Status Updates From The Atlas of Middle-Earth

Bafflingly, R. Esgalduin is not named on the map, though it is mentioned in the text and listed in the Index. And not because there is no room for it; there is room just where Christopher Tolkien himself puts the name.

Yes, I definitely wish that this book had coordinates after every place name, ugly as that might look. It’s deeply irritating to look up names in the back of the book, then on the relevant map, over and over. But it’s necessary to get anything worthwhile out of reading the text.

Error: Tol Fuin is not at I-21, but at H-24. Baffling error.

And so instead of what should be quite pleasurable and enlightening reading, the reader is stuck between the choice of sitting in confusion, or arduously flipping back-and-forth between text, index, and maps to try to figure out what the author is talking about.

I feel like the text is written independently of the maps, which is problematic; I find myself flipping through the pages and even referencing the index(!) to see what she’s talking about in the text. Why? Why not reference the relevant maps? Isn’t the point of the text to provide context for the maps and explain what’s going on in them? But she doesn’t even confine her notes to one map at a time?