Write in style for life with this 100% inkless wooden stylus
Two famous Italian design companies joined forces to create this masterpiece.
07 August, 2020
- Styluses date back to ancient Mesopotamia and are considered the original writing instruments.
- With no lead, graphite, or ink cartridges, this stylus will last a lifetime without replacement parts.
- Two top Italian design companies worked together to create this unique stylus.
<script async="true" src="https://widgets.stackcommerce.com/js-deal-feed/0.1/widget.js" type="text/javascript"></script><p>Ancient Mesopotamians used styluses to write in cuneiform. Egyptians used reed styluses in order to write hieroglyphs. Western Europeans employed styluses until the late Middle Ages to jot down text. And they're still used in Mexico in pottery design.<br></p><p>Writing still matters, even in a technological age. <a href="https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/154193120905302218?journalCode=proe" target="_blank">Research</a> has shown that writing your notes by hand helps you retain information better than typing. That means your memory stays sharper as you age. You remember ideas and facts more efficiently thanks to the motor coordination needed in writing. And styluses offer a unique opportunity to connect with the original form of writing instruments. You can feel that connection for yourself with the <a href="https://shop.bigthink.com/sales/forever-pininfarina-cambiano-pen?utm_source=bigthink.com&utm_medium=referral&utm_campaign=forever-pininfarina-cambiano-pen&utm_term=scsf-411776&utm_content=a0x1P000004sfDDQAY&scsonar=1" rel="dofollow" target="_self"><strong>Forever Pininfarina Cambiano Inkless Pen</strong></a>—a beautifully crafted stylus that produces elegant text with no ink, lead, or graphite.<span style="font-size: calc(0.875rem + 0.0625 * ((100vw - 30rem) / 45));"></span></p><p>This stylus is the result of a partnership between NAPKIN®, an Italian company with significant design experience, and Pininfarina, a famed Italian design company founded in 1930. Crafted with an aluminum shell and an Ethegraph (patented metal alloy) tip, you're guaranteed a lifetime of gorgeous penmanship with this masterpiece.</p><p>The Forever Pininfarina Cambiano is also beautiful. You'll feel a sense of elegance when picking it up from your desk to take notes or bring life to your thoughts. There's something to be said for such simple pleasures.</p><p>Connect with the original form of penmanship with this luxe, everlasting pen. The <a href="https://shop.bigthink.com/sales/forever-pininfarina-cambiano-pen?utm_source=bigthink.com&utm_medium=referral&utm_campaign=forever-pininfarina-cambiano-pen&utm_term=scsf-411776&utm_content=a0x1P000004sfDDQAY&scsonar=1" rel="noopener" target="_blank"><strong>Forever Pininfarina Cambiano Inkless Pen</strong></a> is on sale for just $64.99, nearly half off of the original price.</p><div data-react-checksum="-1147196353" data-reactid="1" data-reactroot="" style="position: relative;"><em>Price subject to change.</em></div><script type="text/javascript"> (function (s,o,n,a,r,i,z,e){s['StackSonarObject']=r;s[r]=s[r]||function(){
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How beards put a brave face on threatened masculinity
A general reorganisation of masculine norms interrupted the shaving-respectability regime.
25 July, 2020
Walt Whitman photographed by Brady Handy (Wikimedia Commons)
In the West, for many centuries, shaving has identified a good man properly oriented to a higher order, whether divine or political.
