[KineticLensman]

I don't have a better link than yours, but books I own talk about maps of the wider Middle Earth (first age) being developed in the 1920s and 30s (e.g. a recognizable Silmarillion Map from the 1930s).

The mapping in The Hobbit was finalised in 1936 and published in 1937, and was started in the late 1920s. Detailed maps of Middle Earth for TLOTR were produced in the 1940s, e.g. a contour map of Minas Morgul from 1944, although I can't find a date for the first rough maps.

To my mind there is a bit of a tension between Tolkien's "I started with a map..." comment and the fact that the story took a while to settle [0] down on the core theme of the One Ring and the need for a quest through Middle Earth (hence the map) that would destroy it.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Lord_of_the_Rings#Writing

[akjssdk]

Regarding your last point: if I remember the foreword to the 2nd edition Tolkien describes his writing process as essentially being spatially. He moves his characters from place to place, and seems to only have put in a core theme later on. This also agrees with the whole "Tolkien wrote a book so he could talk about cultures/languages/something" theme. This would also suggest that he had in his mind something of a map or layout of Middle-Earth very early on. And than there is the complicated interaction with the Silmarillion, which was developed long before the Hobbit even (1914), but also during writing of the Hobbit and TLOTR. [1] So disentangling where exactly he came up with what seems almost impossible (and something that many Tolkien scholars, including Christopher Tolkien, have spent quite some time studying!)

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Silmarillion#Development

[KineticLensman]

> So disentangling where exactly he came up with what seems almost impossible (and something that many Tolkien scholars, including Christopher Tolkien, have spent quite some time studying!)

Yes. To be honest I read several of CT's books on the history of Tolkien's writing but intentionally stopped when he reached TLOTR because I didn't want to see one of my favourite books deconstructed, e.g. the 'too many hobbits' versions, before the hobbit Strider became the ranger Aragorn, for example. I suspect reading those volumes may make the interrelationships clearer but I probably won't do that.