Here Be Dragons

by Stefan Ekman

  2 : Maps

  Maps are wonderful tools that can help us find our way and divide up our surroundings: into our land and theirs, into safe places and unsafe, and, ultimately, into the known world and the unknown. Exploring has become tantamount to mapping, turning the empty margins and blank areas of terra incognita into familiar terrain. In a literary genre as concerned with exploring new worlds as fantasy is, it is hardly surprising that the map is a frequent complement to the texts, a companion on the reader’s journey through the alien landscape. The inclusion of maps is not restricted to fantasy novels, however, and it has been done for almost as long as there have been printed books. As a result of the Genevan reform, the second half of the sixteenth century saw a widespread use of maps in printed Bibles1 and already during the late fifteenth century, numerous illustrations charting Dante’s Hell had been produced, based on descriptions in the text.2 Other well-known works of fiction that are furnished with maps include Thomas More’s Utopia (1516), Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels (1726), and Robert Louis Stevenson’s Treasure Island (1883)—of the last, it has even been said that the map was not just produced to be published together with the novel; the novel was actually written to go with the map.3

  In modern fantasy, especially high fantasy, maps are considered common enough to be almost obligatory, mainly because of the maps J. R. R. Tolkien included in The Lord of the Rings (1954–55).4 According to Roz Kaveney, the map has come to be used as an authenticating device and a means to facilitate understanding, but she also suggests that Tolkien supplied maps “much in the same spirit that he provided endless glossaries and appendices.”5 What this spirit is, she omits to mention; but it is clear that to Tolkien, the map aids in the construction of an internally consistent world. Furthermore, the maps in The Lord of the Rings, just like the many casual references to Arda’s historical events and people, serve to provide the secondary world with the width, depth, and height that Tolkien sought in the realm of fairy stories. Whether provided for authentication, understanding, inner consistency, or world expansion, maps are expected to be supplied in high-fantasy novels today.

  PREVIOUS EXPLORATIONS OF FANTASY MAPS

  Fantasy maps have long fascinated readers. To my mind, the most impressive collection is still J. B. Post’s An Atlas of Fantasy, first published in 1973 (with a revised second edition in 1979).6 Post included more than a hundred maps from modern fantasy worlds as well as from a large range of imaginary places. Few scholars have discussed fantasy maps in writing, however. In 1976, Diane Duane wrote a short piece entitled “Cartography for Other Worlds: A Short Look at a Neglected Subject,” wherein she acknowledged the value of maps and insisted that fantasy and science-fiction maps should be created by author and mapmaker in collaboration.7 A year later, Julian May, writing as Lee N. Falconer, examined the history and cartography of the maps of the fictional world of Conan, including details about map projections, in the preface to A Gazet[t]eer of the Hyborian World of Conan.8 The most in-depth description of fantasy maps can be found in Diana Wynne Jones’s satirical commentary on the typical worlds of Tolkien’s epigones, The Tough Guide to Fantasyland, in which she declares that the first thing to do on any tour of Fantasyland is to “[f]ind the map. It will be there. No Tour of Fantasyland is complete without one.”9 The reader is then encouraged to examine the map, and a number of common features of fantasy maps are noted. Apart from Jones’s satire, few studies of fantasy maps have been more than cursory, despite the alleged prevalence and uniformity of the phenomenon.

