To presume that Tolkien would have had an understanding of the then state-of-the-art theories around continental drift is a bit hopeful. So he probably knew what Middle-Earth looked like for quite some time, maybe even late 1930s? (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". 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 think the author is also severely underestimating how early Tolkien starting working on his maps. Real geographic features tend not to form right angles. 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. 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 Misty Mountains run north-south, and form a right angle with the Ered Nimrais, which run E-W and separate Gondor from everything else. This is discussed in, 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. However, the geography itself isn't realistic. Tolkien himself said 'I wisely started with a map, and made the story fit'. IMO the features look Tolkienish, but the fonts don't. I'd be totally fine if it cost more.Įdit: 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. 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. My only remaining complaint is the license doesn't allow you to cache for more than 24 hours. 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. This made a hobby project of mine (an open source backpacking map for Android) feasible. 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. 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. A large portion of their data is licensed under the UK's Open Government License. This is tangentially related, but I want to call out the ordnance survey for making their data available.
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