Climate study: The Shire is New Zealand, Mordor is south Texas

Top row shows Shire-like conditions, bottom row is Mordor-like conditions. Red areas are regions that fit both rainfall (green) and temperature (blue) criteria.

Cabot Institute, University of Bristol [PDF]

A climate study of Tolkien’s Middle Earth of the Lord of the Rings trilogy reveals some interesting intersections with “Modern Earth.” The places on Earth most similar in climate to the Shire include a small region in New Zealand as well as a part of Britain, while locations that are similar to Mordor fall in the southwest US and a central part of Australia.

The climatology of Middle Earth is examined in a paper released Friday by noted Middle Earth wizard and nature enthusiast Radagast the Brown (also the alias of the Cabot Institute of the University of Bristol), which draws conclusions about the various regions of Middle Earth based on descriptions in the books. For instance, Mordor and Haradwaith are very dry, while the highest precipitation occurs to the west of the Misty Mountains, where the Shire is located.

Based on a climate analysis of Middle Earth’s temperature and rainfall, Radagast maps the regions of the world with similar conditions to different parts of Middle Earth and sees where they overlap. Both New Zealand and England contain large regions with adequate rainfall and enough scattered instances of the right temperature to indicate that Lincolnshire and Leicestershire in the UK are Shire-like, as are (roughly) Gore and Alexandra in NZ.