This is a common criticism of Tolkien's maps, that the mountains are "unnatural". It's a peculiar criticism since the most egregious example, the 90 degree angles at Mordor, are actually taken from a real life mountain range, the Carpathian Mountains!
see http://www.newsandtimes.com/2017/08/in-defense-of-tolkiens-m...
In general what Third Age Middle Earth doesn't have is ranges like the Rockies that rise over hundreds of miles to their centres. Tolkien's characters often see lines of peaks on the horizon with minor foot hills, rather that gradual inclines than take weeks to traverse.
[Edit]
> are actually taken from a real life mountain range, the Carpathian Mountains!
I'm not aware that Tolkien explicitly based the mountains that surround Mordor on the Carpathians or anywhere else for that mattter.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Massif_Central#/media/File:Fra...
Doesn't the Brahmaputra run fairly parallel to the Himalayas for quite a long distance?
Assuming they were created by normal geological processes and not magic. I could see why an evil wizard would want to create a 'natural' castle around his fortress with mountains.
Yes, but Mordor was created before Sauron achieved his power. Perhaps it was long-range contingency planning by Melkor (Sauron's original boss).
To presume that Tolkien would have had an understanding of the then state-of-the-art theories around continental drift is a bit hopeful. In fact, plate tectonics did come to be accepted until the 50s/60s, so Tolkien could barely have known of the theory when writing LOTR and especially not when drawing the initial map.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tolkien%27s_maps#The_Lord_of_t...
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
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Silmarillion#Development
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.
It seems to have been submitted a handful of times in the past without getting traction, but maybe do so again? It's an excellent read and a shame it hasn't got much attention in the past.
Tolkien himself said 'I wisely started with a map, and made the story fit'. However, the geography itself isn't realistic. This is discussed in [0], with the tagline 'Middle-earth’s got 99 problems, and mountains are basically 98 of them.' In summary, the mountains are essentially linear features that create barriers useful from a plot point of view. The Misty Mountains run north-south, and form a right angle with the Ered Nimrais, which run E-W and separate Gondor from everything else. The Ered Nimrais themselves have a right-angle with the Ephel Duath, which are the western side of the three-sided square of mountains (!) that form the border of Mordor.
The main river of Middle Earth - the Anduin - runs parallel with the Misty Mountains - and itself appears to emerge at 90 degrees from the Ered Mithrin, the mountains that run E-W along the top of the Middle Earth map.
Real geographic features tend not to form right angles.
[0] https://www.tor.com/2017/08/01/tolkiens-map-and-the-messed-u...