Idraluna Archives

12-mile Middle Earth Hexmap

I've been re-reading the Hobbit & Lord of The Rings this year, so naturally my latest cartographic hyperfixation was to make a map of Tolkien's paracosm.

I had initially intended for this to be a 6-mile hexmap, but right as I was getting everything polished up I measured the distance from Hobbiton to Rivendell and realized that the GIS data I was using was scaled down by 50%! I may still try to make a 6-mile version, but I don't want to waste all the work I did to hand-digitize rivers & such, so for now here's the 12 mile version.

Click here to download the high-res map.

General approach

When making a GIS hexmap, one always have to make a judgement call as to which features to 'bin' into hexes. For example, the Antarctica map bins terrain into hexes but overlays natural-looking rivers. The Moon & Mars maps simply superimpose a hex grid over finely resolved, hillshaded terrain.

For Middle Earth, I decided to fully abstract everything to hexes, including snapping rivers to hex edges. Tolkien's world has been mapped many times, usually with greater artistry than I can bring to bear. However, comprehensive, well-attested hexmaps are harder to find.

The other dilemma concerned canon & artistic license. I enjoy Tolkien's works but I'm not a superfan or lore expert. Where possible, I tried to only depict features appearing in Tolkien's writings, for which I relied primarily on citations on Tolkeingateway.net. I have not (intentionally) included anything from the films, TV show, MMO, or various TTRPGs. (Some features are likely missing, feel free to hit me up on Discord or Bluesky with any glaring omissions).

The main non-canonical source is the digital elevation model from the arda GIS repository, which guided the initial placement of terrain features. In a few instances, I used this to inform the placement of logical terrain features in sparsely-mapped areas. Tolkien's maps clearly represent peripheral areas in less detail, so in Forlindon, Harlindon, Rhudaur, Rhun & others, I have added small river tributaries & inferred the locations of mountains & foothills.

My main sources were as follows:

Specifics

Base terrain

The terrain type of each hex was assigned by overlaying the grid atop the digital elevation model from the arda GIS repo, visually assigning mountains and hills, and spatially joining the arda forest & marsh layers. As I worked on placing POIs, rivers, & roads, I added many small corrections based on Fonstad's atlas & the hand-drawn maps by J.R.R. & Christopher.

Tundra & desert were assigned by hand. I used the name "Ice bay of Forochel" as a guideline for where the snow line should roughly begin. Desert placement was loosely inspired by the coloration on John Howe's map.

Rivers

The arda GIS repo has some messy river layers, probably generated via a method similar to the one I used for Antarctica. I decided to rely more on the rivers in Christopher Tolkien's map, particularly for cues as to relative sizes. After adding the major canonical rivers I took cues from the GIS waterways to place some likely tributaries, particularly in places where the map is sparse.

Rivers feature heavily as obstacles in Tolkien's legendarium (consider the significance of the Last Bridge & Fords of Bruinen, or of the contentious debate at the end of Fellowship regarding which bank of the Anduin to disembark on). Accordingly, I have snapped rivers to hex edges to eliminate any ambiguity about which side a hex is on.

Roads

Roads were snapped to the centroid of each hex, in keeping with the unambiguous feature binning approach. Whether a road is 'major' or 'minor' was judged subjectively. Generally, all roads appearing on Christopher Tolkien's map are 'major', but certain roads known to have fallen into ruin were demoted to minor. There probably should be more roads in the settled parts of Gondor, but those are currently left as an exercise to the reader.

I also added a 'subterranean' category for Moria, Goblin Town, & the Paths of The Dead.

POIs

I had initially planned to use separate attribute columns to record Westron, Elven, & Dwarven names, but my dedication waned so (for now) each feature has just one name, usually defaulting to the common speech.

As mentioned above, I haven't added POIs from non-canon sources, so much of the map is empty ready to be stocked with your awesome Middle Earth campaign setting.

Bonus Campaign Idea

The Sea of Nurnen in southeastern Mordor was apparently farmed by human (?) slaves of Sauron to feed his armies. From Return of The King:

Neither [Sam] nor Frodo knew anything of the great slave-worked fields away south in this wide realm, beyond the fumes of the Mountain by the dark sad waters of Lake Núrnen; nor of the great roads that ran away east and south to tributary lands, from which the soldiers of the Tower brought long waggon-trains of goods and booty and fresh slaves.

At the start of the Fourth Age, Aragorn gave the land around Nurnen to the newly freed slaves to be a self-governed subject realm of his re-united kingdom. I think this would be an excellent setting for a Fourth Age campaign:

#DIY #GIS #slush-pile