About the Middle-earth map

About this map

Middle-earth, drawn by the same program that draws the Sword Coast.

The Sword Coast map began with a painting, read for its geography. This one began with data. Two fan projects have spent years building Middle-earth the way a surveyor would:

ME-DEM, an elevation model. monks and Redrobes made it on the Outerra forums from real-world terrain, hand editing and simulated erosion. The heights here are its 32,000-pixel version, published by bburns.
ME-GIS, the vector layers: coastline, rivers, roads, forests, hills, marshes and place names. monks and SeerBlue made them, and jvangeld, Andrew Heiss and tetrakai1 have kept them since.

This map is built on their work. Every mark on it is still drawn by code, and no published map’s artwork is shown.

The Misty Mountains in evening light, running north to south, with Eriador to the west and the Anduin and Mirkwood to the east. — The Misty Mountains, an hour before sunset.

The survey

A second survey program reads the shapefiles and the elevation model and writes the same files the Sword Coast’s survey writes: heights, the distance to the coast, masks, rivers, roads. From there nothing changes. The same pen inks it and the same brush paints it.

The data has no outlines for mountains, snow or desert, so those are worked out. Rock comes from height and slope. Snow comes from height and latitude. The sands of Harad and the ash of Mordor are marked by hand.

The sheet runs from the Ice Bay of Forochel to just south of Umbar, and from the sea west of Lindon to beyond the Sea of Rhûn. The data is drawn at half the distances Tolkien gives, so the scale bar doubles them.

What is on it

Much of the dataset comes from the Middle-earth Role Playing game books, which filled the map with towns, roads and names of their own. Those are left out. The names and roads here are the ones in Tolkien’s books: 17 roads and 97 rivers. About 1,700 small unnamed streams stay as well, because a river system needs its tributaries to look like one.

Real heights

The Sword Coast’s lowlands are nearly flat, because a painted map leaves its plains blank. An elevation model doesn’t. Here the downs, the river valleys and the Wold have their own shape, and the forests stand on the ground.

The Shire and the lands around it at dawn: low hills, small woods and streams in warm light. — Dawn over the Shire.

The lettering

This map has its own hand, Rowanbeck Reed: an uncial for realms and cities, a pointed italic for places, a freer italic for water, and a small plain hand. The same pen engine writes it that writes the Sword Coast’s Stonebrook Quill, one stroke at a time, and it is exported as a font in the same way.

The engine had no accents before this map. Barad-dûr needs a circumflex and Lothlórien an acute, so the pen learned to write them as separate marks set over the letter. The older insular forms of d, g and t are in the font as an option. The smaller hands use the plain forms, so that a village name stays readable at twelve pixels.

Everything else

The pen, the paint, the viewer and how it was all built are on the Sword Coast’s page.

Elliot Bonneville · elliotbonneville.com · @elliotbnvl