About the second French translation, the translator Daniel Lauzon use Photoshop to recreate the names on the various maps with the writing style of Christopher Tolkien.

Druss wrote:

About the second French translation, the translator Daniel Lauzon use Photoshop to recreate the names on the various maps with the writing style of Christopher Tolkien.

Interesting, thank you!

It seems a little obvious now, but I suppose that a big driver in producing independent (and different) maps may have been the difficulty in overlaying place-names in the local language - or more to the point, removing those in English. At least until (computer) technologies improved.

Out of interest, when was that French translation produced?

My German edition map looks very similar in style to the French one (2001 edition).

Predictable Matt : this translation, the second one, was published in 2014-2016.

Mapas da nova (2019) edição brasileira. Mais detalhes do box e dos livros em:

Mapas da nova (2019) edição brasileira de O Hobbit. Mais detalhes do box e dos livros em:

Thank you for those! They look really lovely. Having the LOTR maps as endpapers works really well for me. Especially the one of Rohan and Gondor.

The staining on Thror's map is a particularly nice touch - even if in 50 years a seller might have to work hard to convince a buyer that it's not real!

And I've not seen those runes in blue before - I wonder have any other editions had those?

Predictable Matt wrote:

LanceFormation wrote:

I wonder if maps were purposely redrawn to match the artistic style required or for readability purposes, especially in smaller format editions (like paperbacks)?

The readability angle does seem very plausible.

It may be a wild goose chase but I'm tempted to see if the successor to AWG (the Swedish publisher) has any records that can be consulted.

So I got word back this evening from the successor company to the publisher of the first Swedish editions of LOTR - they were kind enough to take time to dig in their archives, but couldn't find a single thing relating to Tolkien. It was kind of them to look!

Predictable Matt wrote:

So I got word back this evening from the successor company to the publisher of the first Swedish editions of LOTR - they were kind enough to take time to dig in their archives, but couldn't find a single thing relating to Tolkien. It was kind of them to look!

Thanks for the research. Too bad they have no readily available Tolkien records, but such as it goes!