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(like certain container vessels,) those ships sailed a long time ago.
I am going to suggest a solution that leaves it perfectly unresolved! Maybe a League is reckoned as not a measure of distance, but of time. And subjective time, at that! A League is one hour's walk for a Hobbit. For a fit Hobbit, that's 3 miles. For an out of sorts Hobbit (either unused to rigors, or too used to stopping at watering holes!) it is 2 miles. I seem to recall there are distance discrepancies between TH and LotR.... Thus 10 leagues shifts back into distance reckoning to become how far one can walk at one's normal pace in a day. And normal pace and the duration of a day being relative to one's fitness! Isn't that delightfully inconsistent?! Time becomes distance and distance becomes time. The potential for hobbitry disputes over a pint becomes endless. "We walked how far?" "You mean, YOU walked how long?".Trying to wrap my head around this also. As the Shire pdf on hobbit walking journeys makes a distinction of journeys longer than 50 miles. Not sure how to know one way or the other.
I do notice on p. 9 of the Shire, they say the distance from Michael delving to the Brandywine Bridge is about 40 leagues. And I notice it’s about 4 hexes inthe map. So is every hex 10 leagues? And a league is ~3 miles. So every hex is 30 miles?
This doesn’t seem to agree very well with journey progress being 1 hex per day, or 2 at a forced march or on horses.
Also doesn’t seem to agree with on that same page the statement that a hobbit could walk from one need to the other of the East Road in about a week, walking 12 mi a day.
Help? Is there a more obvious/easier way of making a rule of thumb for this?
Using the 1e map from Journeys & Maps, the distance from the Brandywine Bridge to Michel Delving is less than 30 leagues (about 8.5 hexes or 85 miles). However, if we take the Shire PDF at its word (40 leagues or approx. 120 miles), we do indeed get a scale of 1 Hex = 10 Leagues (30 Miles). This could definitely use some clarification.
By contrast, checking with Karen Fonstad's map of the Shire from The Atlas of Middle-earth, I get about 90 miles from Michel Delving to the Brandywine Bridge (as the crow flies). Personally, I think the scaling for The One Ring has been a little iffy all along.