Press play to begin the narration...
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The Infinite Tolkien
An endless narration of Middle-earth, as told by the Professor himself
About
This project had been sitting in the back of my mind ever since I first came across The Infinite Conversation — an AI-generated, never-ending dialogue between Werner Herzog and Slavoj Žižek. The concept of something endless, generated and stitched together seamlessly, stuck with me.
If you've read Tolkien, you know. The man could spend an entire page describing a single tree — its bark, its roots, the way the light fell through its leaves, the silence beneath its boughs. My friends and I always joked about it: you'd be deep into an adventure and suddenly find yourself lost in a two-paragraph meditation on the colour of moss.
At some point those two ideas connected: an infinite conversation, and Tolkien's inexhaustible love for describing the world around his characters. What if the Professor never stopped? What if he just kept going — tree after tree, hill after hill, dawn after dawn — forever?
That's what this is. An endless narration of Middle-earth, as told by Tolkien himself, one description at a time.
Like most people today, I find it astonishing what AI can do. But what makes it truly remarkable is that it builds on the work and craft of extraordinary people who came before — in this case, Tolkien's voice, his words, his way of seeing the world. The technology can only approximate something meaningful because the source material was created by someone who meant every word.
I believe this will keep getting better. Yet as of 2026, years have passed since The Infinite Conversation first appeared, and I still haven't seen AI-generated content that truly captivates people the way a great book or film does — something that holds your attention not because it's novel, but because it's genuinely moving. Perhaps that day will come. In the meantime, there's something fitting about using these tools to let Tolkien do what he did best: describe the world in unhurried, loving detail, for as long as anyone cares to listen.
FAQ
Who made this?
Jarlakxen — motivated by wanting to try out Claude Code and not having much free time.
What is this?
A satirical project built in about 3 hours, where you can listen to J.R.R. Tolkien endlessly describing scenes from his books. Because sometimes a single tree deserves its own chapter.
How was it made?
Built entirely using Claude Code (Claude Opus 4) as the development assistant, along with:
- Text generation — 40 narration segments written by Claude in Tolkien's descriptive prose style, designed to be randomly concatenable
- Voice cloning — Chatterbox (by Resemble AI) via mlx-audio, running locally on Apple Silicon with MLX
- Reference audio — Tolkien's own voice from public recordings of him reading his works
- Frontend — Vanilla HTML, CSS, and JavaScript. No frameworks. Elvish Ring NFI font for the narration text. Web Audio API for the visualizer
- Audio pipeline — All 40 segments pre-generated offline as WAV files, served statically with prefetching