  The importance of maps has not passed the scholarly community by completely, however. In 1979, at the beginning of the mass-market fantasy boom that started in the late 1970s, Frank W. Day points out how the increased popularity of science fiction and fantasy, and the use of maps in these genres, “[makes] analysis of the map communication process in such literature more important than ever.”10 His own study focuses on maps as communicative devices, from the perspective of readers and authors. Coming to maps from a somewhat different angle, Clare Ranson ends her 1996 paper “Cartography in Children’s Literature” by expressing the hope that she has demonstrated how maps are “an interesting branch of illustration and worthy of more critical attention.”11 Yet despite Day’s and Ranson’s exhortations, few critics have devoted any notable scholarly efforts to fictional maps—and in all fairness, the fact that Day’s study is an unpublished master’s thesis and Ranson’s paper was presented at a conference on school librarianship probably did not add to their impact among fantasy scholars. Ranson only incorporates minimal readings of maps, including brief comments on the map in Ursula K. Le Guin’s A Wizard of Earthsea (1968). Instead, she proposes a taxonomy of maps in children’s books, with three categories, comprising maps of real places, real-place maps adjusted to fit the plot, and “imaginary maps.”12 Regrettably, this last category includes both maps of secondary worlds and maps of fictional places in the primary world, and thus Ranson’s taxonomy provides little help in advancing a closer investigation of secondary-world maps. R. C. Walker similarly devotes much of his Mythlore piece from 1981, “The Cartography of Fantasy,” to a general taxonomy of fantasy settings, noting the importance of settings to the genre.13 The article proceeds to stress the need for maps in fantasy books, proposing that maps be drawn for books that do not have them.14

  The past three decades have seen a few articles that treat fantasy maps as cartographic objects. Peter Hunt connects maps with landscapes and journeys, bringing up the significance of maps in English fantasy—maps that, he argues, “are both reductive and suggestive.” Fantasy maps, according to Hunt, “stabilize the fantasy, while releasing greater imaginative potential.”15 His discussion does not differentiate between maps of primary and secondary worlds; in fact, his focus is on primary-world maps, and he notes that the maps might be said to “symbolize the tension that exists for the writer between the real landscape and the fantasy which inhabits it.”16 That tension is important to Hunt’s readings of the fictionalized versions of the English landscape, and the map becomes, to him, a tool for tapping into “landscapes of profound national symbolism.”17 The Middle-earth map is thus discussed in terms of how the secondary world it describes can be matched with the English landscape. The problem is that Hunt glides between map and setting in his discussion, so while many of the landscapes described in The Lord of the Rings might fit Hunt’s vision of Englishness, the map of Middle-earth itself does not.

  Where Hunt focuses on maps in English—primarily low—fantasy, Myles Balfe looks at genre fantasy from an Orientalist perspective. He uses the map from Robert Jordan’s Wheel of Time series (1990–2013) to demonstrate how, rather than portraying a completely imaginary landscape, it “continues a Western historical convention of representing the ‘Orient’ and the ‘Orientals’ who exist there as both opposite and inferior to the West, and its Westland heroes.”18 Like Hunt, however, Balfe discusses both setting and its (re)presentation, somewhat undermining any cartographic point he tries to make, and he leaves maps out of his discussions of Feist’s Magician (1982) and the Dungeons & Dragons setting Al Qadim (1992).

  Pierre Jourde dedicates a chapter of his study of imaginary geographies to cartographic representations. After a brief discussion of how map relations can be read (using the allegorical “Carte de Tendre” from Madeleine de Scudéry’s Clélie [1654–60] and the map of Utopia from More’s work as examples), Jourde focuses on the maps from The Hobbit (1937) and The Lord of the Rings.19 He sees two basic divisions in Middle-earth’s geography. The first is that between east and west, roughly along the central mountain range. The western regions are, according to Jourde, the more civilized, with a great number of “microcosms” and innumerable rivers, a land open to the western sea. The regions to the east are more corrupted by the forces of evil, with vast, undefined areas, open to an unknown continent from which Sauron’s troops come.20 Jourde also sees a second division between northern and southern Middle-earth, observing how the norther
n communities are more “rudimentary” than their southern counterparts and comparing the elven realms of Mirkwood and Lothlórien, the human lands of Esgaroth, Rohan, and Gondor, and even Sauron’s two guises, as the “diffuse necromancer” of Dol Goldur and the “quasi-omniscient potentate” of Barad-Dur.21 Jourde’s map readings offer some valuable insights, although his search for patterns sometimes makes him ignore those map features that do not fit, such as the uncivilized interior of Eriador; his desire to support his argument also leads him to overstate some map features in his outlines.22

