This text is a part of Missed, a sequence of obituaries about exceptional folks whose deaths, starting in 1851, went unreported in The Occasions.
In 1977, Karen Wynn Fonstad made a protracted shot chilly name to J.R.R. Tolkien’s American writer with the hope of touchdown a dream project: to create an exhaustive atlas of Center-earth, the setting of the creator’s broadly fashionable “The Hobbit” and “The Lord of the Rings.”
To her shock, an editor agreed.
Fonstad spent two and a half years on the mission, 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 residence, she largely labored at night time. Her husband left notes on her drafting desk reminding her to go to mattress.
Her ensuing guide, “The Atlas of Center-earth” (1981), wowed Tolkien followers and students with its beautiful degree of topographic element; the newest paperback version is in its thirty second printing.
“There is a gigantic quantity of data,” the critic Baird Searles wrote in a evaluate of her guide 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 creator 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” sequence, which the creator 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 as we speak, the ranks of the gaming trade and of fantasy and sci-fi publishing are stuffed 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), mentioned in an interview about “The Atlas of Center-earth.” “Everybody who learn it went out and bought graph paper and mapped one thing.”
Mike Schley, a recent fantasy mapmaker, has referenced her work in his personal analysis.
“Her diagrams and exposition gave her work gravity and materiality,” he mentioned in an interview. “It’s one factor to write down off a characteristic 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 every of a handful of ladies accepted into the varsity’s geography graduate program, the place she wrote a mode guide of cartographic symbology as her grasp’s thesis. Whereas a grad pupil, she met and married Todd Fonstad, a Ph.D. pupil within the division. In 1971, the couple moved to Wisconsin, the place Todd taught on the College of Wisconsin Oshkosh.
Quickly after, a good friend 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 following day to purchase the remainder of the trilogy.
Her son mentioned she had learn “The Hobbit” and “The Lord of the Rings” some 30 instances earlier than pitching the atlas.
“I doubt if another guide 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 concept 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 various millenniums of Tolkien’s legendarium, bringing a geographer’s eye not simply to landforms but additionally to the migrations of peoples, battlefield troop actions and the journeys of the novels’ characters.
“It’s one factor to write down off a characteristic as, nicely, magic. It’s one other to really feel like you will get dust underneath your nails exploring a spot.”
When she referred to 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 liked the idea that she secured permission from the Tolkien property inside days.
As a part of her analysis, Fonstad pored over Tolkien’s authentic manuscripts and notes, archived at Milwaukee’s Marquette College, close to her residence 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 creator’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, mentioned in an interview.
Fonstad adopted her Center-earth tome with 4 equally formidable 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 he or she went to New Mexico to seek the advice of with the novelist Stephen R. Donaldson, creator of “The Chronicles of Thomas Covenant” sequence, for the “The Atlas of the Land,” revealed in 1985.
In an interview, Donaldson recalled Fonstad arriving with “an unlimited listing of scenes and locations” from his books and asking questions on trivia he’d by no means thought of.
“It’s one factor to write down off a characteristic 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 type of uncommon events when fantasy maps handle to get nearer to ‘actual cartography,’” Francesca Baerald, a recent Dungeons & Dragons map artist, wrote in an e-mail. “The scientific method she adopted and her look after every small element is one thing unbelievable.”
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 in the end withheld permission for an atlas.
Fonstad died of issues of breast most cancers on March 11, 2005, at her residence in Oshkosh. She was 59.
For all her devotion to fantasy worlds, Fonstad was bemused by the rise of fan tradition. She hardly ever accepted invitations to conventions or conferences, claiming she was too thin-skinned to subject 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 crew.
“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, mentioned in an interview. “She very a lot loved these motion pictures, although she was among the many 1 % of people that might have nitpicked each distinction from the books.”