<p> Defying this regulation meant being ostracised. But on occasion, a general reorganisation of masculine norms has interrupted the shaving-respectability regime.</p><p>Alexander the Great established shaving as the ideal in Greco-Roman civilisation when he imitated classical depictions of eternally youthful gods. Though there was a brief resurgence of beards inspired by Roman emperors, the Alexandrian style held well beyond the Empire's fall. In medieval centuries, men of the Church made the tonsured head and shaved face marks of holiness and goodness, going so far as to inscribe these practices into canon law. Laymen followed suit, cutting back their beards to be worthy in the sight of God and man. After Renaissance men embraced hairy nature over holy shaving, beards were again curtailed by new codes of gentility enforced by royal courts, which had effectively replaced the Church as guardians of the moral order. </p><p>The breakdown of the clean-shaven order in the middle of the 19th century offers a valuable comparison with our own day. At that time, men on both sides of the Atlantic had new reasons to boast, but to also feel uneasy, about their status as men. Revolutions in Europe and the United States declared the rights of man, investing power in a sex, rather than a class. This gave men reason to assert their manhood with pride and, as one might expect, the most radical republicans and socialists were also the most enthusiastically bearded. By the middle of the century, the decline of radicalism uncoupled the link between radicalism and facial hair, allowing men of all classes and persuasions to assert their manly pride. No one expressed this new spirit more vibrantly than Walt Whitman, whose 1855 hymn to physical vitality, 'Song of Myself', declared 'Washes and razors for foofoos … for me freckles and a bristling beard.' Copies of the poem were sold with a full-length drawing of the poet, to show him true to his word.</p>
<p>As Whitman suggested, beards were liberating and empowering, and were accordingly embraced by men of every rank, from patricians to day labourers. Behind this pride, however, there was an undercurrent of worry. Even as the male sex was granted higher political status, masculine dominance was challenged by nascent feminism in both the private and public spheres. This challenge reinforced men's determination to abandon razors. Those who championed beards praised them for establishing an unimpeachable physical contrast between men and women that demonstrates male superiority. The authors of a <a href="http://www.djo.org.uk/media/downloads/articles/2340_Why%20Shave.pdf" target="_blank">manifesto for facial hair</a>, written in 1853, argued that nature assigned to women 'attributes of grace heightened by physical weakness', and to man 'attributes of dignity and strength'. Men's work, they insisted, is outdoors in wind and weather, and nature provides them suitable protection. Women's work is of a different order.</p><p>The problem with this line of argument was that, even in the 1850s, the London journalists who penned these words were hardly outdoorsmen in need of beards to guard them from the tempests of Fleet Street. Yet this was precisely the appeal of the beard to urban men both then and now. Disconnection from nature and the increasing irrelevance of physical strength, along with the gradual rise of women in public life, threatened to destabilise common understandings of manliness at the very moment when manhood had achieved new political status. Facial hair served as a tangible symbol of gender difference that was in danger of becoming intangible. It is fair to say that a beard made the man.</p>
<p>Like the 1850s, today there is a renewed gender uncertainty that erupts in peaceful times when older constructions of manliness lose relevance. Then as now, war was limited and distant, and not available as a universal definition of masculine purpose. In the 1850s, the athletic ideal was in its infancy. In our time, sports have become so pervasive that they have begun to lose their specific association with masculinity. Even more than in the 1850s, it has proven difficult to police the boundary between the masculine and the feminine. Politics, business, sports, war, even masculinity itself, are no longer unchallenged male preserves. People born female are asserting their claim to be men, whether altered by surgery or not. Still others are declaring they have no sex or gender at all. Some men have navigated this fluid environment with remarkable aplomb. David Beckham openly embraces his 'feminine', fashion-conscious side, while at the same time always sporting a masculinising beard. With facial hair, he can have an effective physical presentation of contemporary manliness.</p><p>As they did in the 1850s, men of every region, race, class and political persuasion are again growing beards to declare the reality of masculinity, as well as their own masculine identity. While there is diminished confidence that nature has conferred upon men any particular quality or status, it might be enough for most to simply establish that they are indeed men, whatever that might entail. Like his 19th-century forebears, a bearded man today demonstrates both masculine vulnerability and pride. His status might be contested, but he puts on a brave face.<img src="https://metrics.aeon.co/count/b2ef0675-a95d-48df-b9e9-25beedae8f01.gif" alt="Aeon counter – do not remove"></p><p>Christopher R Oldstone-Moore</p><p>This article was originally published at <a href="https://aeon.co/?utm_campaign=republished-article" target="_blank">Aeon</a> and has been republished under Creative Commons. Read the <a href="https://aeon.co/ideas/how-beards-put-a-brave-face-on-threatened-masculinity" target="_blank">original article</a>.</p>
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How Camus and Sartre split up over the question of how to be free
If the idea of freedom bound Camus and Sartre philosophically, then the fight for justice united them politically.
19 July, 2020
Mario Tama/Getty Images
They were an odd pair. Albert Camus was French Algerian, a pied-noir born into poverty who effortlessly charmed with his Bogart-esque features.
