It’s Thursday, and already the Marriott hotel in downtown Atlanta is pulsing with music, crowds and excitement. DragonCon is upon us! And staffers from TORn are looking forward to connecting with our fellow fans.
We’ll be at our ‘fan table’ in our usual spot (Hyatt Exhibition Level, opposite the entrance to the Art Show). We have some awesome new buttons for sale, as well as this year’s shirt designs – the Prancing Pony Club:
And Bilbo from the Rankin/Bass The Hobbit:
Please come by the table and say hi. As an added bonus – if you come and tell us something Boromir would have done (in the style of Denethor, a la ‘Boromir would have remembered his father’s need…’), we have a special secret prize for you!
Join us in Bree!
Friday night is of course the annual ‘Evening at Bree‘, starting at 8.30pm. We’re in the Grand Ballroom in the Courtland Grand (same venue as last year), and we’ll have the Brobdingnagian Bards and Beth Patterson playing again, as well as a new (to Bree) band this year, the duo Kinnfolk. The Elf Choir will sing for us, and of course we’ll have the costume contest. (If you’d like to enter, please sign up before the event, either at the High Fantasy Track room: Marriott L401, or at our table.)
Panels
There is lots to enjoy for Tolkien fans this year. TORn’s own panel, ‘An Hour with TheOneRing.net’, when staffers deej, Madeye Gamgee and greendragon will be joined by TORn’s good friend Knewbettadobetta, is Saturday 5.30pm in the Hyatt International South. You can also find greendragon on The Rings of Power Season 2 panel (Friday 1pm, Marriott A601), and join many excellent Tolkien scholars and friends of TORn for ‘Harmony and Dissonance: Creation in Tolkien’s Mythos’ (Sunday 1pm, Marriott L401). For those who stay right through the end of the con, come and Scour the Shire with us at 11.30am on Monday, Marriott L401.
Dance Party
The High Fantasy Track’s ‘Goblin Ball’ goes 90s this year – and our own deej will be DJing once again! Put on your plaid shirt and DMs, apply some frosty lipstick, and come and party 1990s style. We’ll be dancing in the Marriott A601 from 10pm on Sunday night.
As if that weren’t enough…
Tolkien lovers abound at DragonCon this year! Artist Donato Giancola is well-known to fans of Middle-earth, and he’s this year’s Guest of Honour in the Art Show – so be sure to stop by and visit him there. Another featured guest is singer, songwriter, actor and well-known Tolkien fan Jason Charles Miller, who will be performing and appearing in a couple of panels.
Recently, the Robinson Map Library at UW-Madison exhibited many of the manuscripts that cartographer Karen Wynn Fonstad developed in making the groundbreaking The Atlas of Middle-earth.
TORn Discord member Alida Mau shares this report of the exhibit’s showcase of original, hand-drawn maps together with examples of her finalized published works, explanations of her techniques, and stories of her experience turning written, fictional geographic information into visual representations.
Middle Earth Map Exhibit Makes Appearance at UW-Madison
By Alida Mau
UW-Madison’s Robinson Map Library recently held an exhibition that might be unfamiliar to many of Earth’s cartographers, but will certainly resonate with fans of JRR Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings. There the works of the late Karen Fonstad lay on display. The sprawling collection contained drafts and finalized hand drawn maps from her original publication and revised edition of The Atlas of Middle-earth, published in 1981 and 1991 respectively.
The public exhibit ran from July 21 to 31, and was curated by her son, Mark Fonstad, who has been digitizing her full works. The collection included world and regional maps spanning all three ages, along with migration and battle maps, linguistic distribution, and city plans. The exhibition spanned the entirety of the library’s tables yet is estimated to only include 5% of her work, which humbly began sketched out on her kitchen floor.
Developed as a visual tour to supplement reader’s journeys through Tolkien’s literary works. Mapping Arda was a lofty task, for a world that was developed as an alternative history to England, it is not an exact match and landmarks were often amplified from those present in the modern Earth. So she relied upon distances as listed in the books, often in leagues, to set the proper scale for the atlas and expanded upon those descriptions using her geography background and how those landscapes might manifest in a more realistic sense. To give readers a sense of how the world fit together, Karen erred on providing more detail to help fill in some of the blank spaces on the map. Take for example the expansion of Trollshaw forest in the draft of her travel map depicting Frodo’s journey to Rivendell.
