This article is part of Overlooked, a series of obituaries on prominent people whose deaths were not reported in the Times starting in 1851.
In 1977, Karen Wynn Fonstad realized her dream job of creating a comprehensive atlas of Middle-earth, the setting for Tolkien's widely popular The Hobbit and The Hobbit. I made a reckless phone call to J.R.R. Tolkien's American publisher, hoping to do so. Lord of the Rings. ”
To my surprise, one editor agreed.
Fonstad spent two and a half years on this project, reading the novel line by line and painstakingly creating an index of text from which he could infer geographic details. With two young children at home, she worked mostly at night. Her husband left a note on the drafting table urging her to go to bed.
Her book Atlas of Middle-earth (1981) astounded Tolkien fans and scholars with its exquisite level of topographical detail. The latest paperback edition is the 32nd printing.
In a review of his book published in Asimov's Science Fiction magazine, critic Baird Searles writes, “From diagrams of the evolution of languages in Middle-earth to tables of mountain range lengths to rivers. (The author is a geographer) and is quite an accomplishment.
Soon Perun, the setting for author Anne McCaffrey's vast and best-selling Dragon Riders of Pern series, which began publishing in 1968, and other cities with their own subcultures, including two basic worlds. Requests for atlases of fictional locations continued. Within the Dungeons & Dragons franchise.
Fonstad's atlases have become the subject of a cult following, and today there are many cartographers in the gaming, fantasy, and science fiction publishing worlds who have been influenced by her work.
“It was like the Velvet Underground of fantasy cartography,” said Jason Fry, co-author of “Star Wars: The Essential Atlas” (2009, co-authored with Daniel Wallace). In an interview about “Atlas.'' “Everyone who read this picked up a piece of graph paper and drew something on a map.”
Modern fantasy cartographer Mike Schley references her work in his own research.
“Her illustrations and commentary gave her work weight and materiality,” he said in an interview. “It's one thing to dismiss a feature as magical. It's another thing to feel like you've got dirt under your fingernails when you're exploring a place.”
Karen Lee Wynn was born April 18, 1945 in Oklahoma City to Estis (Wampler) and James Wynn. She grew up near Norman, Oklahoma, where her father owned a sheet metal shop and her mother worked as an employed secretary.
After graduating from Norman High School, he enrolled at the University of Oklahoma, where he studied art, then changed his major to physical therapy, envisioning a career as a medical artist, and graduated in 1967.
However, a part-time job illustrating maps for her university's geography department sparked her interest in cartography. In 1968, she was one of the few women admitted to the school's geography graduate program, where she wrote a style manual for cartographic semiotics as her master's thesis. While a graduate student, she met and married Todd Fonstad, a Ph.D. students 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 Lord of the Rings (1954), the first of Tolkien's Lord of the Rings trilogy. Although she wasn't an avid fantasy reader, Ms. Fonstad was fascinated. She stayed up all night finishing it and went out the next day to buy the rest of the trilogy.
Her son said he read “The Hobbit” and “The Lord of the Rings” about 30 times before pitching the atlas.
“I wonder if any other book has ever captured my interest like this,” she wrote in her diary in 1975. I miss them, and I miss the characters in the book, their very vivid descriptions, their whole nature. ”
The idea for Atlas came to Fonstad after the 1977 publication of The Silmarillions, Tolkien's posthumous story collection of Middle-earth mythology and ancient history. (Tolkien died in 1973). He envisioned a series of maps spanning a thousand years.
“It's one thing to dismiss a feature as magical. It's another thing to feel like you've got dirt under your fingernails when you're exploring a place.”
When she called Houghton Mifflin to pitch the idea, Fonstad connected with Tolkien's U.S. editor, Anne Barrett. Ann Barrett was semi-retired, but happened to be visiting the office that day. Barrett liked the concept so much that he received permission from the Tolkien Foundation within days.
As part of her research, Fonstad pored over Tolkien's original manuscripts and notes stored at Marquette University in Milwaukee, near her home in Oshkosh.
The first edition of Atlas of Middle-earth included 172 hand-drawn maps by Fonstad. Each study was accompanied by a discussion of her methodology and assumptions, along with topics such as the rock morphology of the Shire, the settlement patterns of Gondor, and the plate tectonics of Mordor.
The 1991 revised edition incorporates details from the nine volumes of A History of Middle-earth, a treasure trove of unpublished Tolkien material edited by the author's son Christopher. The revised atlas is still in print and translated into nearly a dozen languages.
“This is by far the best and most careful bibliography on Tolkien,” Stenter Danielson, a Tolkien scholar and associate professor of geography at Slippery Rock University in Pennsylvania, said in an interview. he said.
Fonstad followed up his Middle-earth book with four equally ambitious atlases. She traveled to Ireland to work with McCaffrey, who in 1968 became the first woman to win the Hugo Award for Fiction for Fiction, for 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 in “The Atlas of the Land,'' published in 1985.
In an interview, Donaldson recalled that Fonstad arrived with a “huge list of scenes and locations” for the book and asked questions about details he hadn't considered.
For TSR Inc., the publisher of the Dungeons & Dragons role-playing game and the then-widely popular tie-in novels, Fonstad created Atlas of the World of Dragonlance (1987) and Atlas of the Forgotten Realms. ” (1990) was released. These are popular collectibles and are still used as reference materials by artists working on the franchise.
“Her work is one of the rare occasions when fantasy maps have come close to 'real cartography,'” modern Dungeons & Dragons map artist Francesca Bearardo wrote in an email. . “The scientific approach she takes and the attention to detail is amazing.”
Her atlases increased Fonstad's fame among fantasy readers, but her income was modest, and she earned it by teaching geography part-time at the University of Wisconsin-Oshkosh and moonlighting as a physical therapist. was supplementing. During the 1990s, Fonstad occasionally produced maps for TSR and the City of Oshkosh, but devoted more time to executive and civic activities, including a term on the Oshkosh City Council.
She was diagnosed with breast cancer in 1998 and experienced nearly seven years of treatment, remissions, and relapses. During that time, she began mapping C.S. Lewis's The Chronicles of Narnia, but Lewis' estate ultimately withheld permission to produce the atlas.
Ms. Fonstad passed away on March 11, 2005 at her home in Oshkosh from complications from breast cancer. She was 59 years old.
Despite her passion for fantasy worlds, Fonstad was perplexed by the rise of fan culture. She rarely accepted invitations to conventions or conferences, claiming that she was too shallow to withstand criticism. However, near the end of her life, her reluctance softened as the characters of Frodo and Bilbo Baggins became well-known in Peter Jackson's Lord of the Rings film trilogy. .
In 2004, at a conference in Atlanta, she met Alan Lee, the film's Oscar-winning concept designer. He said her atlas was an important resource for his team.
“I couldn't have been happier in the last few months of my mother's 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 one of the one percent who could point out all the differences from the books.”
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