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This article is part of <\/em>Overlooked<\/em><\/a>, a series of obituaries about remarkable people whose deaths, beginning in 1851, went unreported in The Times.<\/em><\/p>\n In 1977, Karen Wynn Fonstad made a long shot cold call to J.R.R. Tolkien\u2019s American publisher with the hope of landing a dream assignment: to create an exhaustive atlas of Middle-earth, the setting of the author\u2019s widely popular \u201cThe Hobbit\u201d and \u201cThe Lord of the Rings.\u201d<\/p>\n To her surprise, an editor agreed.<\/p>\n Fonstad spent two and a half years on the project, reading through the novels line by line and painstakingly indexing any text from which she could infer geographic details. With two young children at home, she mostly worked at night. Her husband left notes on her drafting table reminding her to go to bed.<\/p>\n Her resulting book, \u201cThe Atlas of Middle-earth\u201d (1981), wowed Tolkien fans and scholars with its exquisite level of topographic detail; the most recent paperback edition is in its 32nd printing.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n \u201cThere is an enormous amount of information,\u201d the critic Baird Searles wrote in a review of her book in Asimov\u2019s Science Fiction magazine, \u201cfrom a diagram of the evolution of the languages of Middle-earth to tables of the lengths of mountain ranges and rivers. It\u2019s a true atlas (the author is a geographer) and quite an achievement.\u201d<\/p>\n Commissions soon followed for atlases of other imaginary places with their own devoted subcultures, including Pern, the setting of the sprawling and best-selling \u201cDragonriders of Pern\u201d series, which the author Anne McCaffrey<\/a> began publishing in 1968, and a pair of foundational worlds within the Dungeons & Dragons franchise.<\/p>\n Fonstad\u2019s atlases became objects of cult veneration, and today, the ranks of the gaming industry and of fantasy and sci-fi publishing are filled with cartographers influenced by her work.<\/p>\n \u201cIt was like the Velvet Underground of fantasy mapmaking,\u201d Jason Fry, a co-author of \u201cStar Wars: The Essential Atlas\u201d (2009, with Daniel Wallace), said in an interview about \u201cThe Atlas of Middle-earth.\u201d \u201cEveryone who read it went out and got graph paper and mapped something.\u201d<\/p>\n Mike Schley, a contemporary fantasy mapmaker, has referenced her work in his own research.<\/p>\n \u201cHer diagrams and exposition gave her work gravity and materiality,\u201d he said in an interview. \u201cIt\u2019s one thing to write off a feature as, well, magic. It\u2019s another to feel like you can get dirt under your nails exploring a place.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n Karen Lea Wynn was born on April 18, 1945, in Oklahoma City, to Estis (Wampler) and James Wynn. She was raised in nearby Norman, Okla., where her father ran a sheet-metal shop and her mother did secretarial work for hire.<\/p>\n After graduating from Norman High School, she enrolled at the University of Oklahoma, studying art, then, envisioning a career as a medical artist, switched her major to physical therapy and graduated in 1967.<\/p>\n But a part-time job illustrating maps for the university\u2019s geography department kindled her interest in cartography. In 1968, she was one of a handful of women accepted into the school\u2019s geography graduate program, where she wrote a style manual of cartographic symbology as her master\u2019s thesis. While a grad student, she met and married Todd Fonstad, a Ph.D. student in the department. In 1971, the couple moved to Wisconsin, where Todd taught at the University of Wisconsin Oshkosh.<\/p>\n Soon after, a friend lent her a copy of \u201cThe Fellowship of the Ring\u201d (1954), the first in Tolkien\u2019s \u201cLord of the Rings\u201d <\/em>trilogy. Though she wasn\u2019t an avid reader of fantasy, Fonstad was entranced. She stayed up all night finishing it, then went out the next day to buy the rest of the trilogy.<\/p>\n Her son said she had read \u201cThe Hobbit\u201d and \u201cThe Lord of the Rings\u201d <\/em>some 30 times before pitching the atlas.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n \u201cI doubt if any other book or books will ever grasp my interest as much as these,\u201d she wrote in her journal in 1975. \u201cEach time I finish a reading I immediately feel as if I hadn\u2019t read them for weeks and I am lonely for them \u2014 lonely for the characters within the books, the tremendously vivid descriptions, the whole essence.\u201d<\/p>\n The idea for an atlas came to Fonstad after the 1977 publication of \u201cThe Silmarillion,\u201d a dense, posthumous collection of Tolkien-penned tales comprising the myths and ancient history of Middle-earth. (Tolkien died<\/a> in 1973.) She envisioned a suite of maps spanning the many millenniums of Tolkien\u2019s legendarium, bringing a geographer\u2019s eye not just to landforms but also to the migrations of peoples, battlefield troop movements and the journeys of the novels\u2019 characters.