r/lotr_ai_art

The Two Trees of Telperion and Laurelin with Valimar in the background with Pelóri Mountains.

What do you think — does it capture the feel of Tolkien's description?

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/