“If Hobbiton and Rivendell are taken (as intended) to be at about the latitude of Oxford, then Minas Tirith, 600 miles south, is at about the latitude of Florence. The Mouths of Anduin and the ancient city of Pelargir are at about the latitude of ancient Troy.”
This all seems to make good sense. Northwestern Middle-earth (the area covered by the stories of The Lord of the Rings) is a sort of pseudo-Europe, so it matches up naturally to the location of real Europe on our world. And the directions given by Tolkien further match the climates that our characters experience as they traverse the land. We can see this from the climate map in Karen Wynn Fonstad’s Atlas of Middle-earth:
But if you know anything about global climate, you know that the climate of Europe is weird. Transposed to the other side of the Atlantic, Tolkien is telling us that Hobbiton is at the same latitude as Goose Bay in Labrador, while Minas Tirith is at the same latitude as Portland, Maine. (Or of Irkustk and Vladivostok, to go eastward.) A rather different picture of the region emerges from those parallels!
Europe’s climate is unusually warm for its latitude, because of the North Atlantic Drift – a warm current that begins as the eastern US’s Gulf Stream and then carries on across the ocean.
The reason that Europe enjoys the effects of such a significant warm current can in turn be traced back to the shape of the American continents. The warm water of the North Atlantic Drift forms in the tropical Atlantic, and flows westward due to the Coriolis Effect. If the Americas had simply a flat coastline, this equatorial current would hit it and divide evenly into two warm currents, flowing northward and southward. However, the northern coast of South America is sloped NW-SE, coming to a point a good bit south of the Equator. This means that a disproportionate share of the warm water is directed northward, creating an especially powerful warm current that eventually comes to Europe’s shores. In other words, if you prefer the climate in Britain to that of the Alaskan Panhandle, thank Brazil!
So if northwestern Middle-earth has Europe-like climates, then we can infer that Middle-earth has an equivalent of the North Atlantic Drift. I propose to name this the “Feanor Current,” since it’s a spirit of fire/heat coming out of the west. And having inferred the existence of the Feanor Current, we can then draw conclusions about the shape of the coastlines of Aman, and of the new lands across Belegaer after the world was made round. (The coasts were presumably of roughly similar shape, since there is no evidence of widespread climatic changes associated with a strengthening or weakening of the Feanor Current at the end of the Second Age. I kind of wish Tolkien had incorporated such changes into his works, as that would give a pop culture reference point for concern about the weakening of the North Atlantic Drift due to climate change in our world!)
Most maps of Arda depict the coastline of Aman as a gentle concave curve, with a small, sharp notch near the equator forming the bay of Elvenhome. But to make the Feanor Current work, we need to rearrange the coastline, sloping it outward south of the Equator. Here’s a proposal, drawn over top of Fonstad’s Second Age map:
(Note that the Feanor Current and the southward return current along the coast of Middle-earth end up placing Numenor in the very center of the North Belegaer Gyre. This means that any plastic waste that fell into the ocean would ultimately wash up on the shores of Numenor. This provides an alternate explanation of why Ar-Pharazon was so keen to conquer both Middle-earth and Valinor. To think, all that unpleasantness could have been avoided if Ingwe had provided bio-degradable straws for his feasts …)
One last point of interest is found if we look at Tolkien’s very first sketch map of Arda, published in The Book of Lost Tales I. Unlike later maps, the coastline of Aman has a noticeable asymmetry, with a significant eastward bump south of Tol Eressea. I have commented before on how this parallels the shape of the Bay of Balar, hinting at a plate tectonic history in the same way as the corresponding shapes of South America and Africa. But it also lends weight to the Feanor Current theory. The eastward land is located too far north of the Equator if we take the map literally, but some allowance can be made for the fact that it is an extremely rough sketch. This eastward land lies outside the Pelori, and was – in Tolkien’s original conception of the afterlife – where Men who were neither good enough to be sent to Valinor, nor bad enough to be sent to Angband, would spend their days. Later it became the empty land where Ungoliant lived.
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