If you watched in awe as a certain company of dwarves and one initially out of his depth Hobbit called Bilbo Baggins rode atop an impressive flock of Thorondor’s Giant Eagles in The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey, wishing you too could sit aloft these might birds and see Middle Earth from way up high, then your wish has now been granted.
But in spectacular fashion, with a new project by a group of Danish programmers working as The Middle Earth Project, having already rendered Tolkien’s magical lands as you’d see them from space, with work proceeding apace to fill in as much detail as possible.
According to a post on fastcodesign “it is so epic in scope that you can see the Eye of Sauron from space, yet so finely detailed that you could zoom from space right into Bilbo’s Hobbit hole.”
It is all based on the thousands of pages of meticulously detailed notes that Tolkien, a man who went to the trouble of creating a number of languages from scratch for his books including the seductively beautiful Elvish tongue, left behind, all of which is enabling the programmers to render a photo-realisrtic vision of the famed English author’s lands.
It will be the perfect accompaniment to Peter Jackson’s Lord of the Rings and The Hobbit movie series, which are justifiably renowned for their evocative recreations of The Shire, Mordor and the myriad lands of men.
So while there may be a dearth of Giant Eagles upon which to go aloft, you can now go and see what previously only the members of Thorondor’s kingdom (and a few Nazgûl upon their accursed Fell Beasts) have hitherto been privy to.
