How many miles is it from the Shire to Mordor in "The Lord of the Rings"?
One does not simply walk into Mordor, mainly because it's an absurdly long walk. Frodo and Sam spent six months trekking across Middle-earth to destroy the One Ring (and no, we're not going to talk about why the eagles couldn't just fly them there). J.R.R. Tolkien was so meticulous about his worldbuilding that scholars have been able to roughly calculate the mileage from Bag End to Mount Doom. How many miles is it from the Shire to Mordor?
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Correct Answer: 1,779
(Source)I don't think they'd be using miles in a world filled with talking trees, magical rings, and gods that create everything through song, but we're on real Earth (and I'm in America), not Middle-earth (technically Arda if you want a one-to-one comparison for the joke). Professional cartographer Karen Wynn Fonstad published "The Atlas of Middle-earth" in 1981 and combined her master's degree in geography with Tolkien's detailed notes on every leg of the journey. She calculated that Frodo's route from Bag End to Mount Doom covered approximately 1,779 miles, which is about the same distance as walking from New York City to Denver. It took them 183 days to complete the journey, so they averaged about 9.7 miles per day. And they were doing it barefoot. I'd want a second breakfast too if I had to cover that kind of distance just to throw some jewelry into a volcano.
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