An interactive map of Tolkien's Middle-earth
Details
- External ID
- 47681112
- Source
- HN
- Company
- —
- Product
- An interactive map of Tolkien's Middle-earth
- Website domain
- web.app
- Launched
- April 7, 2026
- Cohort
- —
- Upvotes
- 291
- Upvotes percentile
- 0.9768637532133676
- Tags
- —
- Fetched at
- Sept. 7, 2026, 9:26 p.m.
- Updated at
- Sept. 7, 2026, 9:26 p.m.
Description
An interactive map of Tolkien’s Middle-earth, with events from across the legendarium plotted as markers.I have been commuting a fair bit between the East and West coast, and thanks to American Airlines' free onboard WiFi, I was able to vibe-code a full interactive map of Middle-earth right from my economy seat at the back of the bus.It's rather amazing how much an LLM knows about Tolkien's work, and it was fun to delve into many of the nooks and crannies of Tolkien's lore.Some features: - Plot on the map the journey of the main characters in both The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings. - Follow a list of events in the chronological Timeline - Zoom in on the high-def map and explore many of the off-the-main-plotline places - Use the 'measure distances' feature to see how far apart things are.I also had a lot of fun learning about tiling to allow for efficient zooming.If you are anything like me, this should provide a fun companion to reading the books or watching the movies (note that on this site, I followed the book narrative, and did not include Peter Jackson's many departures)If you get the chance to check it out, I would love more feedback, and if there is demand, I might do the same for Game of Thrones.
Enrichment
- Theme
- interactive simulations and creative experiments
- Vertical
- Media & entertainment
- Function
- Content generation
- Audience
- B2C
- AI stance
- Not AI
- Project type
- Hobby / open-source project
- Normalized one-liner
- interactive middle-earth map
- Manually corrected
- False
Could you build this?
Yes The author explicitly vibe-coded this during a flight; it is a standard Leaflet/Mapbox frontend displaying curated Tolkien geographic coordinates and event markers.
Discussion
20 comments analyzed.
Competitors mentioned: LotrProject - interactive maps with family trees and timelines, Fonstad's canonical atlas maps, Maps from the books
Concerns raised: Collision avoidance issues, Backend errors, Laggy performance when panning/zooming, Marker positioning inaccurate (Cirith Ungol, Henneth Annûn), Generated satellite view unrealistic - water appears dry, strange mountains
Feature requests: Better rendering to reduce lag during panning/zooming, Restructure markers by location with sub-markers for events/plotlines, Add alternate place names for different ages (Dol Guldur/Amon Lanc, etc), Improve satellite imagery with metadata layer for water/land/forest distinctions, More detailed maps with roads included
Competitors
Other products that read as similar to this one — 92 launches clear the similarity bar, closest 8 shown.
Attention rank: #3 of 93 (itself plus its competitors, highest first — normalized so YC and Product Hunt are compared fairly).
Launched 118 days after the earliest competitor.
- A cartographer's attempt to realistically map Tolkien's world · hn · 2026-04-07 · 163 upvotes · similarity 0.61
- The Infinite Tolkien · hn · 2026-04-13 · 5 upvotes · similarity 0.61
- A map of historical movies by narrative location and time period · hn · 2026-02-01 · 7 upvotes · similarity 0.50
- I built Chronoscope, because Google Maps won't let you visit 3400 BCE · hn · 2026-03-12 · 11 upvotes · similarity 0.48
- A new way to read books, magnifying in and out · hn · 2026-08-19 · 7 upvotes · similarity 0.47
- Planes.fyi · hn · 2025-12-17 · 8 upvotes · similarity 0.43
- Sitmap · hn · 2026-08-20 · 9 upvotes · similarity 0.41
- Gaia Atlas · hn · 2026-05-29 · 6 upvotes · similarity 0.41
Other launches for this product
- No other launches for this product.
Same idea, different domain
Nobody's really built a content generation tool for Government yet.