A new profile of Karen Wynn Fonstad

Wisconsin Public Radio just published a great profile on Karen Wynn Fonstad, the celebrated part-time cartographer known for her incredibly detailed and accurate maps of Tolkien’s Middle-earth. Like many here, surely, I have been a huge fan of her work ever since I first saw it in the 1980s. For a long time, it was an indispensable guide as I read and reread Tolkien’s books.

Along with the printed article, there’s a 15-minute public radio piece you can listen to with Fonstad’s son, Mark, who is an associate professor of geography at the University of Oregon. The piece also includes some great photos and an embedded video in the Robinson Map Library at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. There, Mark Fonstad is working on a new project to digitize all of Fonstad’s original maps of Middle-earth, a task made more difficult not just because there are hundreds of them but also because many consist of multiple overlapping layers.

As some may know, Fonstad also drew maps of Anne McCaffrey’s Pern, Stephen R. Donaldson’s The Land, and other geographies of fantasy. Something else I learned in this piece is that Fonstad had pitched creating an atlas of The Chronicles of Narnia, but the C.S. Lewis estate declined to proceed. What a shame!

Although a longtime resident of Wisconsin, she was born in Oklahoma, like me, though in her case it was Oklahoma City (me, north of Tulsa). Fonstad died of breast cancer in 2005, twenty years ago last month. About one year after her death (almost to the day), I pitched writing an entry about her for Robin Anne Reid’s encyclopedia on Women in Science Fiction and Fantasy. [1] I noted this in Lingwë back in 2008, when the encyclopedia was then still forthcoming.

After seeing Robin’s call for contributors and perusing her proposed list of entries, I wrote to her in March, 2006:

Also, if I might offer another suggestion: are you familiar with Karen Wynn Fonstad? Trained as a cartographer, she published fantastic atlases of Tolkien’s and McCaffrey’s worlds (among others). She seems like a good choice to include — and sadly, she passed away from breast cancer last year. I had the opportunity to meet her at a conference only some six months before she died. It’s a great loss. If you were to decide on including her, I would be very honored to write that entry as well. [2]

A little later, I also pitched and wrote an entry on Lloyd Alexander, which, like the one I wrote on Fonstad, turned out to be in memoriam, as Alexander died right after I submitted my draft. This meant I had to make some adjustments to note his passing and to adjust the tense throughout. [3]

 

[1] Fisher, Jason. “Fonstad, Karen Wynn (1945–2005).” Women in Science Fiction and Fantasy. Volume 2: Entries. Ed. Robin Anne Reid. Greenwood Press, 2009, pp. 127–8.

[2] The conference I was referring to must have been the one at Marquette University in October 2004 celebrating the fifty-year anniversary of The Lord of the Rings and the career of the late Richard Blackwelder, known for his Tolkien Thesaurus. But this was twenty years ago, and the memory is rather dim now. Does anyone else remember her being there? The proceedings of that conference would go on to become a Festschrift (or Gedenkschrift) edited by Wayne Hammond and Christina Scull. Prior to the publication of the proceedings, what do you call a conference in honor of a scholar? I don’t know if there’s a single arcane, scholarly German word for this, so let’s just call it an Ehrenkolloquium. :)

[3] Fisher, Jason. “Alexander, Lloyd (1924–2007).” Women in Science Fiction and Fantasy. Volume 2: Entries. Ed. Robin Anne Reid. Greenwood Press, 2009, pp. 2–3.