Show HN: An interactive map of Tolkien's Middle-earth

LotrProject[1] has several interactive maps and visualizations, including a family tree, time/distance chart of the fellowship's journey, maps of Beleriand and Middle-Earth, historical timeline maps, and demographic posts on Middle-Earth's inhabitants. Sadly doesn't seem to have been maintained recently, the cracks in WordPress are starting to show, and AFAICT the source content isn't open.

http://lotrproject.com

Nice map!

The First Age / Second Age boundary is not unlike the K/T boundary...

Compared to that, Second Age / Third Age isn't that different (places like Dunland and Tharbad were forested, according to Treebeard). So if you wish to make the map a bit more ageless, you could just add a few alternate names. - Dol Guldur was Amon Lanc in the Second Age - Lothlorien was Laurelindorenan in the Second Age - Mirkwood, Minas Tirith and Minas Morgul are late-Third-Age-isms too.

Yep. When I get some time I will do a metadata layer to clarify water vs land vs prairies vs forest etc... then I will rerun the process with that additional Context. Should be fun. Thanks for the suggestion.

This is really cool!

Some nitpicks/ideas:

A few of the markers seem to be misplaced. I just noticed with the Cirith Ungol markers and Henneth Annûn, which are too far north and east compared to their location in the books (Cirith Ungol should be more or less directly above Minas Morgul; Henneth Annûn would be closer to the riverbank I think and in any case definitely not inside the mountain range)

There is also a bit of a mix of different semantics with the markers, I think. I see at least three different categories: Book plot lines, historical events and locations. The Hobbit and LotR markers seem to be mostly the first category, Silmarillion the second and Appendices the last (but not always). This makes sense, but is also a bit confusing, as a lot of locations only have book chapter or event descriptions, but no distinct description of the location itself. Some locations also have multiple markers if multiple things happened there.

I wonder if this could be structured a bit more, e.g. a marker for each location, with text subsections or "sub markers" for events and plotlines in that location.

Also, why the map looks good, I'd experiment with a few different ones (like the one from the books) that are more detailed. E.g. in this map, most of the roads are missing, which makes the markers for Tharbad or the Crossroads a bit awkward.

The crowning achievement would be of course to integrate Karen Wynn Fonstad's "high-resolution" maps from the atlas - but I imagine copyright makes that impossible.

The satellite view is a really cool idea, but, as others have said, doesn't reall work right now.

(I think this might be an interesting LLM benchmark: How well can a model generate a satellite view of middle earth that is both accurate to the map and to the descriptions in the books - e.g. not putting any vegetation into Gorgoroth, depicting the various ruined cities as ruins, etc)

But in any case, it's a really fun and well-designed project.

Ugh, yeah, I see what you mean - much of the project is running into backend errors.