u/Calm-Huckleberry-399

"She went into the forgotten South..."

Was she the most powerful being in Middle-earth?

I've been building a Tolkien atlas, and most of it tries to get the geography right. I thought it would be fun to ask a different question: *how would each people draw the same world?*

I assume a Hobbit of the Shire wouldn't draw the same map as a Dwarf of Erebor, who wouldn't draw the same map as an Elf of Rivendell.

I was inspired by Karpathy's recent thinking on LLM "autoresearch" loops that draft, score, and iterate. I wanted to see whether the same pattern works for aesthetic problems rather than scientific ones. So I wrote a small loop: it drafts a map, scores it against an in-world rubric ("does this look like a Hobbit drew it? what would a Hobbit care about? what materials?"), then refines the prompt and tries again. Round after round, until something interesting emerges.

Nothing is what I'd call "perfect", but I thought each was cool in its own way.

Hope you enjoy...

Full page: https://rangeroftherealms.com/atlas/cartographers/

I spent some time making maps for different regions of Arda across the Ages. Intent was something pretty simple (I'm not trying to be Pauline Baynes or recreate Fonstad), just a quick beautiful reference. Five eras, thirteen regions. Thought they came out pretty good so I wanted to share. Sharing a few here, the rest in the link below...

https://rangeroftherealms.com/atlas/

Also shared a bit of behind-the-scenes if anyone's curious: https://rangeroftherealms.com/notes/atlas-of-arda/

Open to all feedback. Always appreciate thoughts and discussion from this community.