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Middle Earth Map Style

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“I wisely started with a map, and made the story fit”
-JRR Tolkien

The map drawn by Christopher Tolkien for his father’s book is a simple and beautiful reference. Absorbed for hours by curious minds through several generations, traced by countless fingers over the decades, and soaked up by a host of imaginations—mine included—where it has become the gold standard of fantasy mapping. Here’s how you can assemble your own fantasy-style map, with real geographic data, inspired by this seminal Lord of the Rings cartography.

In this 4-part series we’ll walk through the reckoning of a Lord of the Rings style fantasy map, right in ArcGIS Pro. We map-makers get to breathe honest to goodness geographic life into the seminal aesthetic found in the LOTR cartography, and I think that’s a bit of magic just waiting around for us to wield.

If you’d rather just jump in to the making, you can find the “One Style to Rule Them All” style for ArcGIS Pro here: esriurl.com/nelsonstyles

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Part 1: How to grow a forest

0:00 Pretty stunning intro
1:03 Deconstructing the forest components
1:27 Planting a forest perimeter
2:36 Filling in the forest with a repeating pattern
3:42 Those cute little tree trunks
5:01 Giving this map a paper texture
5:42 Personalizing with some shading and tinting
10:15 Save symbol to a re-usable style

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Part 2: How to move mountains

0:00 Eye-wateringly dramatic intro
0:14 Examining mountains in Tolkien’s map
0:45 Photoshopping a mountain image asset
1:12 Wes Jones’ fantasy mapping channel
1:30 Add a mountain marker layer
2:36 Highlights
3:08 Add a foothill marker layer
4:28 Saving mountain symbol to a style

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Part 3: How to fill the seas

0:00 Rapturous into
0:16 Tolkien’s water reference
0:50 Review of the previous symbols
1:16 Wavy scratchy rivers
2:56 Water tint
3:54 Coastal rake
5:38 Water line ripple ring things
6:54 Dark water!
7:33 Oceans

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Part 4: Putting it all together

0:00 First, a reading
0:21 Where to find this style resource
0:36 Data sources (Natural Earth water features and Living Atlas Ecoregions)
0:54 How to add a style to a project
2:05 Adding a Living Atlas paper texture
2:45 Planting ecoregions in (Middle) Earth
3:18 Some examples

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Thanks for following along on this unexpected journey! I’d love to see the fantastic maps you make and hope you’ll share them with the community for fun and encouragement. Here are some of mine…

Happy mapping! Love, John

32 thoughts on “Middle Earth Map Style”

  8. there’s still a noticeable pattern of repetition in the forests and mountains which defies the purpose imho. might be interesting to aim for something like an algorithm that actually draws this stuff like a human would, with all the doubts along the way 😉

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  15. John would it in anyway be possible to use these map textures (trees, mountains, etc.) in Photoshop as I don’t have ArcGIS.

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  16. I think I’m confused about how you made these maps. Did you essentially make the ArcGIS equivalent of Photoshop brushes or is there some sort of translation that ArcGIS Pro is doing to place the representations of rivers, mountains, etc for you?

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    1. It’s a combination of both of these I suppose. Specifically, I am using an ArcGIS Pro “style”. A style is a collection of symbol resources that you can apply to your data. Here are a collection of styles I’ve made: https://www.esriurl.com/nelsonstyles
      Regarding how Pro knows were to draw the specific landcover graphics, the underlying vector data is a set of polygons delineating global landform types. I’ve just created a thematic map linking the landform type attribute to the style fill that it best matches.
      Hope this helps!

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      1. I think I got it. Just having trouble getting ArcGIS to apply the style to the map. Maybe I need to download those other maps you were using in your Americas? I’m quite new to all of this.

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      2. In Pro’s symbology window (if you’ve added the style to the project) there is a Gallery tab. Choose that to see the Felt style and apply them to your features.

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  17. How do I run this program? It asked me what to use, and I tried all of the options (like Word, InternetExplorer, Paint, and more) but none of which worked.

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