The Compass Rose on Amazon Prime's Map

Amazon just started a teaser promotional push for the upcoming Prime Video series they are working on. See LOTR On Prime Facebook Page and LOTR on Prime Twitter Account. One of the first teasers that they gave was a map of Middle-earth, which has started a lot of discussion online. I want to focus this post on one small portion of that map: the compass rose:



Just looking at that compass, it doesn't seem right. The Cirth runes they are using make no sense, unless we track them back to Karen Wynn Fonstad, author of The Atlas of Middle-earth.



If you look at Fonstad's design for the first edition hardcover, you will see the same runes but in a different orientation. Fonstad was using Appendix E from The Lord of the Rings, which states the following (up until 2005)

The names of the letters most widely known and used were 17 n, 33 hy, 25 r, 9 f: númen, hyarmen, rómen, formen=west, south, east, north (cf. Sindarin dûn or annûn, harad, rhûn or amrûn, forod). These letters commonly indicated the points W, S, E, N even in languages that used quite different terms.

The quote above is in the section discussing the tengwar writing system, where each character is given a numeric position in the chart.




The next section of Appendix E then goes on to discuss the Cirth writing system with the runes also laid out in a table with numeric entries, and Fonstad mistakenly used Tolkien's numbers above to pick the runes for her compass. Also, Fonstad put "West" at the top of the compass on this first edition cover.





Side note: In 2005, Appendix E was updated to "17 n, 33 hy, 25 r, 10 f: númen, hyarmen, rómen, formen" (note that 9 was changed to 10) - thus aligning this paragraph with the Tengwar - this mistake in Appendix E somehow persisting for 51 years before finally being fixed.

Since she had no idea of the mistake in that side note, Fonstad took the tengwar numbers given by Tolkien, and used those to put the runes on her book cover, with the following note on the copyright page.



Fonstad here says:

• numen = west = 33 (Tolkien says 17 above)
  
• romen = east = 9 (Tolkien = 25)
  
• hyarmen = south = 25 (Tolkien = 33)
  
• formen = north = 17 (Tolkien = 9)
  

Thankfully (partially) the alignment of names and numbers was fixed in the revised edition of Fonstad's Atlas on the cover and copyright page (but not on the title page!)





Fonstad's revised edition says (in agreement with the numbers Tolkien gave now)

• numen = west = 17
  
• romen = east = 25
  
• hyarmen = south = 33
  
• formen = north = 9
  

It seems that no-one noticed that she was using the tengwar indices to look up cirth runes, however.

The sounds for the cirth runes she has selected (based on these mistaken indices) equates to:

• numen = west = 17 = "nj"
  
• romen = east = 25 = "khw"
  
• hyarmen = south = 33 = "ng"
  
• formen = north = 9 = "d"
  

As you can see, nonsense.

These mistaken cirth runes persist into John Howe's map of Numenor if you look carefully at the four corners of the diamond (it is easier to see on his own website image, here).



And then to the Amazon Prime map, shown here again:



Maybe after all these years, Fonstad's mistake can be corrected by someone at Amazon!

With much thanks to Shaun Gunner and Marcel Aubron-Bülles for their discussion and help on Twitter for this post.