<\/p>\n When she called Houghton Mifflin to pitch her idea, Fonstad was connected with Tolkien\u2019s U.S. editor, Anne Barrett, who was semiretired but happened to be visiting the office that day. Barrett so loved the concept that she secured permission from the Tolkien estate within days.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n As part of her research, Fonstad pored over Tolkien\u2019s original manuscripts and notes, archived at Milwaukee\u2019s Marquette University, near her home in Oshkosh.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n The first edition of \u201cThe Atlas of Middle-earth\u201d contained 172 maps, which Fonstad drew by hand. Each was accompanied by reflections on her methodology and assumptions, along with topics like the bedrock morphology of the Shire, settlement patterns in Gondor and plate tectonics in Mordor.<\/p>\n A 1991 revised edition incorporated details from nine volumes of \u201cThe History of Middle-earth,\u201d a trove of formerly unpublished Tolkien material edited by the author\u2019s son Christopher. The revised atlas, still in print, has been translated into nearly a dozen languages.<\/p>\n \u201cIt is far and away the best and most careful reference work related to Tolkien,\u201d Stentor Danielson, a Tolkien scholar and an associate professor of geography at Pennsylvania\u2019s Slippery Rock University, said in an interview.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n Fonstad followed her Middle-earth tome with four similarly ambitious atlases. She traveled to Ireland to work alongside McCaffrey \u2014 the first woman to win a Hugo Award for fiction, in 1968 \u2014 on \u201cThe Atlas of Pern,\u201d which Fonstad published in 1984. And she went to New Mexico to consult with the novelist Stephen R. Donaldson, author of \u201cThe Chronicles of Thomas Covenant\u201d series, for the \u201cThe Atlas of the Land,\u201d published in 1985.<\/p>\n In an interview, Donaldson recalled Fonstad arriving with \u201can enormous list of scenes and places\u201d from his books and asking questions about minutiae he\u2019d never considered.<\/p>\n \u201cIt\u2019s one thing to write off a feature as, well, magic. It\u2019s another to feel like you can get dirt under your nails exploring a place.\u201d<\/p>\n For TSR Inc., the publisher of the Dungeons & Dragons role-playing game and then-ubiquitous tie-in novels, Fonstad released \u201cAtlas of the Dragonlance World\u201d (1987) <\/em>and \u201cThe Forgotten Realms Atlas\u201d (1990), both of which are sought-after collectibles still used as reference material by artists working for the franchise.<\/p>\n \u201cHer work is one of those rare occasions when fantasy maps manage to get closer to \u2018real cartography,\u2019\u201d Francesca Baerald, a contemporary Dungeons & Dragons map artist, wrote in an email. \u201cThe scientific approach she followed and her care for each small detail is something incredible.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n Her atlases earned Fonstad renown among fantasy readers, but only modest income, which she supplemented by teaching geography part time for the University of Wisconsin Oshkosh and by moonlighting as a physical therapist. In the 1990s, Fonstad made occasional maps for TSR and the City of Oshkosh, but she devoted more time to board and civic work, including a term on the Oshkosh City Council.<\/p>\n She was diagnosed with breast cancer in 1998 and underwent nearly seven years of treatment, remission and recurrence. During that time, she started mapping C.S. Lewis\u2019s<\/a> \u201cChronicles of Narnia,\u201d but the Lewis estate ultimately withheld permission for an atlas.<\/p>\n Fonstad died of complications of breast cancer on March 11, 2005, at her home in Oshkosh. She was 59.<\/p>\n For all her devotion to fantasy worlds, Fonstad was bemused by the rise of fan culture. She rarely accepted invites to conventions or conferences, claiming she was too thin-skinned to field criticism. But her reluctance softened near the end of her life, as Peter Jackson\u2019s \u201cLord of the Rings\u201d <\/em>film trilogy made the characters Frodo and Bilbo Baggins household names.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n In 2004, at a conference in Atlanta, she met Alan Lee, the films\u2019 Oscar-winning conceptual designer, who mentioned that her atlas had been a vital resource for his team.<\/p>\n \u201cNothing could have made my mother happier in the last few months of her life,\u201d her son, Mark Fonstad, an associate professor of geography at the University of Oregon, said in an interview. \u201cShe very much enjoyed those movies, even though she was among the 1 percent of people who could have nitpicked every difference from the books.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n
\n\u201cIt\u2019s one thing to write off a feature as, well, magic. It\u2019s another to feel like you can get dirt under your nails exploring a place.\u201d<\/h2>\n
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