Oregon, stated in an interview. “She actually appreciated these motion pictures, regardless that she was within the 1 % of people that might inform any distinction from the books.”
