TORn staff have been busy mixing things up a little bit this year. With Amazon Prime floating all these versions of Middle-earth Maps, we decided it would be fun to take some familiar and some not so familiar Middle-earth locations and spread them out in a Bracket and let you readers decide which destination is your favorite. This year’s madness will be known as Middle-earth Map March Madness for this reason, so you may want to pull out your books and start looking at your maps. Sure, we’ll have some handy little guides to help remind you of some of the more obscure locations, but in the end, this will help you get ready for Amazon’s series, if their teased maps are any indication.
We’ve decided upon a rather simple format of divvying up by books, giving one quarter draw to locations within Silmarillion, one to places found in the Hobbit, and one to locations found in the Lord of the Rings. To fill out the fourth quarter draw, we separated the Shire from the other books and gave it a place of it’s own. So, our final Four will include one location from each of these draws, but will your favorite Middle-earth locations even make the cut? We are still finalizing the draw, which basically consisted of various staff members tossing out loads of names until we had a good 20-25 from each segment, then we began voting to narrow each Quarter draw down to just 16 selections. We hope to have things ready to go in the next few days, so make sure to vote and keep track of the game as it moves through each round.
