Australia is the Mordor of Eartth

Located at the corner of the map? Check.
Inhospitable terrain with dangerous fauna? Check.
Has a dark and edgy origin backstory (prison colony)? Check.
Land of the Dark Lord who is behind much of the world's evil (Rupert Murdoch)? Check

Discuss.

New Zealand is the Bonus Secret Level

I can see the fit.

Meanwhile, the US thinks its Gondor but its actually Moria.

New Zealand is beautiful and one of the best countries on earth.

You forgot the giant spiders.

Revelation34 posted...

You forgot the giant spiders.

and the trees that want to kill you.

That one time my grandmother got bit/stung while doing some garden work, ended up in the ER and never found out what did it

Revelation34 posted...

You forgot the giant spiders.

BlackOmnimon posted...

Inhospitable terrain with dangerous fauna? Check.

New Zealand is the Mordor of Earth because LOTR was filmed there

The Lord of the Rings is a historic account that dates back before written history, and the shire would be somewhat in England, and the journey was a little short of 1,800 miles, so I'm sure it would be closer to the Mediterranean or maybe middle east

Questionmarktarius posted...

and the trees that want to kill you.

Theres also a giant bird there that wants you dead

And dont forget about the snakes, crocs and sharks.

Muscles posted...

The Lord of the Rings is a historic account that dates back before written history, and the shire would be somewhat in England, and the journey was a little short of 1,800 miles, so I'm sure it would be closer to the Mediterranean or maybe middle east

https://i.imgur.com/BOFB9Gm.png

ParanoidObsessive posted...

https://i.imgur.com/BOFB9Gm.png

Spain just came along one day and was like "im gonna attach here don't mind me"

BlackOmnimon posted...

Spain just came along one day and was like "im gonna attach here don't mind me"

I mean, that's basically how India wound up as part of Asia.

But with Tolkien/Middle Earth, catastrophes that reshape the world are pretty common anyway. Like a good 80% of the map from The Silmarillion is under the Atlantic (along with Numenor, which is literally Atlantis). It's not insane to assume that something happens in the 4th or 5th age that winds up sinking a lot of the land between The Shire and Rivendell, while simultaneously pushing Spain back up out of the water.

In fact, I think Spain usually maps to somewhere south of Ossiriand. So Luthien and Beren probably would have lived in northern Spain, give or take. Or their island might have been where the Bay of Biscay is now, and Spain would have been even further south (including areas that don't really show up on maps of Beleriand, but were still apparently dry land).

Though it's hard to say, because it was never meant to be a precise 1:1 mapping, more the case of general implications and rough assumptions.

ParanoidObsessive posted...

It's not insane to assume that something happens in the 4th or 5th age that winds up sinking a lot of the land between The Shire and Rivendell

There used to be land there in real life, it was called doggerland and connected Britain to mainland Europe

Muscles posted...

There used to be land there in real life, it was called doggerland and connected Britain to mainland Europe

Yes, I know.



Technically, it's still there. It's a major sandbank (Dogger Bank). And Doggerland was retroactively named after it.

Also, boom: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ssoKkvDbJpE

Muscles posted...

The Lord of the Rings is a historic account that dates back before written history, and the shire would be somewhat in England, and the journey was a little short of 1,800 miles, so I'm sure it would be closer to the Mediterranean or maybe middle east

I knew a guy who actually believed that.

Revelation34 posted...

I knew a guy who actually believed that.

I mean, it is the meta premise of the story.

The implication is that Tolkien didn't make any of it up, he just translated it from the "Red Book of Westmarch" (which is a reference to other real world Welsh/Celtic books of myth, like the Red Book of Hengest, the White Book of Rhydderch, or the Black Book of Carmarthen).

The book you see Bilbo, Frodo, and Sam writing in the movies becomes the Red Book of Westmarch, which means "There and Back Again, A Hobbit's Tale, etc etc blah blah, The Downfall of the Lord of the Rings" is the true story they wrote, passed down through the ages.

Those stories took place at the end of the Third Age and marked the beginning of the Fourth. Whereas we're pretty much in the Seventh Age now.

It fits with the idea that Tolkien didn't really want to write a story, as much as he was trying to create an artificial mythology rooted in and built around the languages he was inventing in his spare time (which was his actual passion).

I could see someone who doesn't really know the work as well to have maybe sort of heard about the Red Book in passing (but not really picked up the details), and assuming that it was real and that the events of Tolkien's story were based on what was in the Red Book, which in turn was based on some real world history or myth. In the same way that someone can assume that Homer's Illiad was sort of based on real events, or stories about Thor and Odin and Loki in Norse myth. You don't have to assume that mythology was literally real to assume that they were stories written down hundreds/thousands of years ago.

