[HN Gopher] When real world mapping meets Tolkien
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When real world mapping meets Tolkien
Author : dcminter
Score : 207 points
Date : 2021-04-11 13:53 UTC (1 days ago)
(HTM) web link (www.ordnancesurvey.co.uk)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.ordnancesurvey.co.uk)
| lifeisstillgood wrote:
| Am I the only one who was thinking "wow a bit of edge finding, a
| tolkien font and I have a business"
|
| Maybe not.
| jrimbault wrote:
| https://azgaar.github.io/Fantasy-Map-Generator/ ? there are
| lots of options
| dcminter wrote:
| Sounds viable to me!
| dagw wrote:
| 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.
| Cthulhu_ wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| Or use a pre-rendered map tiles and "just" replace the font:
| http://maps.stamen.com/toner-lite
| ragebol wrote:
| - Do some edge detection, extract vector paths from those
| instead of just a bitmap, have a plotter with ink pen, plot! -
| ???, - profit?
| rytis wrote:
| Why not use vector data from OSM?
| KineticLensman wrote:
| 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...
| ximeng wrote:
| 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.
| throw0101a wrote:
| > _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.
| hcrisp wrote:
| 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.
| KineticLensman wrote:
| > 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).
| Naga wrote:
| Reading the article, the author posed that as the most likely
| (well, the only) explanation for Mordor.
| akjssdk wrote:
| 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.
|
| [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tolkien%27s_maps#The_Lord
| _of_t...
| KineticLensman wrote:
| 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.
|
| [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Lord_of_the_Rings#W
| riting
| akjssdk wrote:
| 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!)
|
| [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Silmarillion#Develo
| pment
| KineticLensman wrote:
| > 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.
| jccooper wrote:
| 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".
| dcminter wrote:
| 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.
| arethuza wrote:
| "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 wrote:
| 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 Aule [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
| KineticLensman wrote:
| Well yes. There was also some fairly extreme post-creation
| remodelling, e.g. the flooding of Beleriand and then the
| Drowning of Numenor.
| mebassett wrote:
| > 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...
| KineticLensman wrote:
| 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...
| syoc wrote:
| 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
| B1FF_PSUVM wrote:
| > I draw on A5 (210 x 297mm).
|
| Typo there, that size is A4. Size A5 is half that, 210 x 148 mm
| macintux wrote:
| 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
| Isamu wrote:
| Here I thought it would be about spotting an Apple Maps horse
| cart being drawn through the Shire.
| rkhassen9 wrote:
| 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.
| zo1 wrote:
| 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...
| adflux wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| Tolkien has been dead for a while now, I don't think he minds.
| notacoward wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| I am not convinced that copying style is somehow evil.
| adflux wrote:
| Neither am I, I just think its icky.
| arethuza wrote:
| 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.
| adflux wrote:
| He does commissions aswell, if you check his website.
| galadran wrote:
| 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.
| adflux wrote:
| I'm not saying its illegal. I just think it's cheap.
| CorrectHorseBat wrote:
| Tolkien is 50 years dead, The Hobbit's copyright expires in
| 10 years. I think it's fine.
| dageshi wrote:
| I would call the second or third person copying what he's
| doing "cheap", I wouldn't call what he's doing cheap.
| SamBam wrote:
| 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.
| stakkur wrote:
| This reminds me of a recent mapmaker I discovered (and ordered a
| map from): https://lordofmaps.com/
| tutfbhuf wrote:
| 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.
| dageshi wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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...
| iudqnolq wrote:
| 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.
| tweetle_beetle wrote:
| 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.
| jfk13 wrote:
| > 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.
| titzer wrote:
| Ordnance literally means artillery; shells and bullets :)
| abstractbeliefs wrote:
| 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.
| titzer wrote:
| That actually makes more sense than "Ordinance Survey" :)
| iudqnolq wrote:
| It could be the national government's legally
| authoritative survey :)
| KineticLensman wrote:
| 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).
|
| [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ordnance_Survey#Origins
| iudqnolq wrote:
| Thanks! This is the first time I've written the word out, I
| always abbreviate it OS
| Maursault wrote:
| Actually, you were correct [1], jfk13 is mistaken, but it
| was an easy mistake to make.
|
| [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ordnance_Survey
| iudqnolq wrote:
| I corrected it in an edit. I originally spelled it
| Ordinance.
| vchuravy wrote:
| What's the name of your app? I have been looking for something
| like that. OS maps really are fantastic.
| iudqnolq wrote:
| 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
| vmilner wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| For those not checking the link, Sodor is based upon the real
| life Isle of Man.
| [deleted]
| anotheryou wrote:
| 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!)
| ptrkcsk wrote:
| Similar: https://lordofmaps.com/
| danaris wrote:
| 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 putting random accent
| 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, Gwathlo), and none of them are
| elven diacritics.
|
| [0] http://topazgryphon.org/middleearthnorthwest.png
| rubidium wrote:
| 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...
| arethuza wrote:
| Seems appropriate that there is one for Lauterbrunnen - the
| real life influence for Rivendell:
|
| https://middleearthsmaps.com/products/lauterbrunnen-switzerl...
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(page generated 2021-04-12 23:01 UTC)