Mae govannen, friend,
​
How glad I am you found this little corner of the internet! My name is Kevin, though you may call me as Kevandir the Cartographer of Arda.
My story is one of wandering. I have crossed many paths across the world in search of beauty. I have found it in the physical world, among alpine lakes and soaring peaks, and in the camaraderie felt in friendships made across borders. Most often, I have found it in the most unexpected of places, where strangers treat a traveler like family.
​
Tolkien’s lore has always felt personal to me because its heart is found everywhere in our own world. I see the ancient dignity of the Eldar in the ruins of forgotten empires, and the simple spirit of the Shire in the hospitality of a village home. It was during these travels that I took up the pen and paper to map out the world.
My first grand project was mapping the Silk Roads through the lens of my own journey, drawn in the style of the Tolkien himself. From there, I charted historic cities and lost kingdoms. At the end of 2025, I finally tried my hand at mapping Tolkien’s world itself, and I immediately felt at home. In March 2026, the Atlas of Arda was born, an ambitious project to map the great ages of the Legendarium.
I couldn’t do it without the support of my family and you, the reader.
​
​
​
A Life in the "Middle"
More personally, I have been married for ten years to my wife, Mary. We have two children, aged 3 and 6, whose rambunctious spirits fill every crevice of our lives with joy and occasional chaos.
I come from the United States and my wife from China. Together, we have shared time between two opposite sides of the world while also living in the spaces in between. For the past two years, our home has been Armenia, a land "in the middle of it all." You could call it a Middle-earth of its own. We live in a small village on the slopes of a volcano, with 1,500-year-old stone ruins within a short walk of our front door. It doesn’t get any more Tolkien than that.
I hope you enjoyed learning a little about the man behind the maps. More importantly, I hope these maps bring you joy as they guide you deeper into the beautiful and wondrous world of Arda.
​​
About the Project
​
The Atlas of Arda is an ambitious, ongoing journey to map the changing face of Tolkien’s world across the Ages. This project is a labor of research and hand-drawn devotion, where I treat the Tolkien's work not merely myth, but as a living history. While Tolkien remains my primary source for every coastline and village, I also bring my own background as a professional geologist to each map. I look at mountain ranges and the flow of rivers through the eyes of someone who has studied how landforms actually work in our own world, hoping to give these maps a sense of geographic truth.
The Atlas of Arda grows every month as a new realm is researched and brought to life. We began this journey with the Rise and Fall of Númenor, before crossing the Sundering Seas to map the Blessed Realm of Aman. The third chronicle of this series will be announced very soon, continuing our work to reconstruct the foundations of Arda piece by piece.
My hope is that as you collect these maps, you feel less like a reader and more like a traveler in Middle Earth uncovering the ancient maps of the world we love so much.
​
And if you haven't yet,
acquire your first map here:
​
​