Atlas of Middle-earth is a truly monumental feat.

I think the article writer misses how much of it is really about The Silmarillion, rather than about Lord of the Rings. Tolkien put a lot of work into First Age geography, an entire (interminable, excruciating) chapter of The Silmarillion. Very little of it would be familiar to viewers of the films, and a lot of it opaque even to readers just of LotR.

A wonderful atlas -- my favorite are her trail maps where she depicts a character's daily journey in the book.

The article (almost) footnotes her other work which was equally impressive:

* She also created atlases for the worlds of fantasy authors Anne McCaffrey, creator of the “Dragonriders of Pern” series, and Stephen R. Donaldson, who wrote “The Chronicles of Thomas Covenant” series.

I love fantasy in general, and have read a ton of it. other than tolkien, I have never read a novel with that strong a sense of geography in a constructed world - specifically, that there is an entire rich land out there, and not just a graph of interesting places with the focus shifting from one point to another. when the hobbits have to go from the shire to rivendell, or aragorn has to take the paths of the dead to reach his destination in time, tolkien really manages to convey the experience of a difficult journey that takes a significant amount of time even when nothing plot-significant is happening along the way.

One of my biggest takeaways from the first time I saw her work was that Beleriand was actually situated to the west of Middle Earth prior to sinking. I had seen far too many erroneous maps placing it north of Middle Earth (https://static0.gamerantimages.com/wordpress/wp-content/uplo...)

For rich, authentic old-style maps you want to make at home on the PC (or iPad) is there any better resource than K. M. Alexander's?

https://kmalexander.com/free-stuff/fantasy-map-brushes/