Why all the fuss? Tolkien wanted their journey to Mount Doom to sync with Aragorn's battle at the Black Gate. Topographic contour lines show mountains and the pitch of slopes. In two diagrams, "Map of Rohan, Gondor, and Mordor" and "Distances and dates in Mordor," we see Tolkien's supremely obsessive efforts to calculate the motions and locations of Frodo and Sam to the last millimeter (where 1 mm equals 5 miles). This was a traffic control problem Tolkien exacerbated once he broke up the Fellowship at the end of The Fellowship, thereby unleashing diverging plotlines for at least three groups: Gimli/Legolas/Aragorn (later joined by Gandalf) Pippin/Merry (and Treebeard) and Frodo/Sam/Gollum (and Faramir). Maps also helped Tolkien follow his characters across Middle-earth. The key lesson of The Art of The Lord of the Rings is this: We forget that it’s not only filmmakers who need to translate words into pictures. Later, guided by his sketches, he described the structure more harshly: "A peak and isle of rock it was, black and gleaming hard: four mighty piers of many-sided stone were welded into one." In Tolkien’s process, his drawings and text informed and influenced each other.
Here, he’s trying a gentler, rounded, tiered version of the tower, which matched an early draft of The Two Towers.
In the three-part sketch of Saruman’s tower, "Orthanc (2), 3, (4)," we see Tolkien testing ideas. No wonder 17 years passed between the publication of The Hobbit and Rings. Lothlórien and Gondor! Mount Doom and Edoras! Uruk-hai and Nazgul! So many homelands, races, and cultures to flesh out buildings and environments to build natural and man-made (and dwarf-, elf-, and hobbit-made) features to be pictured in his mind, carefully placed on the map, and turned into words. The width and breadth of it probably felt overwhelming. To be sure, Tolkien had to grapple with the fact the Middle-earth of Lord of the Rings was far more complicated, and expansive, than the Bilbo-sized realm of The Hobbit. To be sure, Tolkien had to grapple with the fact that the Middle-earth of Lord of the Rings was a lot more complicated, and vaster, than the Bilbo-sized version in The Hobbit.
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