In that sense the Red Book would be something like the Necronomicon, where Lovecraft made the entire thing up, but always treated it like it was real and encouraged his writer friends to use it in their stories, to the point where people started assuming it was real and Lovecraft was just referencing it in his stories in the same way someone might reference the Lesser Key of Solomon (a real medieval grimoire). And it became such a huge cultural idea that multiple publishers went on to create their own fake versions of it and sell them (so now you can , theoretically, find a real copy of the Necronomicon in your local library, even if it's not THE Necronomicon).

Another book that sort of plays with that idea is The Princess Bride. If you read the book version, it pretends to be a translation of a much older story, and the "translator" occasionally makes comments about the original text. But it's complete BS. They cut that concept out of it when they made the movie, but they kind of replaced them with the parts where Peter Falk is telling the story to his grandson, to give it an entirely different sort of metatextual framing.

To iterate off that last part, it's sort of like King Arthur. Most of the stories are probably BS, and many of them were just made up out of whole cloth by the people who wrote them. BUT a lot of them are very clearly based on earlier stories (which we know because we've found those earlier versions), which in turn were probably based on even earlier stories, which may have had SOME grain of truth to them. On top of which, most of the stories reference real places and locations (some of which you can still visit today), or even real peoples (like the Saxons), so even when you're reading something Arthurian that's like 99% fiction, it can still occasionally feel like it's based on something real.

Which is why we're always debating over whether or not Arthur was a real person (even as we accept that if he WAS real, he definitely wasn't running around in anachronistic plate armor and talking about chivalry - those were definitely aspects of the story added by much later writers, along with stuff like Lancelot and the Grail).

So there's the idea that a real person can do real things, which eventually get turned into myths and legends, and propagated down through the years, until the modern version of the story is probably nowhere near the same as what actually happened, and probably includes a lot of magic and supernatural elements that would never have been real in the original scenario (see also, Homer, the Illiad, and the Trojan War - which most scholars thought was totally made up... until they started finding evidence that implied it was at least partly based on real events).

( And I am going to totally and deliberately refrain from pointing to Jesus as a similar example at this point. )

So yeah, I could see someone (incorrectly) assuming that some core part of the Lord of the Rings actually happened somewhere at some point, and it got passed down until it became myth and legend, until Tolkien eventually translated it. Because that was exactly the vibe he was going for.

The Trojan war wasn't thought to be made up it was the Trojan horse.

They haven't found evidence it existed and they know where Troy itself is.

Revelation34 posted...

The Trojan war wasn't thought to be made up it was the Trojan horse.

They haven't found evidence it existed and they know where Troy itself is.

For years legit scholars were convinced Troy didn't exist and Homer made the whole thing up.

Then they basically found Troy.

Schliemann pointed to a specific layer of the excavation and said "That's it right there. That's Priam's Troy", but most scholars today think he got it wrong and it's actually a different layer.

Now the prevailing theory is that Troy definitely existed and probably did fight a major war (or succession of wars) against Greek city-states, but the actual amount of time and degree to which the fighting actually happened is still very much in question. The assumption is that Homer would have heard legends and rumors and stories passed down orally for like 400 years, which absolutely would have mutated and shifted over time, so the stories he would have heard were almost certainly exaggerations (especially parts involving the gods), and he may have changed parts himself just so that it would make for a better story. It's very hard to say which parts of Homer's version of the story are more or less true, kind of true but also kind of exaggerated, or completely made up.

Not to mention a lot of the characters may have had different names, while heroes from other stories might have gotten sucked into the telling (which is exactly what happened with King Arthur - most of the stories of his knights were originally stories from Welsh myth that had nothing to do with Arthur, until they were eventually adopted into the overarching narrative).

It's like if we didn't have writing today, so someone thought that America was founded when George Washington challenged King George to single combat, and struck him down with his cherry-tree choppin' axe. While Benedict Arnold cringed in the background like Grima Wormtongue.

Even stuff like the flood myths that permeate a lot of cultures probably have roots in reality ( though again, not going to touch the Bible side of that argument ). Or stuff like the Gilgamesh myth, which might have been based on a real king (most scholars think he was), even if he didn't wrestle a giant immortal snake under a lake, have a werewolf best friend, or friend zone a hot goddess who wanted to sex him up.

Just to go back to the modern US, people believe shit like Washington chopping down the cherry tree, Lincoln living most of his life in a log cabin (or even building them himself), Taft getting stuck in a bathtub, or Teddy Roosevelt being a memetic badass. Combine that with REAL ridiculous stories (like Andrew Jackson beating the shit out of a dude who tried to assassinate him with his cane, or Washington being seen as "bulletproof" during the French and Indian War because his hat, coat, and two horses all got shot while he was uninjured in a battle).

