2 October 2026
Tolkien Illuminations
The beauty of the age we live in is that new tools for creativity are continuously popping up. A few weeks ago I started thinking about whether or not I could create some "small bite" explainers based on Tolkien's work. A few iterations in and version one is a an animated map of the Fellowship's whole journey, from Bag End to Mount Doom. It is fun...it made me think of things I hadn't considered. I learned from it. So now I'm sharing it. I'm calling them Tolkien Illuminations.
The Fellowship's Journey Map: Bag End to Mount Doom is the first episode in the new format. Appendix B gives a date for nearly every stop the Company makes on its way south, so I took every one of those dates and drew it, day by day, on one map of Middle-earth. A solid line where Tolkien gives the date. A dashed one where I'm filling the gap between two of his.
What the map shows is that the quest runs at two speeds. It takes twenty-seven days to get from Bag End to Rivendell. Then the Ring sits in Rivendell for sixty-five days, more than twice as long as the trip that got it there. Add the twenty-nine days later in Caras Galadhon and ninety-four of the hundred and fifty-four days to Parth Galen are spent standing still. Sam says it on the river afterward: "Anyone would think that time did not count in there!" Later on, one line on the map becomes three, and the whole of The Two Towers happens in seventeen days! Three of the four threads land on the Pelennor on the fifteenth of March, while Frodo and Sam are just out of the Tower on the far side of the mountains, and all of them stop together on the twenty-fifth.
The long form episodes on the channel weren't a picture doing this kind of work. The episodes are painted plates under narration: mostly still images and narration. I like that format a lot, and I'm keeping it. But it wasn't the right type of format for this type of content. Some things are easier to draw than to say.
Illuminations are the other kind of video. Every frame is a function of the narration. Each sentence gets timed, and the drawing only moves when the words tell it to move, not on some editor's cut point. No hand-picked stills, no B-roll standing in for an idea. The subjects have to be things you can draw and count straight off the page: a map, a family tree, a timeline, a tally.
The idea came from Ethan Mollick's short film about the Voynich manuscript, "The Book I Cannot Read," where every frame is drawn by code from a timestamp and the narration runs the whole clock. I read how he'd built it and realized I already had most of the pieces lying around. A gazetteer of two hundred and seventy named places with real coordinates, built for something else. A day-by-day reckoning of the quest, also built for something else. A fact-check ledger I already keep for every script. I built the films in Remotion, on the same ink system my episodes already draw their on-screen text with, so the look is the same dark iron-gall ink on parchment you'd recognize from anything else on the channel.
Episode two is ready to go: Aragorn and Elrond's family tree, the whole thing drawn on one page, so you can see exactly how they're kin. After that there's a longer list I'm working through: every Ring of Power's forging and loss on one clock, all of Arda's history drawn to scale, the chain of custody on the Silmarils, named distances converted into travel-days, the falling curve of how long each king of Numenor actually reigned, and, if I can get the astronomy right, Tolkien's moon phases checked against the real almanac for 1941 and 1942, because he apparently wrote the moon into the story from an actual sky. There are plenty of interesting ideas here...
Each film is bespoke. The map is not built like the family tree, and the family tree is not built like the timeline. What repeats is the workflow, and a small, growing library of ink "performances" I can reuse across films: a map camera, threads that draw themselves, a descent tree, counters, a ruler, a timeline strip. It's a fun system to build and work with.
I hope you like them. I plan on publishing one Illumination each week on Sundays. Regular episodes will keep their usual Tuesday/Friday slots.