Q: What Lies Beyond Middle-earth?
ANSWER: This question almost always refers to the map of Middle-earth that was published in J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings. The map defines only a small portion of Middle-earth, and Tolkien identified this region with the “northwest of the Old World, east of the Sea” in the Prologue — that is, he meant that the Middle-earth map approximately corresponds to northern and western Europe.
Since the world of The Lord of the Rings is our world, “round and inescapable”, as Tolkien put it, it follows that the lands which lay to the west of the Middle-earth map would correspond with the Americas. If you traveled far enough into the west you would eventually reach the eastern shores of the “old world”.
The lands beyond Umbar would correspond approximately with Africa. And naturally the lands to the east of the map would correspond approximately with those regions of Aisa and Europe that would not be properly matched to the Middle-earth map itself.
However, readers who strive to identify exact correlations between Tolkien’s map and real maps of Europe are trying too hard. Even though Tolkien made a couple of figurative comparisons between places in Middle-earth with real places in Europe (such as the Shire and England, Minas Tirith and Venice), he drew the map without consulting true European geography while he was composing the story.
This decision — to invent a fantasy landscape for Middle-earth — bothered Tolkien in later years, but he found himself unable to change anything. The stories had been published and readers became intimately familiar with the maps. Middle-earth thus confusingly looked like another world even though it was supposed to this world, Earth.
Although Tolkien did create some maps of a flat world prior to writing The Lord of the Rings, those maps cannot easily be reconciled to the published Hobbit and Lord of the Rings. Karen Wynn Fonstad attempted to do that with her Atlas of Middle-earth and she noted the challenges she faced in the accomplishment of her task.
It’s probably best to just imagine vast plains, forests, mountains, and deserts stretching out to south and east of the map, and to picture distant foreign shores with strange cultures lying off to the west.
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