Welcome to The
Tolkien Forum,
lolo1189.
The
maps vary depending upon which edition of
Lord of the Rings you’re using. You may need to tell us which edition you’re using:
the one I have at hand is the Houghton Mifflin edition of 1994, published in the United States. In my edition, there is a single
map of all of
Middle-earth; followed by four maps that divide the large map into quarters:
Eriador including
the Shire,
Rhovanion including
Erebor (the
Lonely Mountain), western
Gondor and
Rohan, and eastern Gondor and Rohan including
Mordor; and finally a detailed map showing the region depicted in
Return of the King: Gondor near
Minas Tirith,
Ithilien, and western Mordor including Mount Doom and
Barad-dûr.
On these maps, Erebor is the name of the mountain where
Smaug dwelt in
The Hobbit, with “The Lonely Mountain” written below it on the mid-scaled map (as well as “
Wood Elves” between the mountain and
Mirkwood). The
rivers are marked “Baranduin (Brandywine)”, “Mitheithel (Hoarwell)”, “Bruinen (Loudwater)”, and so on. On the last, most detailed map, the
mountains on the west side of Mordor are marked “Ephel Dúath (Mountains of Shadow)”, and the volcano “Orodruin (Mt Doom)”. English (or the language into which your edition is translated) represents
Common Speech; I suppose the variant names are a reflection of the way learnéd
Men (or
Hobbits) spoke: a mixture of Common Speech and
Sindarin, with
Sindarin names preferred (after all, they denote formal education, an advantage more common among mapmakers than crofters) but Common Speech names attached, too, since Sindarin was less and less usual as a daily speech among Men, even the Dúnedain.
Aragorn may well have been the last of the Dúnedain who grew up speaking Sindarin as his first language, and that only because he lived in
Elrond’s house from the time he was two years old; but even there, he learned excellent Common Speech (
Adûnaic or
Westron).
The pattern of showing the names of
places began early on with the Sindarin name of a place first, often in larger, capital letters, and
the Common Speech name in parentheses after or below. There are many early maps depicted in the later volumes of
History of Middle-earth along with discussions of them by Christopher Tolkien, who drew many of the later maps under his father’s direction.
While “in story” using two names reflects how people spoke, for the reader, it makes clearer where things are and that two different names (e.g., “Erebor” and “the Lonely Mountain”) both identify the same place.
BTW, the maps changed over time: the Shire map between the Prologue and Book One in
Fellowship of the Ring was altered; labels and misspellings were corrected in later editions; the illustrator Pauline Baynes, whom Tolkien liked, produced a famous color map of Middle-earth with places not previously named or located in published material, and so forth. Corrections and new editions of the maps continued until at least as late as 2005.