  The most extensive study to date of fantasy maps as cartographic objects is presented by Deirdre F. Baker. She carries out what she refers to as “a casual survey” based on a convenience sample of fantasy maps.23 Her findings confirm the similarities Jones satirizes in the Tough Guide. Regrettably, given that Baker’s stated purpose promises much more, her actual reading of the maps turns out to be rather shallow, and she forces the Middle-earth map from The Lord of the Rings into an allegory based on “what we know of Tolkien.”24 To suggest that the map illustrates the threat of Nazi Germany by virtue of its physical layout feels like a somewhat outdated interpretation of Tolkien. Also regrettable is that when Baker identifies the Earthsea map as intriguingly different from the other maps she has examined, she turns from the physical map to what she terms “metaphysical” maps. The unique vision of Le Guin’s map is coupled with a “mapping” (in the text of the novels) of Earthsea’s spiritual world, according to Baker, and she eventually suggests that “the sameness of geographical layout determines a sameness in simplistic moral or metaphysical vision.”25 Unconventional maps and originality in plot and metaphysics go together, she argues, yet while her discussions of a number of fantasy works are not without merit, they do not necessarily substantiate that conclusion.

  Ricardo Padrón investigates fantasy maps together with other types of maps of imaginary worlds, offering a wider consideration of cartographic objects that map fictional geographies. He discusses the functions of a wide array of maps, from Dante’s Hell to William Faulkner’s Yoknapatawpha County, even including examples from the visual arts, such as Adrian Leskiw’s road maps of imaginary places. Given such a comprehensive collection of examples, it is not surprising that Padrón includes Tolkien’s map of Middle-earth along with user-created maps of the online computer game World of Warcraft (2004–present) and maps of the land of fairy tales by Jaro Hess and Bernard Sleigh. As opposed to the maps of Utopia and Gulliver’s travel locations, these various fantasy maps all invite us to revel in imaginative travel.26 Padrón’s analysis, while on the whole interesting, is occasionally so brief as to suggest that he bases his discussion on a personal view of fantasy as escapist fiction, an impression made especially strong when he fails to support his arguments.27 His conclusion is that the maps he has investigated are not radically different from other maps as maps, and that they work because of their similarity with those other maps. It is the imaginary worlds of the maps that trigger our imagination, but that is something any map can do—if we let it.28

  Among the many recent online essays and blog posts that wax lyrical about fantasy and imaginary maps, I have found one example worth mentioning here. In his nicely argued and beautifully illustrated piece “Here Be Cartographers: Reading the Fantasy Map,”29 Nicholas Tam sketches out a theory of how to analyze fantasy maps. He proposes a number of angles from which to approach a map, based on ways in which the fantasy map can relate to the story and the fictive world. Tam’s discussion ranges from material conditions of mapmaking to worldviews encoded in maps, and his examples make clear why the various angles are worth considering in theoretical investigations of the genre’s numerous maps. This is a brief essay rather than a scholarly article, lacking theoretical depth, but it provides a useful starting point for anyone who wants to think critically about fantasy maps.

  Over the past four decades, many scholars have argued that fantasy maps deserve more critical attention, but what little scholarship has been published has either offered only a cursory exploration or too narrow a scope to provide any deeper insight into the subject. A greater understanding of the genre’s maps requires both a more comprehensive study of a large number of maps and more thorough examinations of particular maps. It is also important to bear in mind that Padrón’s point—that maps of imaginary worlds are similar to other maps—implies that fantasy maps can be analyzed in the same way as maps of our world. However, any textbook in cartography will quickly reveal a difference between the two types of maps that is significant enough to call into doubt whether fantasy maps are maps at all, a topic next up for consideration.

  WHAT IS A FANTASY MAP?

