Mordor is not just close to Gondor, it's right on its borders. I'll show you.

In the films, we're introduced to Gondor first at Minas Tirith, which is the capital of the region. But we're also shown Osgiliath, which Boromir and Faramir have been fighting over for some time, and Mordor has moved all the way up to this city, which can be seen very clearly from Minas Tirith. But it's worse than that, because this is Minas Morgul, and this is the fortress that the Black Riders leave from, the Nazgul, when they travel all the way to the Shire to try to take the ring from Frodo and the other three hobbits. In fact, right here, kind of blurry, is the village of Bree when Strider saves the four hobbits from the Nazgul. But this was once called Minas Ithil, and it was a sister city to Minas Tirith, and Mordor took it, as well as Kirith Ungol, which is the tower that Frodo was taken to after being stabbed by Shelob, and this was also a Gondorian tower. Lastly, to answer a couple questions that people have been asking a lot is, you know, what's it made out of? So the whole thing is carved out of foam and then, you know, plaster and paint and everything else. And it took me about 80 hours to complete, but that was spread over the course of roughly four and a half months, because my wife and I run a small brand and we actually make cloaks, so that keeps us super, super busy. A lot of people point out that the size of the landmarks is not true to scale, and that's true, but the map itself is accurate. The landmarks are much, much larger than they should be, but this would not fit in any garage that I'm aware of or any normal sized house that I'm aware of if I made everything exactly to scale, and it would be a multi, multi-year project, probably. But the scale of the landmarks is what it is because I wanted it to be sort of like a Middle-earth eye spy where you're looking around like, oh, there's Helm's Deep and oh my gosh, like there's Rivendell. So you kind of have to look for these things, and once you find them, if you look with a magnifying glass, like there's a huge amount of detail in most of these pieces for how small they are. And there are some landmarks that are depicted twice. So for instance, Theodred's burial mound, there's one that's accurate to the book and then another one that's accurate to the film. And all the inaccuracies, I'm aware of them, and a lot of them, I just made a decision that was personal, because I wanted to go with the film location for that or the book location for something else. But overall, I'm just really, really, it's a lot of fun to share it with people. So I'll probably do like a multi-part Fellowship path video and then another one for the Hobbit and then another one maybe for the paths that all the characters took after the events in the Lord of the Rings. So if you want to see that, go ahead and hit the follow button. No pressure, though, but it's going to be a bunch of different videos to go through that. But anyway.