When real world mapping meets Tolkien
ordnancesurvey.co.uk
ordnancesurvey.co.uk
The three little dots over the letters are a diacritic used in Tengwar (the elven script). The movies used them (and, IIRC, a couple of the other Tengwar diacritics—there are several) to give the English maps drawn in-universe by Bilbo a "Tolkienian" quality. It would be like pûttïng ràñdóm åccênt marks over letters to give it a "foreign" quality: sure, it looks all fancy and exotic to your average American who never learned a second language, but those marks mean something and you're using them wrong.
For reference, here's[0] what part of the map Tolkien made actually looks like. Some of the words do have diacritics, but they're meaningful ones (eg, Gwathló), and none of them are elven diacritics.
I want a “how to draw Tolkien maps” article by this guy that gives examples of trees, mountains, cities, etc... in a point by point way and the tricks to making the style work.
There’s more on his website to learn from examples so I’ll start there I suppose: https://middleearthsmaps.com/pages/about
Edit: for some of the HN crowd, this one is likely of interest, https://middleearthsmaps.com/collections/my-favourite-square...
https://middleearthsmaps.com/products/lauterbrunnen-switzerl...
http://maps.stamen.com/#toner/12/37.7706/-122.3782
(make sure to chech out the shading on watercolor too though!)
The map tiles themselves aren't, but they recently moved from a "call one of our partners for a quote" model for licensing to an extremely cheap and friendly model. In "development mode" you get rate limited to about one request per second but it's free, in "production mode" their hiking maps are $0.000046 per tile with the first ~$1,400 per month free.
This made a hobby project of mine (an open source backpacking map for Android) feasible. I found it interesting that the previous situation seemed to be because they couldn't be bother/didn't have the resources to open up, not because they had a reason to want to keep things more restricted.
My only remaining complaint is the license doesn't allow you to cache for more than 24 hours. All commercial outdoors maps apps allow caching for longer because you might be out of cell service for a few weeks, and I wish I could offer this feature. I'd be totally fine if it cost more.
Edit: fyi, my number doesn't match their pricing page because I changed the unit to make more sense to someone not super familiar with maps and converted to USD.
If you want something that actually works I highly recommend Gaia. They only have OS's driving maps built-in, but you should be able to manually add OS's leisure maps. Reasonable usage will definitely fit within OS's free tier, but you'll probably need to pay Gaia for pro. Disclaimer: I've worked with the tech this described a lot, but not actually done the steps I'm suggesting.
See:
https://osdatahub.os.uk/docs/wmts/overview
https://help.gaiagps.com/hc/en-us/articles/360047068634-How-...
My WIP project: https://github.com/danielzfranklin/backpackingmap
Nit-picking: it's "ordnance", not "ordinance". They're not interchangeable, even though they share a common origin.
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...
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.
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.
Yes, but Mordor was created before Sauron achieved his power. Perhaps it was long-range contingency planning by Melkor (Sauron's original boss).
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.
Doesn't the Brahmaputra run fairly parallel to the Himalayas for quite a long distance?
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...
Maybe not.
It's worth a shot!
https://www.alamy.com/stock-photo-china-guangxi-yuangshuo-or...
One of my favourite maps, the picture doesn't actually do it justice the other side had one covering a much larger area in the same style.
I honestly think maps like this and in other fantasy styles would be better for people exploring a country.
This is via https://help.openstreetmap.org/questions/4496/how-to-create-... and https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Ceyx and https://www.cartographersguild.com/showthread.php?t=5409&pag...
https://www.ordnancesurvey.co.uk/image-library/newsroom/blog...
It's great to find an article on something that looks fun just for the sake of doing it. Would love to see more like this on HN.
Typo there, that size is A4. Size A5 is half that, 210 x 148 mm
If this was open source work, sure. But he's charging quite an amount for something I personally consider plagiarism.
EDIT: For anyone unaware, he's selling these on his personal site.
As I love OS maps and Tolkien I really like this - I might even try and get him to do my local map square.
2. 'Style' is not copyrightable. No one owes royalties to Picasso for Cubism.
3. Plagiarism is representing someone else's work as your own. The tag line of his site is literally "Tolkien Inspired Cartography". He's very clear that he's following Tolkien's style.
4. Tolkien borrowed from previous cartographers, his own style evolved considerably over time and what you probably think of as the iconic Tolkien map, was actually by Pauline Baynes.
Particularly if their website were called "StarryNightPhotos.com" and they clearly said on their site "these are painted in the style of Van Gogh?"
Because that's all this is. And there are plenty of AI sites that do exactly what I just said but poorly, and probably plenty of artists with a side-job of doing something like that better.