Geography and Prehistory
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One of the fun things about writing in Tolkien's mindset is all of the world-building he does. Of course, the stories even exist at all in order to give the languages a place to exist. So I start to think, what was the world like in the Fourth Age?
The word that Takeuchi used for the four Youma generals was Shitennou (四天王) -- literally four heavenly kings. (I have no idea where that second "N" came from.) This came over from Buddhism, and each represents guardian spirits of the cardinal directions: north, south, east, and west (which Fushigi Yuugi watchers would know). Of course, given the time between the Fourth Age and the present (Sixth Age?), the mythological attributes were mostly invented later.
Endymion was a prince, of course, but where where these other kingdoms? Asia centered, maybe? One thing to do is to look at Tolkien, and see what he says about it.
Well, that's pretty direct. It is supposed to be a mythical history of the English, on the same level as the Eddas. Even the word Mediterranean literally means "in the middle of earth". But the geography looks odd at first glance. Indeed, the first time I read the book when I was about, oh, college freshman age, I pretty much looked at Mordor and instantly laughed at the right-angled mountain ranges.
There're a couple of articles where a geologist takes a look at the mountains and rivers of Middle-earth. I feel like a few criticisms are unfair, like how odd he thinks it is that a river parallels a mountain range — basically all of California's major rivers do this, due to the being the impact zone of the collision with the Pacific Plate. But he makes one very good point, that when Tolkien was writing the theory of continental drift had not yet been established. Had he wrote a few decades later, these maps may have been much better. All he really would have known is that the land east of England, Doggerland, flooded, and that the land of Europe had gone through many changes in past eras. In later writings he tried to accomodate some of this new knowlege.
Some fans have done some simulations of Middle-earth projected onto Europe. Well, let's see what we've got:
![[Image: Didier_Willis_-_Middle-earth_and_Europe_projection.png]](https://tolkiengateway.net/w/images/5/5b/Didier_Willis_-_Middle-earth_and_Europe_projection.png)
Okay that kind of works, but in other ways not at all works, like putting mountains in the middle of England's swampiest swamps. Er, I mean, most ecologically critical wetlands. One thing that strikes me here is that Mordor seems kind of like Asia Minor over there. That sea in the middle seems a little like Lake Tuz (which apparently disappeared completely two years ago). Minas Tirith seems close to Gallipoli (there are floodable lands either in Rhûn or Mordor), which probably makes the Anduin an analogue to the Danube. Ancient England being connected to the mainland is A-OK -- Doggerland didn't flood until relatively recently.
But unlike in my youth, I now look at the map and think, you know, that's a pretty damn good map of Europe — particularly in terms of cultural geography. One has to go back to the concept Tolkien was writing: the historical myth of the the Anglo people that would have been produced in the Middle Ages, had they not been invaded by the Normans. Yeah, weird, but all of us authors are. So while the events are supposed to have happened in the long distant past, you should look at this through the lens of the High Middle Ages.
Tolkien definitely changed the geography to suit the plot, and he did it very accurately. In Bret Devereaux's very long series on the Battle of Helm's Deep, he basically comes to the conclusion that most every non-magic thing was appropriate to medieval warfare, from technology to army sizes to fortifications. The characters only bother to explain what they're doing when some bumpkin hobbit is around -- it's not as if Aragorn and Theoden need to explain basics of siege warfare to each other. But what you see makes a lot of sense.
If you zoom out on the Middle Ages, the defining event was the conflict between the West and the East, and Tolkien uses this terminology everywhere. In particular, it was between the advance of Islam into Christian lands, and it felt more and more like an existential struggle for Christ against the forces of Islam. I read The Song of Roland a while back, and I highly recommend it because of the insight you get into how medieval folks actually thought — therein it describes how the evil Moslem worshippers of Apollo [sic, so very sic] were defeated by soldiers and armed clerics. Tolkien absolutely does not want to put Muslims in the evil role in a modern tale, so he replaces them with always chaotic evil orc race. They are not the same, but do allow an East-West conflict.
