Karen Wynn Fonstad Collection

Karen Wynn Fonstad, a cartographer from Oshkosh, Wisconsin, was a lifelong fan of J.R.R. Tolkien’s work, and the work of other twentieth century fantasy authors. Her collection, housed at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee Libraries’s American Geographical Society Library, include the original manuscript maps of ‘The Atlas of Middle-Earth’, as well as ‘The Atlas of Pern’, The Atlas of The Land’, and an unpublished ‘Atlas of Narnia’. Her archive includes nearly 1,000 map drafts, many of them based on Tolkien’s ‘The Lord of the Rings’, ‘The Hobbit’, and ‘The Silmarillion’. This digital collection includes digital surrogates of her original works presented as individual map layers, and a composite image showing the layers combined as a final map. Digitization is ongoing, with additional maps being added as available.