Karen Wynn Fonstad was a noted cartographer and geography lecturer whose admiration for J.R.R. Tolkien's books resulted in the first serious attempt to create a coherent atlas of Middle-earth in 1981. This was fully revised ten years later to accommodate Tolkien's expanding legendarium following the publication of nine volumes of The History of Middle-earth, and this third edition followed in 2001. Although Karen Wynn Fonstead died in 2005, her Atlas of Tolkien's Middle-earth remains the most ambitious and exhaustive book on the subject.