<p> Jean-Paul Sartre, from the upper reaches of French society, was never mistaken for a handsome man. They met in Paris during the Occupation and grew closer after the Second World War. In those days, when the lights of the city were slowly turning back on, Camus was Sartre's closest friend. 'How we loved you then,' Sartre later wrote.</p><p>They were gleaming icons of the era. Newspapers reported on their daily movements: Sartre holed up at Les Deux Magots, Camus the peripatetic of Paris. As the city began to rebuild, Sartre and Camus gave voice to the mood of the day. Europe had been immolated, but the ashes left by war created the space to imagine a new world. Readers looked to Sartre and Camus to articulate what that new world might look like. 'We were,' remembered the fellow philosopher Simone de Beauvoir, 'to provide the postwar era with its ideology.'</p><p>It came in the form of existentialism. Sartre, Camus and their intellectual companions rejected religion, staged new and unnerving plays, challenged readers to live authentically, and wrote about the absurdity of the world – a world without purpose and without value. '[There are] only stones, flesh, stars, and those truths the hand can touch,' Camus wrote. We must choose to live in this world and to project our own meaning and value onto it in order to make sense of it. This means that people are <em>free</em> and burdened by it, since with freedom there is a terrible, even debilitating, responsibility to live and act authentically.</p><p>If the idea of freedom bound Camus and Sartre philosophically, then the fight for justice united them politically. They were committed to confronting and curing injustice, and, in their eyes, no group of people was more unjustly treated than the workers, the proletariat. Camus and Sartre thought of them as shackled to their labour and shorn of their humanity. In order to free them, new political systems must be constructed.</p>
<p>In October 1951, Camus published <em>The Rebel</em>. In it, he gave voice to a roughly drawn 'philosophy of revolt'. This wasn't a philosophical system <em>per se</em>, but an amalgamation of philosophical and political ideas: every human is free, but freedom itself is relative; one must embrace limits, moderation, 'calculated risk'; absolutes are anti-human. Most of all, Camus condemned revolutionary violence. Violence might be used in extreme circumstances (he supported the French war effort, after all) but the use of revolutionary violence to nudge history in the direction you desire is utopian, absolutist, and a betrayal of yourself.</p><p>'Absolute freedom is the right of the strongest to dominate,' Camus wrote, while 'absolute justice is achieved by the suppression of all contradiction: therefore it destroys freedom.' The conflict between justice and freedom required constant re-balancing, political moderation, an acceptance and celebration of that which limits the most: our humanity. 'To live and let live,' he said, 'in order to create what we are.'</p><p>Sartre read <em>The Rebel </em>with disgust. As far as he was concerned, it <em>was</em> possible to achieve perfect justice and freedom – that described the achievement of communism. Under capitalism, and in poverty, workers could not be free. Their options were unpalatable and inhumane: to work a pitiless and alienating job, or to die. But by removing the oppressors and broadly returning autonomy to the workers, communism allows each individual to live without material want, and therefore to choose how best they can realise themselves. This makes them free, and through this unbending equality, it is also just.</p><p>The problem is that, for Sartre and many others on the Left, communism required revolutionary violence to achieve because the existing order must be smashed. Not all leftists, of course, endorsed such violence. This division between hardline and moderate leftists – broadly, between communists and socialists – was nothing new. The 1930s and early '40s, however, had seen the Left temporarily united against fascism. With the destruction of fascism, the rupture between hardline leftists willing to condone violence and moderates who condemned it returned. This split was made all the more dramatic by the practical disappearance of the Right and the ascendancy of the Soviet Union – which empowered hardliners throughout Europe, but raised disquieting questions for communists as the horrors of gulags, terror and show trials came to light. The question for every leftist of the postwar era was simple: which side are you on?</p>
<p>
With the publication of <em>The Rebel</em>, Camus declared for a peaceful socialism that would not resort to revolutionary violence. He was appalled by the stories emerging from the USSR: it was not a country of hand-in-hand communists, living freely, but a country with no freedom at all. Sartre, meanwhile, would fight for communism, and he was prepared to endorse violence to do so.
</p><p>
The split between the two friends was a media sensation. <em>Les Temps Modernes </em>– the journal edited by Sartre, which published a critical review of<em> The Rebel </em>– sold out three times over. <em>Le Monde </em>and <em>L'Observateur </em>both breathlessly covered the falling out. It's hard to imagine an intellectual feud capturing that degree of public attention today, but, in this disagreement, many readers saw the political crises of the times reflected back at them. It was a way of seeing politics played out in the world of ideas, and a measure of the worth of ideas. If you are thoroughly committed to an idea, are you compelled to kill for it? What price for justice? What price for freedom?
</p><p>
Sartre's position was shot through with contradiction, with which he struggled for the remainder of his life. Sartre, the existentialist, who said that humans are condemned to be free, was also Sartre, the Marxist, who thought that history does not allow much space for true freedom in the existential sense. Though he never actually joined the French Communist Party, he would continue to defend communism throughout Europe until 1956, when the Soviet tanks in Budapest convinced him, finally, that the USSR did not hold the way forward. (Indeed, he was dismayed by the Soviets in Hungary because they were acting like Americans, he said.) Sartre would remain a powerful voice on the Left throughout his life, and chose the French president Charles de Gaulle as his favourite whipping boy. (After one particularly vicious attack, de Gaulle was asked to arrest Sartre. 'One does not imprison Voltaire,' he responded.) Sartre remained unpredictable, however, and was engaged in a long, bizarre dalliance with hardline Maoism when he died in 1980. Though Sartre moved away from the USSR, he never completely abandoned the idea that revolutionary violence might be warranted.