And then the geography falls into place. The lost realm of Andor is Western Rome, which once stretched though Gaul up to the Shire. The many walls of Minas Tirith are Theodosian Walls of Constantinople, which makes Gondor the as yet unfallen Eastern Roman Empire. The Black Sea has not yet flooded, and is the Battle Plain, a.k.a. Dagorlad. Across the water from Minas Tirith is the land of Mordor, which is definitely Anatolia. The east-west mountains near Gondor are the Alps, the North-South ones are probably an imagined German highland connecting through Jutland to the Scandinavian mountains. Rohan is a migratory horse people from the Eastern steppes that moved into the Balkans, during the Migration Period.
All of that is well and good, but for this fic I need to strip all of that historic medieval context back out, as well as use actual geography of the last glacial period. That said, I need to keep the original medieval context of Lord of the Rings, in terms of culture and technology. It's a real medieval society, which means that by the end of the Fourth Age, where we set our story, we'll be in an Early Modern or Modern context. The Earthlings have to get to space somehow so they can invade the Moon, right?
But back to the earlier question: there are other kingdoms, right? But where? Thematically, it makes sense to put Endymion on the throne of Gondor, which seems to be near Greece, and a cromulent place for an early civilization. This more or less would explain why Minako ended up in Greece when exploring her past.
One thing of note is that Takeuchi-sensei actually assigns the Shitennou regions of Dark Kingdom operation. Jadeite: Far-East; Nephrite: North America; Zoicite: Europe; Kunzite: Middle-East. We know the Dark Kingdom is evil because they are completely ignoring the Global South! This arrangement actually kind of works. If Gondor is something of a Mediterranean civilization, and Arnor is like Western Europe... sure.
We know there were Men in the east, in the lands where the Elves woke. Men ostensibly woke there too -- since the prevailing theory at the time the legendarium was being conceived was the Out of Asia hypothesis. At least some of Men of the east had fallen under the sway of Sauron -- certainly there was little communication between the West and really anyone across the Anduin near the end of the Third Age, since Greenwood the Great fell under the Necromancer's influence and became Mirkwood -- later remembered in the Norse sagas as Myrkviðr. But since Middle-earth is Europe, the people of the East are not really important except as adversaries and subjugated peoples in The Lord of the Rings.
In any case, we have what looks to be the heart of geopolitics in the late Fourth Age: One great kingdom on Earth, surrounded by four rather large vassal states. This seems to me to me to be kind like the setup in CLAMP's RG Veda, but the only thing I can say for sure about that manga is that attractive people fell in love with each other, then fought each other because it was ordained by fate or something. It's possible, and not to different from what happened with Alexander's empire. I think this can exist in a Late Modern context — the current mode of geopolitics is American hegemony, so why not hegemony in the Fourth Age, Earth's first modern period?
Since when we talk about geography, we need to know when, because geography changes. In human lifetimes, rivers change course and coastlines erode, but much more happens over longer time. Tolkien would have been familiar with the loss of cities to the sea in East Anglia, for instance. So he writes that the world was remade, and geography changes -- most dramatically in the War of Wrath, where nearly all of Beleriand sinks beneath the waves.
We know even more land must have be lost, because the Shire is not in the middle of a continent, but is on the island of Britain these days. Not so long ago, it was connected to the mainland through Doggerland, but that land too was lost. Much of my reasoning is in another thread, a post on the Language and Secret Prehistory of the Moon Kingdom. But the time period where we have people in societies, but land yet to sink beneath the ocean, is the Younger Dryas event at ~ 12000 BP (~10000 BC). This event sets the stage for another cataclysm at the end of the Moon Kingdom, which is very Tolkienesque.
So, where did cool stuff survive from the last ice age? In Serbia and Romania, along the Danube, the Iron Gates culture had a large settlement at Lepenski Vir. Göbekli Tepe, on the edge of Syria and Anatolia, is an ancient complex. The city of Jericho has been inhabited and walled since the Younger-Dryas, with various periods of abandonment. Pottery was being made in Japan in the Jomon culture (Korea/Jeulmun is just barely out of our time range). Surprisingly there's no settled people with ceramics known in the Indian subcontinent at this time, but there's some caves in North Africa.
Some dating which has been, well, disputed in archaeology dates the megaliths at Gunung Padang on Java at around 10000 BC. And then there's the hypothesis of not-an-archaeologist Graham Hancock that evidence of civilization from before the Younger Dryas was in land that is now submerged -- Sundaland in particular in what are now the Indonesian islands (apparently Borneo had glaciers in this period!), as well as perhaps sites in Doggerland (North Sea) and Florida/the Caribbean. As I've been looking around at this period, I think he's essentially right that there was likely more civilization back longer, and we haven't seen most of the evidence. Lots of places lack evidence because not enough locals are looking for it. But that's not really an excuse to make up a larger story about a dying civilization.
