Pauline Baynes's promotional Map of Middle-Earth, released as artwork advertising J.R.R. Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings.
The present map was created by Baynes following a collaboration between Tolkien and Baynes in 1969. A hand-drawn draft of this map of Middle-Earth by Baynes, with Tolkien's comments and annotations, was found in Baynes's copy of Lord of the Rings in recent years and purchased in 2015 by the Bodleian Library at Oxford, where it now resides.
A Map of Middle-Earth was the name of two color posters by different artists, published in the late 1960s and early 1970s by the American and British publishers of J. R. R. Tolkien's book The Lord of the Rings. Both posters were based on cartography by J. R. R. Tolkien and Christopher Tolkien depicting the fictional region of Middle-Earth. Neither map covers the whole continent of Middle-Earth. Only the north-western part of the continent is depicted, where the story takes place.
The first Middle-Earth poster, signed "BRem" (Barbara Remington), was published in the 1960s by Ballantine Books and features border images adapted from Remington's cover designs for the 1965 Ballantine paperback edition of The Lord of the Rings.
The second version, by Pauline Baynes, was published in 1970 by George Allen & Unwin in the UK and Ballantine Books in the USA. It features ten small inset illustrations of important locations from the story. The poster is framed at the top by a row of nine figures representing the members of the "Fellowship of the Ring" setting out on their quest. At the bottom is an array of antagonists from the novel, including the nine Black Riders, Gollum, Shelob, and various Orcs.
This is the the "First Trade Printing," from 1970.
Pauline Diana Baynes was an English illustrator, author and commercial artist. She contributed drawings and paintings to more than 200 books, mostly in the children's genre. She was the first illustrator of some of J. R. R. Tolkien's minor works and of C. S. Lewis's Chronicles of Narnia.