</p><iframe title="vimeo-player" src="https://player.vimeo.com/video/201881771" width="640" height="360" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen=""></iframe><p>
The violence of communism sent Camus on a different trajectory. 'Finally,' he wrote in <em>The Rebel</em>, 'I choose freedom. For even if justice is not realised, freedom maintains the power of protest against injustice and keeps communication open.' From the other side of the Cold War, it is hard not to sympathise with Camus, and to wonder at the fervour with which Sartre remained a loyal communist. Camus's embrace of sober political reality, of moral humility, of limits and fallible humanity, remains a message well-heeded today. Even the most venerable and worthy ideas need to be balanced against one another. Absolutism, and the impossible idealism it inspires, is a dangerous path forward – and the reason Europe lay in ashes, as Camus and Sartre struggled to envision a fairer and freer world.<img src="https://metrics.aeon.co/count/d5f97bbd-d975-4075-839b-51bc83628eb4.gif" alt="Aeon counter – do not remove"></p><p>
This article was originally published at <a href="https://aeon.co/?utm_campaign=republished-article" target="_blank">Aeon</a> and has been republished under Creative Commons. Read the <a href="https://aeon.co/ideas/how-camus-and-sartre-split-up-over-the-question-of-how-to-be-free" target="_blank">original article</a>.</p>
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How Hemingway felt about fatherhood
Parenting could be a distraction from what mattered most to him: his writing.
05 July, 2020
Ernest Hemingway Holding His Son 1927 (Wikimedia Commons)
Ernest Hemingway was affectionately called “Papa," but what kind of dad was he?
<p>In my role as Associate Editor of the <a href="https://www.hemingwaysociety.org/hemingway-letters-project" target="_blank">Hemingway Letters Project</a>, I spend my time investigating the approximately 6,000 letters sent by Hemingway, 85% of which are now being published for the first time in a multivolume series. <a href="https://www.cambridge.org/us/academic/subjects/literature/literary-texts/letters-ernest-hemingway-19321934-volume-5?format=HB&isbn=9780521897372" target="_blank">The latest volume</a> – the fifth – spans his letters from January 1932 through May 1934 and gives us an intimate look into Hemingway's daily life, not only as a writer and a sportsman, but also as a father.</p><p>During this period, Hemingway explored the emotional depths of fatherhood in his fiction. But his letters show that parenting could be a distraction from what mattered most to him: his writing. </p>
<h2>'No alibis' in the writing business</h2><p>Hemingway had three sons. His oldest, John – nicknamed "Bumby" – was born to Ernest and his first wife, Hadley, when Ernest was 24 years old. He had Patrick and Gregory with his second wife, Pauline.</p><p>Hemingway initially approached fatherhood with some ambivalence. In her 1933 memoir "<a href="http://gutenberg.net.au/ebooks06/0608711.txt" target="_blank">The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas</a>," Gertrude Stein recalls that one evening Hemingway came to visit and "announced…with great bitterness" that he was "too young to be a father."</p><p>As the fifth volume of letters opens in January 1932, Hemingway is trying to finish "<a href="https://books.google.com/books/about/Death_in_the_Afternoon.html?id=Wn69QsdwDlQC" target="_blank">Death in the Afternoon</a>," his nonfiction account of bullfighting, in a household with a six-week-old baby, a three-year-old who ingests ant poison and nearly dies, a wife still recovering from a C-section, along with all the quotidian problems of home ownership, from a leaky roof to faulty wiring.</p><p><a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/342233/original/file-20200616-23227-ywfum4.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip" target="_blank"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/342233/original/file-20200616-23227-ywfum4.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip"></a></p><p>Ernest Hemingway and Pauline Pfeiffer Hemingway, with Gregory, Patrick and Bumby in Key West, 1933. (Princeton University Library, Author provided)</p><p>Hemingway explained to his mother-in-law, Mary Pfeiffer, that if his latest book fell short, he couldn't simply take readers aside and say, "But you ought to see what a big boy Gregory is…and you ought to see our wonderful water-work system and I go to church every Sunday and am a good father to my family or as good as I can be."</p><p>There are "no alibis" in the writing business, Hemingway continued, and "a man is a fool" to allow anything, even family, to interrupt his work. "Taking refuge in domestic successes," he added, "is merely a form of quitting."</p><p>For Hemingway, work didn't simply entail sitting at a desk and writing. It also included the various adventures he was famous for – the <a href="https://www.simonandschuster.com/books/Hemingway-on-Fishing/Ernest-Hemingway/9781476716411" target="_blank">fishing</a>, <a href="https://www.pbs.org/hemingwayadventure/africa.html" target="_blank">hunting</a>, traveling and socializing with the people he met along the way. Though he would teach the boys to fish and shoot when they were older, when they were very young he didn't hesitate to leave them with nannies or extended family for long stretches of time.</p><p>This separation was <a href="https://www.kirkusreviews.com/book-reviews/john-hemingway/strange-tribe/" target="_blank">particularly hard</a> on the youngest, Gregory, who, from a very young age, was left for months in the care of Ada Stern, a governess who lived up to her last name. Patrick sometimes joined his parents on their travels or stayed with other relatives. Bumby, the oldest, divided his time between his father and his mother in Paris. The children's lives were so peripatetic that at the Letters Project we maintain a spreadsheet to keep track of their whereabouts at any given time.</p>