Unless you're writing fiction, of course!
So as a first approximation, our five kingdoms could be Gondor/Balkans, Arnor/Western Europe, Harad (literally "South")/Arabia and Persia, Sundaland, and Japan. I don't yet know what to name either of last two. Japan is actually really convenient, because it means there's a reason for Usagi Serenity and her court to reincarnate in Japan, and it's also roughly where Hildórien is, the place where Men first awoke in Tolkien's history, and thus a place to reawaken.
There's a couple more notes on the geography: the D-Point is obviously either Angband or Utumno, a vast subterranean fortresses once inhabited by Morgoth and his host of nasties. Utumno was theoretically destroyed by the Valar in the War of Wrath, but secret chambers existed where folks like Sauron hid and survived. Where precisely any of those locations lie isn't all that important, but they're in the hyperborean tundra. It seems exactly like the kind of place Metallia might renovate to make a bit more homey.
At the very edge of Aman, in interplanetary geography, near Pluto, lies the Door of Night through which Morgoth was ejected into the Timeless Void, and which Eärendil was left to guard. If that's not the same as the Space-Time Door, I'll eat my hat. Sailor Moon's Chaos (ultimate supreme big baddie) being Melkor/Morgoth is obvious, and it makes sense why Pluto cannot leave the door unguarded, and also why Chaos sends agents in from outer space rather than come himself.
Finally, let's address why I should even care about fitting geography into the real world when I'm trying to merge two mythic pasts together into one tale. BSSM's setting in the modern day does rely on science and science fiction is part of the reason. The main reason is, however, what kind of civilization exists in the period at the end of the Moon Kingdom. The Moon Kingdom has, at a minimum, multiplanetary outposts, but as I argued in the other thread, it likely involves some degree of elven settlement on the outer moons. And the Men of Earth must have a way of projecting power into space.
So we need to fix them in place, and similarly to fix them in time. It wouldn't be too strange if a descendant of the Noldor managed to get computers working for the Mercury Computer, as the Noldor were always exceptional with craft. But the Men are going to need to climb the technological ladder, even if they can "simply" get to the Moon with teleportation magic. Yes, Tolkien does portray military tech as moving backwards at various points in the history of Middle-Earth, but the way to industrial progress ran right through the military technology of cannons to pressure vessels for steam power.
And, well, some of the Men on Sauron or Saruman's side will have known how all those engines worked. I'm not sure if Tolkien himself would have wanted that bell unrung through the destruction of Mordor and Isengard -- he talks both about the great workings of the ancient past and how awful the machinery is now -- but I think we need a higher technology level for humanity to face the half-elves of the Moon.
The other reason it should be higher is that the attack on the Moon seems kind of genocidal, which as I noted in the other thread, essentially implies nationalism. The world then starts to look very nineteenth century, with entrenched nobility but imperial and racial ambitions. And, like, by God if I can't make it interesting in a steampunkish setting what on Earth am I doing here?
We may not need intensive agriculture, or artificial fertilizer, given the relatively low populations of Middle-earth. But they would be able to see the world as it is, and discard the geography of legend. And Men would have built an industry of some kind, perhaps not as dark and noisome as the evil ones made, but some kind of machinery nonetheless.
And bringing it back to the time setting of the Younger Dryas, that temperature spike looks awfully familiar. Could we detect this civilization from the geologic record? Probably, if it was real, but it really depends on the the chemical signatures left behind. We have some pottery, but on the other hand we hardly have textiles from 500 years ago. Honestly prehistory is a pretty fun space to write into.
Open questions:
* How actually do Men get into space?
* Is mithril strong enough to make a space elevator? (no, really)
* Is that orb Beryl is constantly holding a palantir? (if so, likely the Orthanc stone due to the size) If so, has Metalia found the others?
* What becomes of the other races? (Dwarves and Hobbits; Elves have gone to Aman, natch)
* Is the Last Glacial Maximum caused by Metalia?
* What actually is Metalia's plan?
* Where exactly did the Blue Wizards go? Paleo-Tokyo?