Now imagine people passing those stories around for a thousand years, without any way of writing any of them down to know what "really" happened. You'd probably have some crazy myths by the end (especially if you factor in stuff like Mount Rushmore literally being a massive monument to how awesome those crazy fuckers were).


And all of that is assuming you don't wind up with stuff like Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter being misunderstood and incorporated into your monomyth, where now the people of the future assume it's historical fact that Lincoln regularly fought off vampires.

The Minoan eruption caused tsunamis which is where the flood myths come from.

Revelation34 posted...

You forgot the giant spiders.

Florida has giant spiders too. They call them Golden Orb spiders.

Revelation34 posted...

The Minoan eruption caused tsunamis which is where the flood myths come from.

That's almost certainly not it. Sumerian flood myths predate the Minoan eruption.

The more likely triggering scenario for flood myths is much earlier. Ice Age era melting, and potentially things like this (if true):

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_Sea_deluge_hypothesis


The Minoan eruption has been suggested as the kernel around which Plato might have built the idea of Atlantis as as sunken land, but there's no real proof of that, and it's not as if the idea of "lost lands" wasn't already a thing in myth by that point. Especially with flood myths and coastlines being submerged as glaciers and ice sheets melted (and hey, here's Doggerland again) being something that might easily have been part of a shared cultural context for people who were much closer to it than we are.

https://gamefaqs.gamespot.com/boards/3-poll-of-the-day/81006502

The world of Conan had the same premise as being before recorded history. "Between the time when the oceans drank Atlantis and the rise of the sons of Aryas..."

BlackOmnimon posted...

The world of Conan had the same premise as being before recorded history. "Between the time when the oceans drank Atlantis and the rise of the sons of Aryas..."

Yep.

Howard's original Hyborian map: https://i.sstatic.net/I4A3a.jpg

A cleaned-up version of the same map: https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-NDyTS7i4i1g/VFj0ZzgygPI/AAAAAAAAy9A/Tdfxza-Nf8M/s1600/Maphyboria.jpg

Conan's world is basically ice-age Afro-Eurasia without the Mediterranean filled in.

And the "King Kull" era predates that:

https://static.wikia.nocookie.net/conan/images/e/ea/Map.jpg

Conan's time period was 10000 BC, Kull's time was 20000 BC. The cataclysm that sank Atlantis is what reshaped the world into Conan's Hyborian Age. Then about a thousand years after Conan there was another cataclysm that set up the world as we know it today.



In a similar vein, Mystara (the original setting for Basic D&D back in the 80s) was based on the continents the way they looked at the beginning of the Cretaceous Era (specifically, the "Known World" is the Northeast Coast of the US and Canada, Alphatia is Greenland, the Serpent Peninsula is Florida, the Savage Coast is Texas, and the Arm of the Immortals is sort of an amalgamation of Baja California and Mexico).

https://www.thorfmaps.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/01/mystara-2016-robinson-1.jpg
https://www.researchgate.net/figure/Reconstructed-early-Cretaceous-palaeogeographic-world-map-modified-from-Blakey-2011_fig2_318463232

ParanoidObsessive posted...

Yep.

Howard's original Hyborian map: https://i.sstatic.net/I4A3a.jpg

A cleaned-up version of the same map: https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-NDyTS7i4i1g/VFj0ZzgygPI/AAAAAAAAy9A/Tdfxza-Nf8M/s1600/Maphyboria.jpg

Conan's world is basically ice-age Afro-Eurasia without the Mediterranean filled in.

And the "King Kull" era predates that:

https://static.wikia.nocookie.net/conan/images/e/ea/Map.jpg

Conan's time period was 10000 BC, Kull's time was 20000 BC. The cataclysm that sank Atlantis is what reshaped the world into Conan's Hyborian Age. Then about a thousand years after Conan there was another cataclysm that set up the world as we know it today.

In a similar vein, Mystara (the original setting for Basic D&D back in the 80s) was based on the continents the way they looked at the beginning of the Cretaceous Era (specifically, the "Known World" is the Northeast Coast of the US and Canada, Alphatia is Greenland, the Serpent Peninsula is Florida, the Savage Coast is Texas, and the Arm of the Immortals is sort of an amalgamation of Baja California and Mexico).

https://www.thorfmaps.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/01/mystara-2016-robinson-1.jpg
https://www.researchgate.net/figure/Reconstructed-early-Cretaceous-palaeogeographic-world-map-modified-from-Blakey-2011_fig2_318463232

It's an interesting concept but it wouldn't work since there would always be at least one ruin somewhere.

