J. R. R. Tolkien's maps, depicting his fictional Middle-earth and other places in his legendarium, helped him with plot development, guided the reader through his often complex stories, and contributed to the impression of depth and worldbuilding in his writings.
Tolkien stated that he began with maps and developed his plots from them, but that he also wanted his maps to be picturesque. Later fantasy writers also often include maps in their novels.
The publisher Allen & Unwin commissioned Pauline Baynes to paint a map of Middle-earth, based on Tolkien's draft maps and his annotations; it became iconic. A later redrafting of the maps by the publisher HarperCollins however made the maps look blandly professional, losing the hand-drawn feeling of Tolkien's maps.
Maps
The Hobbit
The Hobbit contains two simple maps and only around 50 placenames. In the view of the Tolkien critic Tom Shippey, the maps are largely decorative in the "Here be tygers" tradition, adding nothing to the story. The first is Thror's map, in the fiction handed down to Thorin, showing little but the Lonely Mountain drawn in outline with ridgelines and entrances, and parts of two rivers, decorated with a spider and its web, English labels and arrows, and two texts written in runes. The other is a drawing of "Wilderland", from Rivendell in the west to the Lonely Mountain and Smaug the dragon in the east. The Misty Mountains are drawn in three dimensions. Mirkwood is shown as a mixture of closely packed tree symbols, spiders and their webs, hills, lakes, and villages. The map is overprinted with placenames in red. Both maps have a heavy vertical line not far from the left-hand side, the one on the map of Wilderland marked "Edge of the Wild". This line represented the printed delineation of the margin of the school paper, which came with the printed instruction "Do not write in this margin".
The Lord of the Rings
The Lord of the Rings contains three maps and over 600 placenames. The maps are a large drawing of the north-west part of Middle-earth, showing mountains as if seen in three dimensions, and coasts with multiple waterlines; a more detailed drawing of "A Part of the Shire"; and a contour map by Christopher Tolkien of parts of Rohan, Gondor, and Mordor, very different in style. Tolkien worked for many years on the book, using a hand-drawn map of the whole of the north-west of Middle-earth on squared (not graph) paper, each 2cm square representing 100 miles. The map had many annotations in pencil and a range of different inks added over the years, the older ones faded until almost illegible. The paper became soft, torn and yellowed through intensive use, and a fold down the centre had to be mended using parcel tape. He made a detailed pencil, ink and coloured pencil design on graph paper, enlarged five times in length from the main map of Middle-earth. His son Christopher drew the contour map from the design. The finished map faithfully reproduced the contours, features and labels of his father's design, but omitted the route (with dates) taken by the Hobbits Frodo and Sam on their way to destroy the One Ring in Mount Doom. Father and son worked desperately to finish the map in time for publication:
Shippey notes that many of the places mapped are never used in the text. The map of the Shire is the only one to include political boundaries, in the shape of the divisions between the administrative districts or Farthings.
The Silmarillion
The first edition of The Silmarillion contains two maps. There is a large fold-out drawing of Beleriand. The Ered Luin mountain range on its right-hand edge approximately matches the mountain range of that name on the left-hand edge of the main map in The Lord of the Rings. The other is a smaller-scale drawing of the central region of the same area, with coasts, mountains, and rivers but without forests, overprinted in red with the names of the leaders of the Elves in each part of Beleriand.
The other continents and regions described in The Silmarillion are not mapped in the book, but Tolkien drew sketches of Arda in its early stages including of Valinor (Aman), and a map of the star-shaped island of Numenor, with little detail other than coasts (with waterlining) and mountains, which was eventually printed in Unfinished Tales. Some other absences may be significant; Christopher Tolkien wrote that the frequently mentioned Dwarf-road over the mountains bordering Beleriand is not shown, because the Noldorin Elves who lived there never crossed the mountains.