Any comments or feedback would be appreciated.
-----
One of the fun things about writing in Tolkien's mindset is all of the world-building he does. Of course, the stories even exist at all in order to give the languages a place to exist. So I start to think, what was the world like in the Fourth Age?
The word that Takeuchi used for the four Youma generals was Shitennou (四天王) -- literally four heavenly kings. (I have no idea where that second "N" came from.) This came over from Buddhism, and each represents guardian spirits of the cardinal directions: north, south, east, and west (which Fushigi Yuugi watchers would know). Of course, given the time between the Fourth Age and the present (Sixth Age?), the mythological attributes were mostly invented later.
Endymion was a prince, of course, but where where these other kingdoms? Asia centered, maybe? One thing to do is to look at Tolkien, and see what he says about it.
JRR Tolkien Wrote:Middle-earth is Europe.
Well, that's pretty direct. It is supposed to be a mythical history of the English, on the same level as the Eddas. Even the word Mediterranean literally means "in the middle of earth". But the geography looks odd at first glance. Indeed, the first time I read the book when I was about, oh, college freshman age, I pretty much looked at Mordor and instantly laughed at the right-angled mountain ranges.
There're a couple of articles where a geologist takes a look at the mountains and rivers of Middle-earth. I feel like a few criticisms are unfair, like how odd he thinks it is that a river parallels a mountain range — basically all of California's major rivers do this, due to the being the impact zone of the collision with the Pacific Plate. But he makes one very good point, that when Tolkien was writing the theory of continental drift had not yet been established. Had he wrote a few decades later, these maps may have been much better. All he really would have known is that the land east of England, Doggerland, flooded, and that the land of Europe had gone through many changes in past eras. In later writings he tried to accomodate some of this new knowlege.
Some fans have done some simulations of Middle-earth projected onto Europe. Well, let's see what we've got:
Okay that kind of works, but in other ways not at all works, like putting mountains in the middle of England's swampiest swamps. Er, I mean, most ecologically critical wetlands. One thing that strikes me here is that Mordor seems kind of like Asia Minor over there. That sea in the middle seems a little like Lake Tuz (which apparently disappeared completely two years ago). Minas Tirith seems close to Gallipoli (there are floodable lands either in Rhûn or Mordor), which probably makes the Anduin an analogue to the Danube. Ancient England being connected to the mainland is A-OK -- Doggerland didn't flood until relatively recently.
But unlike in my youth, I now look at the map and think, you know, that's a pretty damn good map of Europe — particularly in terms of cultural geography. One has to go back to the concept Tolkien was writing: the historical myth of the the Anglo people that would have been produced in the Middle Ages, had they not been invaded by the Normans. Yeah, weird, but all of us authors are. So while the events are supposed to have happened in the long distant past, you should look at this through the lens of the High Middle Ages.
Tolkien definitely changed the geography to suit the plot, and he did it very accurately. In Bret Devereaux's very long series on the Battle of Helm's Deep, he basically comes to the conclusion that most every non-magic thing was appropriate to medieval warfare, from technology to army sizes to fortifications. The characters only bother to explain what they're doing when some bumpkin hobbit is around -- it's not as if Aragorn and Theoden need to explain basics of siege warfare to each other. But what you see makes a lot of sense.
If you zoom out on the Middle Ages, the defining event was the conflict between the West and the East, and Tolkien uses this terminology everywhere. In particular, it was between the advance of Islam into Christian lands, and it felt more and more like an existential struggle for Christ against the forces of Islam. I read The Song of Roland a while back, and I highly recommend it because of the insight you get into how medieval folks actually thought — therein it describes how the evil Moslem worshippers of Apollo [sic, so very sic] were defeated by soldiers and armed clerics. Tolkien absolutely does not want to put Muslims in the evil role in a modern tale, so he replaces them with always chaotic evil orc race. They are not the same, but do allow an East-West conflict.
And then the geography falls into place. The lost realm of Andor is Western Rome, which once stretched though Gaul up to the Shire. The many walls of Minas Tirith are Theodosian Walls of Constantinople, which makes Gondor the as yet unfallen Eastern Roman Empire. The Black Sea has not yet flooded, and is the Battle Plain, a.k.a. Dagorlad. Across the water from Minas Tirith is the land of Mordor, which is definitely Anatolia. The east-west mountains near Gondor are the Alps, the North-South ones are probably an imagined German highland connecting through Jutland to the Scandinavian mountains. Rohan is a migratory horse people from the Eastern steppes that moved into the Balkans, during the Migration Period.
