This text is a part of Missed, a collection of obituaries about outstanding individuals whose deaths, starting in 1851, went unreported in The Instances.
In 1977, Karen Wynn Fonstad made an extended shot chilly name to J.R.R. Tolkien’s American writer with the hope of touchdown a dream task: to create an exhaustive atlas of Center-earth, the setting of the writer’s extensively well-liked “The Hobbit” and “The Lord of the Rings.”
To her shock, an editor agreed.
Fonstad spent two and a half years on the venture, studying by way of the novels line by line and painstakingly indexing any textual content from which she might infer geographic particulars. With two younger kids at dwelling, she principally labored at night time. Her husband left notes on her drafting desk reminding her to go to mattress.
Her ensuing e book, “The Atlas of Center-earth” (1981), wowed Tolkien followers and students with its beautiful degree of topographic element; the latest paperback version is in its thirty second printing.
“There is a gigantic quantity of knowledge,” the critic Baird Searles wrote in a assessment of her e book in Asimov’s Science Fiction journal, “from a diagram of the evolution of the languages of Center-earth to tables of the lengths of mountain ranges and rivers. It’s a real atlas (the writer is a geographer) and fairly an 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 “Dragonriders of Pern” collection, which the writer Anne McCaffrey started publishing in 1968, and a pair of foundational worlds throughout the Dungeons & Dragons franchise.
Fonstad’s atlases turned objects of cult veneration, and at present, the ranks of the gaming business and of fantasy and sci-fi publishing are crammed with cartographers influenced by her work.
“It was just like the Velvet Underground of fantasy mapmaking,” Jason Fry, a co-author of “Star Wars: The Important Atlas” (2009, with Daniel Wallace), stated in an interview about “The Atlas of Center-earth.” “Everybody who learn it went out and obtained graph paper and mapped one thing.”
Mike Schley, a up to date fantasy mapmaker, has referenced her work in his personal analysis.
“Her diagrams and exposition gave her work gravity and materiality,” he stated in an interview. “It’s one factor to put in writing off a function as, nicely, magic. It’s one other to really feel like you will get dust underneath your nails exploring a spot.”
Karen Lea Wynn was born on April 18, 1945, in Oklahoma Metropolis, to Estis (Wampler) and James Wynn. She was raised in close by Norman, Okla., the place her father ran a sheet-metal store and her mom did secretarial work for rent.
After graduating from Norman Excessive College, she enrolled on the College of Oklahoma, finding out artwork, then, envisioning a profession as a medical artist, switched her main to bodily remedy and graduated in 1967.
However a part-time job illustrating maps for the college’s geography division kindled her curiosity in cartography. In 1968, she was one in all a handful of girls accepted into the college’s geography graduate program, the place she wrote a mode handbook of cartographic symbology as her grasp’s thesis. Whereas a grad scholar, she met and married Todd Fonstad, a Ph.D. scholar 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 replica of “The Fellowship of the Ring” (1954), the primary in Tolkien’s “Lord of the Rings” trilogy. Although she wasn’t an avid reader of fantasy, Fonstad was entranced. She stayed up all night time ending it, then went out the subsequent day to purchase the remainder of the trilogy.
Her son stated she had learn “The Hobbit” and “The Lord of the Rings” some 30 instances earlier than pitching the atlas.
“I doubt if some other e book or books will ever grasp my curiosity as a lot as these,” she wrote in her journal in 1975. “Every time I end a studying I instantly really feel as if I hadn’t learn them for weeks and I’m lonely for them — lonely for the characters throughout the books, the tremendously vivid descriptions, the entire essence.”
The thought for an atlas got here to Fonstad after the 1977 publication of “The Silmarillion,” a dense, posthumous assortment of Tolkien-penned tales comprising the myths and historic historical past of Center-earth. (Tolkien died in 1973.) She envisioned a set of maps spanning the numerous millenniums of Tolkien’s legendarium, bringing a geographer’s eye not simply to landforms but in addition to the migrations of peoples, battlefield troop actions and the journeys of the novels’ characters.
“It’s one factor to put in writing off a function as, nicely, magic. It’s one other to really feel like you will get dust underneath your nails exploring a spot.”
When she known as Houghton Mifflin to pitch her thought, Fonstad was related with Tolkien’s U.S. editor, Anne Barrett, who was semiretired however occurred to be visiting the workplace that day. Barrett so beloved the idea that she secured permission from the Tolkien property inside days.
As a part of her analysis, Fonstad pored over Tolkien’s unique manuscripts and notes, archived at Milwaukee’s Marquette College, close to her dwelling in Oshkosh.
The primary version of “The Atlas of Center-earth” contained 172 maps, which Fonstad drew by hand. Every was accompanied by reflections on her methodology and assumptions, together with matters just like the bedrock morphology of the Shire, settlement patterns in Gondor and plate tectonics in Mordor.
A 1991 revised version integrated particulars from 9 volumes of “The Historical past of Center-earth,” a trove of previously unpublished Tolkien materials edited by the writer’s son Christopher. The revised atlas, nonetheless in print, has been translated into practically a dozen languages.
“It’s far and away the very best and most cautious reference work associated to Tolkien,” Stentor Danielson, a Tolkien scholar and an affiliate professor of geography at Pennsylvania’s Slippery Rock College, stated in an interview.
Fonstad adopted her Center-earth tome with 4 equally bold 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 revealed in 1984. And she or he went to New Mexico to seek the advice of with the novelist Stephen R. Donaldson, writer of “The Chronicles of Thomas Covenant” collection, for the “The Atlas of the Land,” revealed in 1985.
In an interview, Donaldson recalled Fonstad arriving with “an infinite checklist of scenes and locations” from his books and asking questions on trivia he’d by no means thought-about.
“It’s one factor to put in writing off a function as, nicely, magic. It’s one other to really feel like you will get dust underneath your nails exploring a spot.”
For TSR Inc., the writer of the Dungeons & Dragons role-playing recreation and then-ubiquitous tie-in novels, Fonstad launched “Atlas of the Dragonlance World” (1987) and “The Forgotten Realms Atlas” (1990), each of that are sought-after collectibles nonetheless used as reference materials by artists working for the franchise.
“Her work is a kind of uncommon events when fantasy maps handle to get nearer to ‘actual cartography,’” Francesca Baerald, a up to date Dungeons & Dragons map artist, wrote in an electronic mail. “The scientific strategy she adopted and her look after every small element is one thing unimaginable.”
Her atlases earned Fonstad renown amongst fantasy readers, however solely modest earnings, which she supplemented by instructing geography half time for the College of Wisconsin Oshkosh and by moonlighting 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 underwent practically seven years of remedy, remission and recurrence. Throughout that point, she began mapping C.S. Lewis’s “Chronicles of Narnia,” however the Lewis property finally withheld permission for an atlas.
Fonstad died of problems of breast most cancers on March 11, 2005, at her dwelling in Oshkosh. She was 59.
For all her devotion to fantasy worlds, Fonstad was bemused by the rise of fan tradition. She not often accepted invitations to conventions or conferences, claiming she was too thin-skinned to discipline criticism. However her reluctance softened close to the tip of her life, as 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 movies’ Oscar-winning conceptual designer, who talked about that her atlas had been a significant useful resource for his group.
“Nothing might have made my mom happier in the previous couple of months of her life,” her son, Mark Fonstad, an affiliate professor of geography on the College of Oregon, stated in an interview. “She very a lot loved these motion pictures, although she was among the many 1 p.c of people that might have nitpicked each distinction from the books.”