<h2>'Papa' explores fathers and sons in his fiction</h2><p>However, it would not be accurate to say that Hemingway did not care about his children. In the latest volume of letters, three are addressed to Patrick, two of them decorated with circled dots, a Hemingway family tradition called "toosies," which represented kisses.</p><p><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/342482/original/file-20200617-94044-1rk64fc.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip"></p><p>In his letters to his kids, Hemingway would sometimes draw dots called 'toosies,' which represented kisses. (Princeton University Library, Author provided)</p><p>In Hemingway's fiction, we can see the depth of that paternal feeling, and in his letters, the domestic moments that inspired him.</p><p>In November 1932, with his two youngest sons ill with whooping cough and being cared for by their mother at their grandparents' home in Arkansas, Hemingway postponed a trip to New York to stay in Key West with Bumby.</p><p>"He is a good kid and a good companion," Hemingway wrote his editor, Maxwell Perkins, "but I do not want to drag him around the speakies [bars] too much."</p><p>That same month Hemingway worked on the story of a father and son traveling together that would become "<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fathers_and_Sons_(short_story)" target="_blank">Fathers and Sons</a>" in the collection "<a href="https://books.google.com/books/about/Winner_Take_Nothing.html?id=Bc8C0Hb9B5YC" target="_blank">Winner Take Nothing</a>." It's one of the only stories in which Nick Adams – a semi-autobiographical recurring character – is portrayed as a parent, and the reflective, melancholy piece was written just three years after Hemingway's own father <a href="https://www.jstor.org/stable/2926355?seq=1" target="_blank">had died by suicide</a>.</p><p>In the story, Nick is driving along a stretch of highway in the countryside with "his son asleep on the seat by his side" when he starts thinking about his father.</p><p>Nick recalls many details about him: his eyesight, good; his body odor, bad; his advice on hunting, wise; his advice about sex, unsound. He reflects on viewing his father's face after the undertaker had made "certain dashingly executed repairs of doubtful artistic merit."</p>
<p>Nick is surprised when his son starts to speak to him because he "had felt quite alone" even though "this boy had been with him." As if reading his father's thoughts, the boy wonders, "What was it like, Papa, when you were a little boy and used to hunt with the Indians?'"</p><p>Hemingway's letters show that another story in the collection, "<a href="http://crmsl.weebly.com/uploads/6/3/1/4/63143381/a_day%E2%80%99s_wait_by_ernest_hemingway.pdf" target="_blank">A Day's Wait</a>," was inspired by Bumby's bout with influenza in the fall of 1932. It is a seemingly lighthearted story about a young boy's misunderstanding of the differences between the centigrade and Fahrenheit scales of temperature. Like Bumby, the protagonist, "Schatz" – one of Bumby's other nicknames, a term of endearment in German – attends school in France but is staying with his father when he becomes ill. Schatz had learned at school that no one can survive a temperature of 44 Celsius, so, unbeknownst to his father, he spends the day waiting to die of his fever of 102 Fahrenheit.</p><p>But there is more to this story than the twist. "You don't have to stay in here with me, Papa, if it bothers you," the boy tells him. "It doesn't bother me," his father replies. He unwittingly leaves his son to believe, for an entire day, not only that the boy is going to die, but that his death is of no importance to his father.</p><p>In this slight story – one of those stories he told Perkins was written "absolutely as they happen" – we find an unexpected Hemingway hero in the form of a nine-year-old boy who bravely faces death alone.</p><p>Though he once wrote that he wanted "Winner Take Nothing" to make "a picture of the whole world," Hemingway also seemed to understand that no one ever truly knows the subjective experience of another, not even a father and son.</p><p><a href="https://theconversation.com/profiles/verna-kale-408674" target="_blank">Verna Kale</a>, Associate Editor, The Letters of Ernest Hemingway and Assistant Research Professor of English, <em><a href="https://theconversation.com/institutions/pennsylvania-state-university-1258" target="_blank">Pennsylvania State University</a></em></p><p>This article is republished from <a href="https://theconversation.com/" target="_blank">The Conversation</a> under a Creative Commons license. Read the <a href="https://theconversation.com/how-hemingway-felt-about-fatherhood-139801" target="_blank">original article</a>.</p>
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What if Middle-earth was in Pakistan?