At least something like AC solved that issue with the way they did it.

Revelation34 posted...

It's an interesting concept but it wouldn't work since there would always be at least one ruin somewhere.

Cataclysms tend to be really effective at erasing things.

There's a reason why only one of the original Seven Wonders still exists, and we can't even find half of the other six (and aren't even sure if one of them was ever real at all). Time alone can destroy a lot of shit - the fact that people in the past rarely cared about preserving history meant they'd happily tear down old buildings to build new ones and melt down old metals to make new tools. Conquerors would tear down the idols of their vanquished foes, entire cities might wind up being buried so deep under water or under sands that no one remembers they were ever there.

Now throw literal magic apocalypses into the mix. The Hyborian Age had magic in it, so it's not a huge leap to assume anything built with magic might have faded away the moment magic died (a similar concept to the one Tolkien used). Or magical explosions could have obliterated entire cities. The landscape buckled to literally shift what the continents looked like - it could just as easily have buried things deeper than we'd ever dig.

But also remember that Howard was writing in the 1920s/30s. Archeology wasn't nearly as advanced at the time. "Irem of the Pillars" was still very much a lost (and legendary) city at the time (which is why Lovecraft wrote about it), as was Ubar (and both technically still are). Petra went missing for about 1600 years. Modern satellite imaging managed to actually find at least one lost city beneath the sands, but that wasn't until the 1990s.

( And we still can't find Jimmy Hoffa! )

The entire concept of places like Atlantis, Lemuria, and Mu being real places that actually sank doesn't really work once you understand plate tectonics - but the people who started writing about those things generally did so before anyone knew what the hell plate tectonics were .

Plus, we're talking about fantasy, not sci-fi. If you're thinking that hard about the actual science, you're already doing it wrong.

ParanoidObsessive posted...

Cataclysms tend to be really effective at erasing things.

There's a reason why only one of the original Seven Wonders still exists, and we can't even find half of the other six (and aren't even sure if one of them was ever real at all). Time alone can destroy a lot of shit - the fact that people in the past rarely cared about preserving history meant they'd happily tear down old buildings to build new ones and melt down old metals to make new tools. Conquerors would tear down the idols of their vanquished foes, entire cities might wind up being buried so deep under water or under sands that no one remembers they were ever there.

Now throw literal magic apocalypses into the mix. The Hyborian Age had magic in it, so it's not a huge leap to assume anything built with magic might have faded away the moment magic died (a similar concept to the one Tolkien used). Or magical explosions could have obliterated entire cities. The landscape buckled to literally shift what the continents looked like - it could just as easily have buried things deeper than we'd ever dig.

But also remember that Howard was writing in the 1920s/30s. Archeology wasn't nearly as advanced at the time. "Irem of the Pillars" was still very much a lost (and legendary) city at the time (which is why Lovecraft wrote about it), as was Ubar (and both technically still are). Petra went missing for about 1600 years. Modern satellite imaging managed to actually find at least one lost city beneath the sands, but that wasn't until the 1990s.

( And we still can't find Jimmy Hoffa! )

The entire concept of places like Atlantis, Lemuria, and Mu being real places that actually sank doesn't really work once you understand plate tectonics - but the people who started writing about those things generally did so before anyone knew what the hell plate tectonics were .

Plus, we're talking about fantasy, not sci-fi. If you're thinking that hard about the actual science, you're already doing it wrong.

I meant more of the people who actually believe in stuff like that. Like lost histories. Flat earthers tend to also believe other fringe shit.

Revelation34 posted...

I meant more of the people who actually believe in stuff like that. Like lost histories. Flat earthers tend to also believe other fringe shit.

Oh yeah, stupid people be stupid.

But also, when your go-to argument tool kit includes things like "God put dinosaur bones there to test our faith" and "it's all a massive global government conspiracy to cover up the truth", you can ignore pretty much any inconvenient reality you want.

ParanoidObsessive posted...

And we still can't find Jimmy Hoffa!)

Isn't he buried under the metlife field?

Muscles posted...

Isn't he buried under the metlife field?

Ground penetrating radar never found anything, and the stadium was demolished and they didn't find anything. So no.

MetLife Stadium is actually a different stadium:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Meadowlands_Sports_Complex_-_kingsley_-_04-JUL-09.JPG

ParanoidObsessive posted...

Ground penetrating radar never found anything, and the stadium was demolished and they didn't find anything. So no.

MetLife Stadium is actually a different stadium:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Meadowlands_Sports_Complex_-_kingsley_-_04-JUL-09.JPG

They moved the body.