Map cataloguing Frodo’s journey from Bag End to Rivendell. UW-Madison Karen Wynn Fonstad Exhibition.
What started the endeavor to make an atlas of Middle-earth was a fateful encounter with a student who wanted to build a map of Middle-earth while Karen was a TA in grad school. Upon realizing an atlas would be better suited to Tolkien’s writings than a world map after the publication of the Silmarillion, Karen pitched the idea to Houghton Mifflin almost a decade later and it was quickly greenlit with the blessing of the Tolkien estate.
She would go on to release a revised edition in 1991, informed by previously unreleased details as the History of Middle-earth was published, such as the circles of the world and geography of Numenor. In an ironic twist, Christopher Tolkien in part credited the initial Atlas of Middle-earth for helping the History of Middle-earth get published upon realizing that the public interest and readership was great enough to warrant undertaking that project.
Early version of the 2nd Age voyages of Numenoreans. UW-Madison Karen Wynn Fonstad Exhibition.
Final draft of the 2nd Age voyages of Numenoreans. UW-Madison Karen Wynn Fonstad Exhibition.
She went off of drafts available in Marquette library which could sometimes be complicated as Tolkien’s canon would change between revisions and sometimes be contradictory. Some of the details of Gondolin’s city layout, for example, were not fully published in a final form.
Unbeknownst to Karen until 2004, Alan Lee mentioned that he and the crew often heavily utilized her Atlas around with them while locations scouting in New Zealand while developing the films. And her reconstruction of Minas Tirith (seen below) based on Tolkien’s own sketches in the Marquette archives helped inform the design decisions of the Jackson films.
From here the collection will be transferred to the American Geographical Society Library in Milwaukee, Wisconsin where it will stay in perpetuity. Karen’s revised edition of Atlas of Middle Earth is still in print and available for purchase.
If you have a Tolkien/Middle-earth inspired poem you’d like to share, then send it to poetry@theonering.net. One poem per person may be submitted each month. Please make sure to proofread your work before sending it in. TheOneRing.net is not responsible for poems posting with spelling or grammatical errors.
We have one more trip around San Diego Comic-Con 2025 for you. In this episode of the Collecting The Precious Podcast Jim and I, along with very special guest Matt from Nerd of the Rings, talk about the fun that was SDCC 2025. We cover how cool it was, and that despite there wasn’t a film or show coming out this year, that there was awesome stuff to be seen from Weta Workshop, Vanderstelt Studio, Middle-earth Enterprises, and Cliff Cramp Illustrations. That’s not to mention how freaking awesome our booth was.
This amazing piece by Weta Workshop was revealed to the world during Comic-Con 2023. After much turmoil for yours truly, I finally had time to sit down, open, and to review this awesome piece.
This is the limited version of the Fountain Guard statue. In this version you also get the White Tree of Gondor as we see it during much of The Lord of the Rings Trilogy. The Fountain Guard of the White Tree is limited to 905 pieces and is sold out of course but if you’re willing you can snag this on the secondary market. It is, after having had time to stare at it, one of my new favourite pieces.
The Prancing Pony made everyone feel like a Hobbit at Comic Con, and now you can give back to Barliman the barkeep!
Photo: Middle Earth Enterprises Team Picture
Our pals at SDCCBlog.com have opened voting for Best Of San Diego Comic Con 2025, affectionately known as The Shruggies, and The Prancing Pony Booth from Middle Earth Enterprises has made the short list of nominees!
Click here to vote for TheOneRing.net booth and the Prancing Pony Club t-shirt for best exclusive!
Heads up: when you fill out the first 4 poll questions, the page automatically refreshes with the rest of the awards categories. We need your vote to catch up to the current leader LEGO!
Vote Vote Vote here! Let’s win one for the old Gaffer!
– Samwise Gamgee, if he went to Comic Con
Bringing the Prancing Pony to life
Middle Earth Enterprises, the stewards of all things LOTR and Hobbit, made their comic con debut in oversized fashion with a book, cartoon and movie accurate scale build of the pub the Hobbits arrive at in Bree. The Prancing Pony, under the peaceful management of Barliman Butterbur, is famously the place where “it comes in pints!”
If the Prancing Pony booth made you feel something, please VOTE at the polls now and be sure to tag @theoneringnet in your photos on IG. Voting ends Friday August 8th.