Iranian Tolkien scholar finds intriguing parallels between subcontinental geography and famous map of Middle-earth.
01 July, 2020
Image: Mohammad Reza Kamali, reproduced with kind permission
- J.R.R. Tolkien hinted that his stories are set in a really ancient version of Europe.
- But a fantasy realm can be inspired by a variety of places; and perhaps so is Tolkien's world.
- These intriguing similarities with Asian topography show that it may be time to 'decolonise' Middle-earth.
Mental decolonisation
<img type="lazy-image" data-runner-src="https://assets.rebelmouse.io/eyJhbGciOiJIUzI1NiIsInR5cCI6IkpXVCJ9.eyJpbWFnZSI6Imh0dHBzOi8vYXNzZXRzLnJibC5tcy8yMzQzMDM0OS9vcmlnaW4ucG5nIiwiZXhwaXJlc19hdCI6MTY1MDU4Mjg3N30.pKS1PLxKYeJ6WDPAcleg7NCxzDn7Pddcg9rSJaul6no/img.png?width=980" id="56ee5" class="rm-shortcode" data-rm-shortcode-id="1d2ba98946accd12f7e0070c8d10154d" data-rm-shortcode-name="rebelmouse-image" alt="Menu page for Arda.ir, the website of the Persian Tolkien Society." />Menu page for Arda.ir, the website of the Persian Tolkien Society.
Image: Arda.ir
<p>Where on earth was Middle-earth? Based on a few hints by Tolkien himself, we've always sort-of assumed that his stories of "The Hobbit" and "The Lord of the Rings" were centered on Europe, but so long ago that the shape of the coasts and the land has changed. </p><p>But perhaps that's too easy and too Eurocentric an assumption; perhaps, like so many other things these days, Tolkien's fantasy realm too is in dire need of mental decolonisation.</p><p>And here's an excellent occasion: an Iranian Tolkienologist has found intriguing hints that the writer based some of Middle-earth's topography on mountains, rivers, and islands located in and near present-day Pakistan. </p><p>As mentioned in a previous article – recently reposted on the <a href="https://www.facebook.com/VeryStrangeMaps" target="_blank">Strange Maps Facebook page</a> on the occasion of the death of Ian Holm – Tolkien admitted that "The Shire is based on rural England, and not on any other country in the world," and that "the action of the story takes place in the North-West of 'Middle-earth', equivalent in latitude to the coastlands of Europe and the north shores of the Mediterranean."<br></p>Non-European topography
<img type="lazy-image" data-runner-src="https://assets.rebelmouse.io/eyJhbGciOiJIUzI1NiIsInR5cCI6IkpXVCJ9.eyJpbWFnZSI6Imh0dHBzOi8vYXNzZXRzLnJibC5tcy8yMzQzMDM1MC9vcmlnaW4ucG5nIiwiZXhwaXJlc19hdCI6MTY1NTQ4MzcyMX0.891LPW42L78fdrwUhXdgOab7cbhs3YOqZK4ukIQx-Rw/img.png?width=980" id="6741c" class="rm-shortcode" data-rm-shortcode-id="2b50c57cb3b8a3a1cc8a4696c89ad954" data-rm-shortcode-name="rebelmouse-image" alt="Map of Tian-shan, the Himalayas, and the Pamirs" />If you look at it like that, yes: that does resemble Mordor...
Image: Mohammad Reza Kamali, reproduced with kind permission
<p>Extrapolating from the location of the Shire in Middle-earth and from other clues dropped by Tolkien, geophysics and geology professor Peter Bird matched the geography of Middle-earth with that of Europe (more about that in the <a href="https://bigthink.com/strange-maps/121-where-on-earth-was-middle-earth?utm_medium=Social&utm_source=Facebook&fbclid=IwAR0ZFYK1EXrf4J3B3X5_U4hSAgidgBs24ZNTYV9QEFbz2qI34OA_DpZsn70#Echobox=1592583835" target="_blank">aforementioned article</a>).</p><p>However, seeing Middle-earth as a mere palimpsest for present-day Europe is to place an undue limit on the imagination of its creator. As Tolkien also said about the shape of his world: "[It] was devised 'dramatically' rather than geologically or paleontologically."</p><p>In other words, certain parts of Middle-earth may very well have been inspired by other places than European ones. It is telling that it took a non-European connoisseur of Tolkien's topography to find some examples. <br></p>"Seen that map before"
<img type="lazy-image" data-runner-src="https://assets.rebelmouse.io/eyJhbGciOiJIUzI1NiIsInR5cCI6IkpXVCJ9.eyJpbWFnZSI6Imh0dHBzOi8vYXNzZXRzLnJibC5tcy8yMzQzMDM1MS9vcmlnaW4ucG5nIiwiZXhwaXJlc19hdCI6MTY1MTQ3Njc3NH0.azDO1_NWm9q9FwMpmqBOV2troOX0ajAXS4lP2bLstJI/img.png?width=980" id="1b193" class="rm-shortcode" data-rm-shortcode-id="21c3d38b14503ba8edac18c0ef1cceb0" data-rm-shortcode-name="rebelmouse-image" alt="Map of Indus river" />The Indus river is a prominent geographical feature of Pakistan. Its course is similar to that of the Anduin, the Great River of Middle-earth.
