 Magoun explains that Gondor is both virtuous, being West, and has problems, being South; Mordor in the Southeast is hellish, while Harad in the extreme South "regresses into hot savagery".The film-maker Andrew Stewart, writing in "CounterPunch", concurs that the geography of Middle-earth deliberately pits the good West against the evil East.Any moral bias towards a north-western geography, however, was directly addressed by Tolkien himself in a letter to Charlotte and Denis Plimmer, who had recently interviewed him in 1967