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.
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.
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.
Which is exactly how they got their name: the Ordnance Survey was the organisation responsible for generating accurate maps for the purposes of planning and executing artillery shoots.
To be precise, their original goal [0] was to map Scotland in the aftermath of the Jacobite rising of 1745, to to help the crown to subjugate the clans (as opposed to just lobbing arty fire at them).
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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!
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.
> 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.
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.
I think the author is also severely underestimating how early Tolkien starting working on his maps. The Hobbit (published in 1937) already came with a somewhat fleshed out map of the Misty Mountains and surroundings, and it is fair to assume that from this the remainder of Middle-Earth was fleshed out. (I cannot quickly find somewhere when he first drew a complete map of Middle-Earth, but Wikipedia notes that "The paper became soft, torn and yellowed through intensive use, and a fold down the centre had to be mended using parcel tape" [1]. So he probably knew what Middle-Earth looked like for quite some time, maybe even late 1930s?
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.
I don't have a better link than yours, but books I own talk about maps of the wider Middle Earth (first age) being developed in the 1920s and 30s (e.g. a recognizable Silmarillion Map from the 1930s).
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.
Regarding your last point: if I remember the foreword to the 2nd edition Tolkien describes his writing process as essentially being spatially. He moves his characters from place to place, and seems to only have put in a core theme later on. This also agrees with the whole "Tolkien wrote a book so he could talk about cultures/languages/something" theme. This would also suggest that he had in his mind something of a map or layout of Middle-Earth very early on. And than there is the complicated interaction with the Silmarillion, which was developed long before the Hobbit even (1914), but also during writing of the Hobbit and TLOTR. [1] So disentangling where exactly he came up with what seems almost impossible (and something that many Tolkien scholars, including Christopher Tolkien, have spent quite some time studying!)
> So disentangling where exactly he came up with what seems almost impossible (and something that many Tolkien scholars, including Christopher Tolkien, have spent quite some time studying!)
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.
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.
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.
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".
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Would someone who paints photographs for you in the style of Van Gogh's Starry Night also be "cheap?"
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.
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.
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