Among my interests is Speculative Geographies, an interdiscipline best described as the study of hypothetical, fictional or otherwise non-realist geography.
On the micro-level, it’s the study of how a wardrobe in ‘our’ world can open up into Narnia, or what it is about Prague that allows protestors to march into the sky in a Milan Kundera novel.
But one of the things I always yearned for was a macro-level. Something that went beyond the ‘spaces and places’ superficiality and attempted to encompass imaginary geographies in the whole. These days we have a technology which can do that, at least on a meteorological level, which is climate modelling, the same methodology used by climate scientists to model theories about where our own climate is headed.
So it was pleasingly inevitable that eventually someone would goof off between running El Nino frequencies or iceberg melt rates and plug in the maps of Middle-Earth and Westeros to see just how credible was the worldbuilding of two of our most lauded fantasy novelists. And the results are … surprising.
Tolkien’s hand-drawn and annotated map of Middle-Earth. Copyright the Tolkien Estate.
Why surprising? Well, firstly because neither J.R.R. Tolkien, nor his middle initials namesake George R.R. Martin are in any way renowned as climatologists. If anything, the opposite was assumed. Scientists have long looked at the famous map of Middle-Earth, with its famously rectangular mountains surrounding Mordor, and wondered if Tolkien ever left his study or lecture hall to look outside. (Reader, he did. He was an avid lover of nature, and a keen cartographer, as revealed in a semi-recent exhibition at Oxford’s Bodleian and elsewhere.)
Furthermore, Tolkien’s cartography was such an affront to one scientist, the Russian arachnid expert Kyril Yeskov, that he spent the downtime during a quiet research break in Siberia writing a kind of realist correction to The Lord of the Rings.
The resulting text, which is free on the internet in English due to obvious copyright issues, moved swiftly beyond Yeskov’s irritation at what he felt was Tolkien’s dubious geographies, to examine more serious or worrying concerns – how the trilogy (or hexalogy to be exact) presents a good vs evil spectrum that mostly operates on a West vs East paradigm, and the not-very-well-hidden racist underpinnings that seem to arise from that.
Yeskov’s The Last Ringbearer therefore is a realist text, written from the point of view of an orc (who in this version are merely more swarthy versions of humanity), which depicts the overthrow of an enlightened and scientifically focused multicultural Mordor by an imperialist, racist, fascist (ie Elvish) west. As counter-readings go, it’s magnificent. I once wrote a whole essay on it, which can be found here.
But Yeskov’s initial inspiration has proven to be somewhat untrue. Despite the square mountain range, Tolkien’s geography for Middle-Earth passes the climate modelling test. Tolkien once claimed that the Shire was located at the equivalent of Oxford whereas Minas Tirith in Gondor was the latitudinal equivalent of Florence in Italy in our world. The climate modelling roughly bears this out.
There’s been less criticism of George R.R. Martin’s geographical imaginings, perhaps because A Song of Ice and Fire still isn’t completed and perhaps because the TV adaptation seemed to disappoint a lot of fans in its closing season or two. But it still poses questions worth asking climatologists, such as how come it has such lengthy seasons.
Westeros – cute but nowhere near as sumptuous as the Game of Thrones opening credits
“Winter is coming” is no idle threat in Westeros. It lasts a lot longer than a couple of months. Like Brian Aldiss’s astonishing (and sadly neglected) Helliconia trilogy, Westeros has generally suffered from extensively elongated seasons. Aldiss, after consulting scientists, located his Helliconia planet in a complex binary star system, which results in seasons that are centuries long.
Westeros by comparison has shorter seasons, peaking at a few years, but a few years of winter is enough for anyone, even before you get to the ice zombies invading. Additionally, they are erratic and unpredictable. Is this even plausible, from a geographical or climate perspective?
The same study that vindicated Tolkien produced a theory to explain Westeros’s seasons, involving variable axial tilt of the planet. (It must be noted that many scientists are also fantasy nerds, and the cause of Westeros’s weather has been hotly disputed for many years, with various explanations proposed, but this seems to fit best.)
This doesn’t make Tolkien and Martin fastidiously scientific worldbuilders anymore than it legitimises Tolkien’s ‘East is evil, West is good’ morality, and it certainly does nothing to improve the finale of Game of Thrones. But it does suggest that a lot more consideration went into these fantastikal texts than is generally noted.
And to answer the titular rhetorical question, the weather in Mordor is pretty damn evil.