All of that is well and good, but for this fic I need to strip all of that historic medieval context back out, as well as use actual geography of the last glacial period. That said, I need to keep the original medieval context of Lord of the Rings, in terms of culture and technology. It's a real medieval society, which means that by the end of the Fourth Age, where we set our story, we'll be in an Early Modern or Modern context. The Earthlings have to get to space somehow so they can invade the Moon, right?
But back to the earlier question: there are other kingdoms, right? But where? Thematically, it makes sense to put Endymion on the throne of Gondor, which seems to be near Greece, and a cromulent place for an early civilization. This more or less would explain why Minako ended up in Greece when exploring her past.
One thing of note is that Takeuchi-sensei actually assigns the Shitennou regions of Dark Kingdom operation. Jadeite: Far-East; Nephrite: North America; Zoicite: Europe; Kunzite: Middle-East. We know the Dark Kingdom is evil because they are completely ignoring the Global South! This arrangement actually kind of works. If Gondor is something of a Mediterranean civilization, and Arnor is like Western Europe... sure.
We know there were Men in the east, in the lands where the Elves woke. Men ostensibly woke there too -- since the prevailing theory at the time the legendarium was being conceived was the Out of Asia hypothesis. At least some of Men of the east had fallen under the sway of Sauron -- certainly there was little communication between the West and really anyone across the Anduin near the end of the Third Age, since Greenwood the Great fell under the Necromancer's influence and became Mirkwood -- later remembered in the Norse sagas as Myrkviðr. But since Middle-earth is Europe, the people of the East are not really important except as adversaries and subjugated peoples in The Lord of the Rings.
In any case, we have what looks to be the heart of geopolitics in the late Fourth Age: One great kingdom on Earth, surrounded by four rather large vassal states. This seems to me to me to be kind like the setup in CLAMP's RG Veda, but the only thing I can say for sure about that manga is that attractive people fell in love with each other, then fought each other because it was ordained by fate or something. It's possible, and not to different from what happened with Alexander's empire. I think this can exist in a Late Modern context — the current mode of geopolitics is American hegemony, so why not hegemony in the Fourth Age, Earth's first modern period?
Since when we talk about geography, we need to know when, because geography changes. In human lifetimes, rivers change course and coastlines erode, but much more happens over longer time. Tolkien would have been familiar with the loss of cities to the sea in East Anglia, for instance. So he writes that the world was remade, and geography changes -- most dramatically in the War of Wrath, where nearly all of Beleriand sinks beneath the waves.
We know even more land must have be lost, because the Shire is not in the middle of a continent, but is on the island of Britain these days. Not so long ago, it was connected to the mainland through Doggerland, but that land too was lost. Much of my reasoning is in another thread, a post on the Language and Secret Prehistory of the Moon Kingdom. But the time period where we have people in societies, but land yet to sink beneath the ocean, is the Younger Dryas event at ~ 12000 BP (~10000 BC). This event sets the stage for another cataclysm at the end of the Moon Kingdom, which is very Tolkienesque.
So, where did cool stuff survive from the last ice age? In Serbia and Romania, along the Danube, the Iron Gates culture had a large settlement at Lepenski Vir. Göbekli Tepe, on the edge of Syria and Anatolia, is an ancient complex. The city of Jericho has been inhabited and walled since the Younger-Dryas, with various periods of abandonment. Pottery was being made in Japan in the Jomon culture (Korea/Jeulmun is just barely out of our time range). Surprisingly there's no settled people with ceramics known in the Indian subcontinent at this time, but there's some caves in North Africa.
Some dating which has been, well, disputed in archaeology dates the megaliths at Gunung Padang on Java at around 10000 BC. And then there's the hypothesis of not-an-archaeologist Graham Hancock that evidence of civilization from before the Younger Dryas was in land that is now submerged -- Sundaland in particular in what are now the Indonesian islands (apparently Borneo had glaciers in this period!), as well as perhaps sites in Doggerland (North Sea) and Florida/the Caribbean. As I've been looking around at this period, I think he's essentially right that there was likely more civilization back longer, and we haven't seen most of the evidence. Lots of places lack evidence because not enough locals are looking for it. But that's not really an excuse to make up a larger story about a dying civilization.