  A map is a symbolized representation of geographical reality, representing selected features or characteristics, resulting from the creative effort of its author’s execution of choices, and is designed for use when spatial relationships are of primary relevance.30

  If this is how a map is to be defined, the maplike illustrations found in a vast number of fantasy works present a problem. Although they undeniably “[result] from the creative effort of [their authors’] execution of choices,” an overwhelming majority of them are not representations of “geographical reality.” Their “features or characteristics” bear little or no relation to anything in the actual world. They are simply not maps, as they violate the deeply ingrained notion that a map must in some way represent the world of the cartographer. Even the most concise definition I have found, that of American cartographers Arthur H. Robinson and Barbara Bartz Petchenik, ultimately falls back on this notion. To them a “map is a graphic representation of the milieu,” wherein the word milieu “connotes one’s surroundings or environment in addition to its meaning of place.”31 Cartographically, a fantasy map seems to be a contradiction in terms.

  Actually, Robinson and Petchenik seem to have no problems with maps of imaginary places, as they include them among their examples.32 Historian Jeremy Black brings up the problem of mapping politics in maps of imaginary worlds, but he never questions their status as maps.33 In his influential book The Power of Maps, map scholar Denis Wood similarly acknowledges the existence of fictional and fantastic maps.34 In a later book, Wood discusses maps of imaginary places (mentioning, for instance, the maps of Middle-earth, Dungeons & Dragons, and the Marvel Universe) at some length, concluding that they illustrate how maps need not represent a part of the Earth’s surface.35 Consequently, fantasy maps are treated as maps here, with one important caveat. The difference between the map that graphically represents the milieu and a map of an imaginary place is one of priority: a map re-presents what is already there; a fictional map is often primary—to create the map means, largely, to create the world of the map. (This is the case even though maps that are made to fit an existing literary work are by no means uncommon. Padrón includes the many maps of Hell that are based on Dante’s Divina Commedia as examples of this phenomenon.36) Some points, then, on terminology before proceeding: First, the maps in the fantasy novels to be examined are not maps in the sense that they necessarily correspond to anything in the actual world. Drawing inspiration from Wood’s terms, I refer to fictional maps and fantasy maps, where the former category includes any map that does not represent the actual world and the latter is a map of a fantasy world, generally found in a fantasy novel (although the term would fit maps from fantasy role-playing games equally well). Maps of the actual world are consequently actual maps. Second, to avoid suggesting that fictional maps in any way correspond to a position in the actual world, I say that they portray rather than represent something.

  The status of the fictional map in relation to the text is in no way clear-cut, and various points of view yield different insights. In Paratexts: Thresholds of Interpretation, Gérard Genette uses the term paratext to refer to the various “verbal or other productions, such as an author’s name, a title, a preface, illustrations” that accompany a text.37 Whether they belong to the text or not, he explains, these produ
ctions surround and extend it. Genette mainly considers textual paratexts, but in his conclusion, he mentions some paratextual elements that he has not examined. Among these are “certain elements of the documentary paratext that are characteristic of didactic works” but that sometimes appear in works of fiction.38 Genette’s examples of such elements include fictional maps, for instance Faulkner’s map of Yoknapatawpha County and Umberto Eco’s plan of the abbey in The Name of the Rose (1980).

  It makes sense to regard a fantasy map as something that extends the fantasy text. The maps are generally not part of the narrative, in that they do not refer directly to any object in the text (with a few exceptions, such as Thror’s Map in The Hobbit, which is also parenthetically referred to by the narrator39). Instead, they and the text both refer to the fictional world or to a part of it—that is, to the story’s setting. Thus, they become, in Genette’s terminology, a threshold,40 a liminal space between the actual world of the reader and the fictional (generally secondary; see Table 2.2) world of the fantasy story. The maps blur the distinction between representation and imagination, suggesting that the places portrayed are in fact representations of existing places. This suggestion would explain why fictional maps are usually considered to be maps, even though they do not share the actual maps’ representing of the “milieu.”