I've been reading The Lord of the Rings to my son, and the other day we were speculating on the question, what if Frodo had failed? What if Sauron had regained the ring? We looked at the map of Middle-Earth in the book, and one of my first thoughts was, imagine how different this map would look if evil had been victorious?
It occurred to me that Sauron, or at least his generals and commanders, must have maps of Middle-Earth, too. What do their maps look like? How do they view the lands that we know as Gondor, Rohan, Rivendell, the Shire...? I've always loved Tolkien's maps, and I wonder if he ever speculated on this, too, or attempted to draw a map of his world from evil's perspective.
One thing seems certain, that just as in a capitalist oligarchy of the kind that's prevalent in our world now, a victory for Mordor would mean that everything on the map would immediately be reduced to its economic significance. What resources would each conquered territory bring to the devouring imperial machine?
So I took an existing map of Middle-Earth and made a quick, rough draft of how it might look if Mordor ruled all. If I find some time I might draw a map of Sauron's Middle-earth from scratch, with more detail, to explore this idea.
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