Unless you're writing fiction, of course!
So as a first approximation, our five kingdoms could be Gondor/Balkans, Arnor/Western Europe, Harad (literally "South")/Arabia and Persia, Sundaland, and Japan. I don't yet know what to name either of last two. Japan is actually really convenient, because it means there's a reason for Usagi Serenity and her court to reincarnate in Japan, and it's also roughly where Hildórien is, the place where Men first awoke in Tolkien's history, and thus a place to reawaken.
There's a couple more notes on the geography: the D-Point is obviously either Angband or Utumno, a vast subterranean fortresses once inhabited by Morgoth and his host of nasties. Utumno was theoretically destroyed by the Valar in the War of Wrath, but secret chambers existed where folks like Sauron hid and survived. Where precisely any of those locations lie isn't all that important, but they're in the hyperborean tundra. It seems exactly like the kind of place Metallia might renovate to make a bit more homey.
At the very edge of Aman, in interplanetary geography, near Pluto, lies the Door of Night through which Morgoth was ejected into the Timeless Void, and which Eärendil was left to guard. If that's not the same as the Space-Time Door, I'll eat my hat. Sailor Moon's Chaos (ultimate supreme big baddie) being Melkor/Morgoth is obvious, and it makes sense why Pluto cannot leave the door unguarded, and also why Chaos sends agents in from outer space rather than come himself.
Finally, let's address why I should even care about fitting geography into the real world when I'm trying to merge two mythic pasts together into one tale. BSSM's setting in the modern day does rely on science and science fiction is part of the reason. The main reason is, however, what kind of civilization exists in the period at the end of the Moon Kingdom. The Moon Kingdom has, at a minimum, multiplanetary outposts, but as I argued in the other thread, it likely involves some degree of elven settlement on the outer moons. And the Men of Earth must have a way of projecting power into space.
So we need to fix them in place, and similarly to fix them in time. It wouldn't be too strange if a descendant of the Noldor managed to get computers working for the Mercury Computer, as the Noldor were always exceptional with craft. But the Men are going to need to climb the technological ladder, even if they can "simply" get to the Moon with teleportation magic. Yes, Tolkien does portray military tech as moving backwards at various points in the history of Middle-Earth, but the way to industrial progress ran right through the military technology of cannons to pressure vessels for steam power.
And, well, some of the Men on Sauron or Saruman's side will have known how all those engines worked. I'm not sure if Tolkien himself would have wanted that bell unrung through the destruction of Mordor and Isengard -- he talks both about the great workings of the ancient past and how awful the machinery is now -- but I think we need a higher technology level for humanity to face the half-elves of the Moon.
The other reason it should be higher is that the attack on the Moon seems kind of genocidal, which as I noted in the other thread, essentially implies nationalism. The world then starts to look very nineteenth century, with entrenched nobility but imperial and racial ambitions. And, like, by God if I can't make it interesting in a steampunkish setting what on Earth am I doing here?
We may not need intensive agriculture, or artificial fertilizer, given the relatively low populations of Middle-earth. But they would be able to see the world as it is, and discard the geography of legend. And Men would have built an industry of some kind, perhaps not as dark and noisome as the evil ones made, but some kind of machinery nonetheless.
And bringing it back to the time setting of the Younger Dryas, that temperature spike looks awfully familiar. Could we detect this civilization from the geologic record? Probably, if it was real, but it really depends on the the chemical signatures left behind. We have some pottery, but on the other hand we hardly have textiles from 500 years ago. Honestly prehistory is a pretty fun space to write into.
Open questions:
* How actually do Men get into space?
* Is mithril strong enough to make a space elevator? (no, really)
* Is that orb Beryl is constantly holding a palantir? (if so, likely the Orthanc stone due to the size) If so, has Metalia found the others?
* What becomes of the other races? (Dwarves and Hobbits; Elves have gone to Aman, natch)
* Is the Last Glacial Maximum caused by Metalia?
* What actually is Metalia's plan?
* Where exactly did the Blue Wizards go? Paleo-Tokyo?
Any comments or feedback would be appreciated.
"Kitto daijoubu da yo." - Sakura Kinomoto