I should begin by saying clearly that the Interactive Map of Middle-earth is no longer available; I explain why below. While you're here, though, you might be interested in the other resources on this site. I host all of the Frequently Asked Questions lists from the Tolkien newsgroups, an interactive Tolkien booklist that will recommend a reading order based on your personal tastes, a popular and comprehensive essay on the nature of Tom Bombadil, and more. I hope that even without the map, you find my site useful. As for why the map is gone...

Once upon a time, in the (somewhat) early days of the web, a new HTML extension appeared that allowed "client-side image maps": different parts of an image could be hyperlinks to different places. (Similar things were possible before, but they required complicated scripting on the web server.) I thought that was really cool, and being an undergraduate at the time I had enough spare time to incorporate all the latest HTML features into my web pages as fast as they became available.

After playing with image maps for a little while (using them to put easter eggs on my main page, for example), I realized that they could actually be useful: I could create an interactive map of Middle-earth, where clicking on various parts of the map would zoom in to give a larger map. I wanted to be as "canonical" as possible, so I scanned in the maps by Christopher Tolkien from my copy of LotR.

The Interactive Map of Middle-earth was quite popular for a while (at least, I got a fair bit of complimentary email about it). However, over time I began to feel increasingly uncomfortable about it. I found that I felt quite protective of the texts of Tolkien's books online: I firmly believed that giving away electronic copies of them was wrong. Eventually, it sank in that giving away Tolkien's maps wasn't any more moral than giving away the texts themselves, and (feeling fairly guilty about the whole thing) I shut down the interactive map.

I still feel a little sad that those maps aren't available any more, as I enjoyed creating them and it felt good to have actually created some useful content on the web. On the other hand, I still have lingering feelings of guilt for having unthinkingly gone against my own moral principles. I'd love to see some brilliant idea to improve (or replace) copyright law so that the rights of creators could be protected while still allowing enough freedom of information for resources like my map to exist (without requiring explicit permission, or at least so that such permission would be likely to be granted), but I haven't been able to come up with anything better than the system we have now. Until we all agree on a replacement, I think that working within our existing thoughts on copyright is the only way to go: it's not perfect, but it's better than not having any protection for creators at all. At any rate, that's what's happened to the map. My apologies for the inconvenience.