Image: Mohammad Reza Kamali, reproduced with kind permission
<p>In an article published on <a href="https://arda.ir/" target="_blank">Arda.ir</a>, the web page for the Persian Tolkien Society, Mohammad Reza Kamali writes that during several years of cartographic study, "I found that maybe there are real lands [that] could have inspired Professor Tolkien, and some of them are not in Europe."</p><p>Around 2012, Kamali's eye stopped when it came across a Google Map of Central Asia that showed the mountain chain of the Himalayas, the peaks of the Pamirs bunched together in an almost circular area, and the huge, flat oval of the Takla Makan desert, bounded to the north by the Tian-Shan mountains. </p><p>"I had seen that map before," he writes. "This is of course Mordor, the land of Sauron and the dark powers of Middle-earth, where Frodo and Sam destroy the One Ring." </p><p>In <a href="http://lotrproject.com/map" target="_blank">Tolkien's world</a>, the Himalayas transform into Ephel Duath, the Mountains of Shadow; and the Tian Shan into Ered Lithui, the Ash Mountains. And the circle-shaped Pamirs "are the same shape and in exactly the same corner as the Udûn of Mordor, where Frodo and Sam originally tried getting into Mordor, via the Black Gate."<br></p>Similar shapes
<img type="lazy-image" data-runner-src="https://assets.rebelmouse.io/eyJhbGciOiJIUzI1NiIsInR5cCI6IkpXVCJ9.eyJpbWFnZSI6Imh0dHBzOi8vYXNzZXRzLnJibC5tcy8yMzQzMDM1Mi9vcmlnaW4uanBnIiwiZXhwaXJlc19hdCI6MTYxMDQyODMzNX0.KHrY7rDCNNaKKJQz-xn431APM2TqxGPCaMsqNvBe1xA/img.jpg?width=980" id="7a9fa" class="rm-shortcode" data-rm-shortcode-id="e87f1af97902201abc042640255606b2" data-rm-shortcode-name="rebelmouse-image" alt="Marine Corps helicopter flying over Tarbela Dam" />A US Marine Corps helicopter flying over the Tarbela Dam on the Indus river in Pakistan. At its center: a former river island which may have been the inspiration for Cair Andros, a ship-shaped island in Middle-earth's Anduin river.
Image: Paul Duncan (USMC), public domain
<p>Mulling over these similarities, Kamali became convinced that Tolkien's map work was heavily inspired by Asia. Looking further, he found more evidence. Consider Anduin, the Great River of Middle-earth, in whose waters the One Ring was lost for more than two thousand years. </p><p>On Tolkien's map, the Anduin bends toward the sea in a shape similar to that of another great river: the Indus, which runs the length of Pakistan. Like the Anduin, it flows to the west of a major mountain chain. A prominent feature of the Anduin is the river island of Cair Andros, just north of Osgiliath. Its name means 'Ship of Long Foam', a reference to its long and narrow shape, and the sharpness of its rocks, which split the waters of the Anduin like a prow. <br></p><p>Kamali is not entirely sure, but proposes that Tolkien may have been inspired by a similar-shaped island in the Indus. Now integrated into the Tarbela Dam, which was inaugurated in 1976, it would still have been a separate island in the 1930s and '40s, when Tolkien dreamed up his map.</p>Kutch as Tolfalas Island
<img type="lazy-image" data-runner-src="https://assets.rebelmouse.io/eyJhbGciOiJIUzI1NiIsInR5cCI6IkpXVCJ9.eyJpbWFnZSI6Imh0dHBzOi8vYXNzZXRzLnJibC5tcy8yMzQzMDM1NC9vcmlnaW4ucG5nIiwiZXhwaXJlc19hdCI6MTYwOTU5NjcyNn0.869W8iiowQb9_T3laFKOUe5o5UMXuMlSITb1VxRlC2g/img.png?width=980" id="9c49e" class="rm-shortcode" data-rm-shortcode-id="548bafc6042cc7515e07f77657aa161c" data-rm-shortcode-name="rebelmouse-image" alt="Map of Kutch" />During the rainy season, the coastal region of Kutch, near the mouth of the Indus, turns into an island that resembles Tolfalas Island, near the mouth of the Anduin.
