IMMERSIVE MYTHOLOGIES: CULTURE- BUILDING IN MIDDLE-EARTH
T he works of J.R.R. Tolkien are rich with intricate maps, laying out an expansive geography of the Middle-earth he built for his epic cast of characters. For those familiar with the Third Age of The Lord of the Rings books, The Rings of Power and its Second Age-setting pushes the boundaries of what we know as Middle-earth into the east. Doing so creates new territory for stories and histories to develop, allowing the various departments working on the series to extrapolate original designs of how those cultures would look and feel. As the map expands, there are new horizons to be explored. Supervising Dialect Coach Leith McPherson characterized the regionality of the maps designed for The Rings of Power through an array of accents. She began by assigning different characteristics to the voices found in the various locations of Middle-earth, choosing where the many species in the series sat in terms of accent and dialect.
“The Dwarves have a Scottish base. The Harfoots have an Irish base. The Southlanders have a Northern English base that’s kind of fun. The Elves were a bit prescribed. They have a more heightened, standard English accent. Then it became about creating an accent that really wasn’t from our world, creating a dialect that was specific to a fantastical world.” Tolkien was a philologist, a language expert, who parlayed that knowledge into creating his own languages. There is little point to building languages without also building a map in which those languages could be used, designing the borders of Middle-earth around the languages he formulated. As Producer/VFX Producer Ron Ames observes, “Tolkien drew the worlds. He would draw maps. He imagined it so fully and so richly, yet at the same time he was telling the story of humanity. He created this world from scratch.” It is those original designs—
the illustration and script in Tolkien’s own hand—upon which the maps of The Rings of Power were based. Joining the ranks of Tolkien experts on the show was Daniel Reeve, who has made a career out of specializing in Tolkien-inspired calligraphy and cartography. His presence symbolizes the breadth of the world-building in the series, and even the maps he helped to create chart lands that transcend mere physical space. One of the key props for the Harfoots is The Star Book , and Reeve was tasked with creating the content for the book, including a written Harfoot language. The Star Book is owned by Sadoc Burrows (played by Sir Lenny Henry), the trail finder and constellation expert of his tribe, and is referenced throughout the series. Reeve looked at ancient runes, drew pictograms, formulated calculations, and crafted family trees to fill the pages of the book. One of the other Tolkien specialists working on the series, Loremaster Griff Jones, worked in the capacity of a historical adviser on a real-world project, treating the canon of The Lord of the Rings with the same academic diligence. He compares the books’ extensive “Appendices,” upon which The Rings of Power is based, to “a history textbook” out of which narratives and stories could be told. The maps found in the books are held in similar regard, moving from quasi-academic text to something visually compelling.
Exploring the lore, design, and language, inspired by Tolkien and invented anew to add deeper layers of immersion
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