If you're a true The Lord of the Rings fan then you'd know that the epic high fantasy novel written by J.R.R. Tolkien has been around since it sequeled after The Hobbit in 1937. Its birth grew into a much larger sphere which eventually became the best selling franchise with over 150 million novel copies sold. With that said, if one has a map of Middle Earth in his hands, it's a real big deal.
Pauline Baynes who was an illustrator of the The Lord of the Rings and also worked on the books of CS Lewis apparently had a copy of an annotated map of the Middle Earth between her very own copy of The Lord of the Rings, the Guardian reports. The map was found inside a book handed into the Blackwell's shop.
It appears that Tolkien personally annotated the map with Baynes adding her own comments while she worked on the illustration. No doubt a commune of two creative minds.
On the map, Tolkien noted down comments for Baynes to follow such as correcting some names and places, and suggested adding some greenery to certain areas of the map. Tolkien also used references from Jerusalem, Cyprus and Belgrade for inspirational points.
This budding news in the LOTR world has created waves of theories and insights as to how critical Tolkien was in his work. Even Ian McKellen, who played Gandalf in the LOTR Movie franchise, has taken the news to Twitter.
Blackwell's called it the most important and finest piece of J.R.R. Tolkien artifact in the last 20 years. Blackwell's, a book retailer company, is currently exhibiting the map at Oxford and is selling the map for £60,000 along with other works of Baynes, such as her signed drawings for Narnia. She died in 2008.
If you have £60,000, then you'd probably have the One Map to rule them all.