Image: Mohammad Reza Kamali, reproduced with kind permission
<p>Turning our eyes to the mouth of the Anduin and Indus, we see another pair of islands, and Kamali is more certain about the real one having inspired the fictional one. The fictional one is Tolfalas Island, the largest island in Belfalas Bay. <br></p><p>At first glance, it doesn't seem to have a real-life counterpart near where the Indus joins the Arabian Sea. But take a look at the coastal part of the Indian state of Gujarat. It is known as <em>Kutch</em>, a name which apparently refers to its alternately wet and dry states. In the rainy season, the shallow wetlands flood and Kutch becomes an island – the biggest island in the Gulf of Kutch, and not too dissimilar to Tolfalas Island. </p>General knowledge
<img type="lazy-image" data-runner-src="https://assets.rebelmouse.io/eyJhbGciOiJIUzI1NiIsInR5cCI6IkpXVCJ9.eyJpbWFnZSI6Imh0dHBzOi8vYXNzZXRzLnJibC5tcy8yMzQzMDM1NS9vcmlnaW4uanBnIiwiZXhwaXJlc19hdCI6MTYyMDIwODkyOH0.aInJedv3tiQo1LmW-M6D5LV699oeWNltxeYcVKWwtF0/img.jpg?width=980" id="9bc6e" class="rm-shortcode" data-rm-shortcode-id="01d97d3941f9ba732b4df35c3aedd977" data-rm-shortcode-name="rebelmouse-image" alt="British Indian Empire 1909 Imperial Gazetteer of India" />1909 map showing British India in pink (direct British control) and yellow (princely states). Circled: Kutch, clearly recognisable as an island.
Image: Edinburgh Geographical Institute; J. G. Bartholomew and Sons, public domain
<p>But are these similarities really more than coincidences? Why would Tolkien, who was based in Oxford and steeped in English lore and Germanic mythology, turn to the Indian subcontinent for topographical inspiration? Perhaps because cartographic knowledge of that part of the world was far more general in Britain then than it is now. Until the late 1940s, the countries we know today as India and Pakistan were part of the British Empire. Detailed maps of the region would have been standard fare for British atlases. </p><p>Kamali is convinced that the topographical features on Tolkien's map of Middle-earth are not mere fantasy, but derive from actual places in our world, and were 'riddled' onto the map. In that case, we may look forward to more discoveries of Tolkien's real-world inspiration. <br></p>From Frodingham to Frodo
<img type="lazy-image" data-runner-src="https://assets.rebelmouse.io/eyJhbGciOiJIUzI1NiIsInR5cCI6IkpXVCJ9.eyJpbWFnZSI6Imh0dHBzOi8vYXNzZXRzLnJibC5tcy8yMzQzMDM1Ni9vcmlnaW4uanBnIiwiZXhwaXJlc19hdCI6MTY2MDkwNTE2OH0.zxa0eVWzVuySpq5wQTLSYrFjdVGWyvpXecQhQc_miy8/img.jpg?width=980" id="4ad77" class="rm-shortcode" data-rm-shortcode-id="ff9aace7fc7c111df3639a276cedf63c" data-rm-shortcode-name="rebelmouse-image" alt="Photograph of J. R. R. Tolkien in army uniform" />J.R.R. Tolkien in 1916, when he was 24. Around that time, he was stationed near the village of Frodingham, which may have given him the inspiration for the name of the main protagonist in Lord of the Rings.
Image: public domain
<p>Here's one example of Tolkienography—if that's what we can call the effect of actual geography on this particular writer's imagination—which I gleaned myself, some years ago in East Yorkshire. A local historian told me that Tolkien had been stationed in the area during the First World War, and had apparently stored away some local place names for later use. The name Frodo, he said, derived from a town where he had attended a few dances – Frodingham, a village across the Humber in northern Lincolnshire, not far from Scunthorpe (<em>Scunto</em>? We dodged a bullet there). </p><p>Whether that story is entirely true or not is beside the point. As fantasy fans know, any grail quest is ultimately about the quest, not the grail. In fact, to quote Mr Kamali, the treasure is important only because it's well hidden, "by a clever professor who enjoys riddles."</p><p><em>Unless otherwise indicated, illustrations are from Mr Kamali's <a href="https://arda.ir/the-tale-of-the-annotated-map-and-tolkien-hidden-riddles/?fbclid=IwAR3RmtU0ZdyzQGlK-iCsUjho4LA2W279fwO9dt8vv90FX2IeO3zrfMuMToU" target="_blank">article</a> on <a href="https://arda.ir/" target="_blank">Arda.ir</a>, reproduced with kind permission. </em><br></p><p><strong>Strange Maps #1036</strong></p><p><em>Got a strange map? Let me know at </em><a href="mailto:strangemaps@gmail.com">strangemaps@gmail.com</a><em>.</em></p>
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