When real world mapping meets Tolkien

https://www.ordnancesurvey.co.uk/newsroom/blog/real-world-mapping-meets-tolkien

by dcminter • 5 years ago

228 68 5 years ago

ordnancesurvey.co.uk

rubidium• 5 years ago

This looks like a new hobby for me :)

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...

arethuza3• 5 years ago

Seems appropriate that there is one for Lauterbrunnen - the real life influence for Rivendell:

https://middleearthsmaps.com/products/lauterbrunnen-switzerl...

lifeisstillgood• 5 years ago

Am I the only one who was thinking "wow a bit of edge finding, a tolkien font and I have a business"

Maybe not.

dcminter2• 5 years ago

Sounds viable to me!

Cthulhu_• 5 years ago

Nope; Google Maps has had april fools' projects a few times where they do something similar, like their 8 bit version: https://youtu.be/rznYifPHxDg

cstuder• 5 years ago

Or use a pre-rendered map tiles and "just" replace the font: http://maps.stamen.com/toner-lite

ragebol• 5 years ago

- Do some edge detection, extract vector paths from those instead of just a bitmap, have a plotter with ink pen, plot! - ???, - profit?

rytis• 5 years ago

Why not use vector data from OSM?

jrimbault• 5 years ago

https://azgaar.github.io/Fantasy-Map-Generator/ ? there are lots of options

dagw• 5 years ago

There was a site posted here a couple of years ago where you could select an area in OpenStreetMaps and it be would stylize and carve it into a piece of wood using a CNC machine and send to you.

samatman• 5 years ago

The difference between doing it and doing it well is huge, but not unsurmountable.

It's worth a shot!

macintux• 5 years ago

The site appears effectively abandoned, but I found this to be an interesting browse, effectively a GIS portal for Middle Earth: http://arda-maps.org

tutfbhuf• 5 years ago

I would like to have a trained neural network that can generate Tolkien maps from existing map images and a filter for google maps or OpenStreetMap that can render the maps in Tolkien mode.

dageshi2• 5 years ago

When I was travelling around Asia around 13-14 years ago I came across this map of Yangshuo

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.

habi• 5 years ago

Here’s what you can achieve with some OSM tools: http://anamnese.online.fr/carte/leaflet.html

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...

vmilner• 5 years ago

I'd really like to see the fictitious Island of Sodor from Thomas the Tank Engine done in a proper UK Ordnance Survey map style!

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sodor_(fictional_island)

Wildgoose• 5 years ago

For those not checking the link, Sodor is based upon the real life Isle of Man.

rkhassen9• 5 years ago

Can't wait to try this!

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.

adflux4• 5 years ago

I'm sorry but I don't really think this is appropriate. Not only is he copying the maps Tolkien made himself, he is also copying his style and font typings almost 1:1...

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.

madmoose• 5 years ago

Tolkien has been dead for a while now, I don’t think he minds.

notacoward• 5 years ago

JRR has been dead for a while, but his estate still exists and has been highly protective of his works (putting it kindly). They're the reason it took so long for a movie to be made, and why LOTR Online had to make up a bunch of stuff to fill in for inaccessible source material.

matkoniecz• 5 years ago

I am not convinced that copying style is somehow evil.

adflux4• 5 years ago

Neither am I, I just think its icky.

arethuza3• 5 years ago

He's handy producing these things and gives a fairly detailed tutorial on how to do the same thing.

As I love OS maps and Tolkien I really like this - I might even try and get him to do my local map square.

adflux4• 5 years ago

He does commissions aswell, if you check his website.

galadran• 5 years ago

1. Of the literally hundreds of maps on his site, there are only two which are actually based on Middle Earth.

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.

adflux4• 5 years ago

I'm not saying its illegal. I just think it's cheap.

anotheryou• 5 years ago

I think stamen maps "toner" render is a good start :)

http://maps.stamen.com/#toner/12/37.7706/-122.3782

(make sure to chech out the shading on watercolor too though!)

KineticLensman7• 5 years ago

IMO the features look Tolkienish, but the fonts don't.

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...

throw0101a• 5 years ago

Real geographic features tend not to form right angles.

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.

Naga• 5 years ago

Reading the article, the author posed that as the most likely (well, the only) explanation for Mordor.

KineticLensman7• 5 years ago

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).

hcrisp• 5 years ago

It was the Valar. Whatever theory you come up with has to accommodate the geography of the Hidden City of Gondolin (search Google Images to see it illustrated). Aule, Ulmo, or Melkor, someone fashioned it in such a way that it was able to preserve Turgon and the other elves for 400 years until it was betrayed to Morgoth.

dcminter2• 5 years ago

I was just re-reading it (LoTR) the last few days and I often found myself thinking that the geography didn't seem very natural; delightful to read this in the light of 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.

arethuza3• 5 years ago

"massive rivers that run parallel to those mountain ranges for long distances"

Doesn't the Brahmaputra run fairly parallel to the Himalayas for quite a long distance?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brahmaputra_River

chongli• 5 years ago

Middle Earth (which is one continent on the world called Arda) didn’t evolve by natural geological processes, it was created by a god-like being (one of the Valar) called Aulë [1]. These beings would continue to personally shape and transform the world over its short history (a few thousand years), compared to the real world. I think it’s entirely reasonable for the features to look designed when in fact it is.

[1] http://tolkiengateway.net/wiki/Middle_Earth#History

KineticLensman7• 5 years ago

Well yes. There was also some fairly extreme post-creation remodelling, e.g. the flooding of Beleriand and then the Drowning of Númenor.

syoc• 5 years ago

One thing to note about mountains is that they can have been artificially created during earlier times. The misty mountains were for instance intentionally created to be hard to pass[1]. Angles might make more sense then.

[1] https://lotr.fandom.com/wiki/Misty_Mountains

mebassett• 5 years ago

Real geographic features tend not to form right angles.

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...

KineticLensman7• 5 years ago

The mappings in the linked article have one or two issues themselves. The first map of Europe, for example, represents the Massif Central [0] as linear feature at right angles to the Pyrenees, when it is actually a large plateau.

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...

ximeng• 5 years ago

http://www.shadedrelief.com/world/Data/map1_type.jpg a good map of mountain ranges to search for counterexamples. Lake Maracaibo in Venezuela is surrounded by mountains on three sides and the Magdalena river runs parallel with the Andes and has some squarish curves. It also seems likely that the map could be thought of as not being accurate itself with the "real world" geography of Middle Earth given its sketchy design.

jccooper• 5 years ago

Indeed. The lettering is not Tolkien-map-style, and it uses the movie "style" of dropping unnecessary (and incorrect) tengwar diacritics all over to make it look "fantasy".

ptrkcsk• 5 years ago

Similar: https://lordofmaps.com/

iudqnolq5• 5 years ago

This is tangentially related, but I want to call out the ordnance survey for making their data available. A large portion of their data is licensed under the UK's Open Government License.

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.

vchuravy• 5 years ago

What's the name of your app? I have been looking for something like that. OS maps really are fantastic.

iudqnolq5• 5 years ago

I made the questionable choice to write my map renderer from scratch, got it barely working, then got bored and abandoned the project at least for now. When I finish my current pet project I plan to replace it with an existing renderer and focus on the hiking/backpacking specific features I can add.

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

jfk13• 5 years ago

I want to call out the ordinance survey for making their data available

Nit-picking: it's "ordnance", not "ordinance". They're not interchangeable, even though they share a common origin.

iudqnolq5• 5 years ago

Thanks! This is the first time I've written the word out, I always abbreviate it OS

titzer2• 5 years ago

Ordnance literally means artillery; shells and bullets :)

tweetle_beetle• 5 years ago

I wouldn't give the organisation too much credit. It might be that they are modernising and friendlier now, but from memory, they were very much forced into the start of the process of opening up in the early 2000s. Before, it pretty much had a monopoly on the data which had been collected at the taxpayers expense, and was effectively run as a private company which, among other things, sold products using this data to taxpayers at a profit.

Isamu• 5 years ago

Here I thought it would be about spotting an Apple Maps horse cart being drawn through the Shire.

zo1• 5 years ago

Off topic. Wow - one of the images on that page had me dizzy. Seems to be triggering some sort optical illusion effect that does not play well with my head. First time I've encountered something like this, despite looking at many optical illusions and "seizure-triggering" content in the past.

https://www.ordnancesurvey.co.uk/image-library/newsroom/blog...

danaris• 5 years ago

Urgh. Yet another place using the terrible example of the movies where it comes to the LotR typography.

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.

[0] http://topazgryphon.org/middleearthnorthwest.png

stakkur• 5 years ago

This reminds me of a recent mapmaker I discovered (and ordered a map from): https://lordofmaps.com/

B1FF_PSUVM• 5 years ago

I draw on A5 (210 x 297mm).

Typo there, that size is A4. Size A5 is half that, 210 x 148 mm

When real world mapping meets Tolkien

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