Here Be Dragons

by Stefan Ekman

  Alternatively, fantasy maps can be interpreted as docemes. A doceme is defined by documentation-studies scholar Niels Windfeld Lund as “any part of a document, anything that can be identified and isolated analytically as part of the documentation process or the resulting document.” Moreover, Lund explains that although, for instance, a photograph can be a document in itself, if it is part of a newspaper article, it (as well as the article text) is only a doceme—“[a] doceme can never be something in itself.”41

  Thinking of the fantasy map as a doceme puts a stronger emphasis on the relationship between narrative (text) and map. Rather than offering a threshold between fiction and reader, the map is part of the total fantasy document. Lund’s observation that the doceme is part of the documentation process or the resulting document is also highly relevant. The map is not only one of several parts of the finished document; it can, as in the case of Stevenson’s Treasure Island, be a central part of the creation process: according to Orson Scott Card, maps are basic to Card’s world creation and provide him with story ideas;42 Poul Anderson explains how, “[w]hen a story has an imaginary setting, I draw a map as part of the planning”;43 and in a letter, Tolkien relates how he “wisely started with a map, and made the story fit (generally with meticulous care for distances).”44 Three authors do not, of course, represent a genre, but they all point in the same direction, and Tolkien proceeds to explain why the map’s priority is important: “The other way about lands one in confusions and impossibilities, and in any case it is weary work to compose a map from a story.” In the same letter, he also apologizes for “the Geography” and acknowledges how difficult it must have been to read The Lord of the Rings proofs without maps. In other words, Tolkien felt the map doceme to be necessary both during the documentation process and when reading the resulting document.

  In the two discussions on maps that follow, we can see how fantasy maps can be fruitfully interpreted as both paratexts and docemes. The two perspectives are not mutually exclusive but relate the map differently to the text. Constituting thresholds between the actual and fictional worlds, they are also an essential part of the document that is the fantasy book.

  A SURVEY OF FANTASY MAPS

  To take a quantitative approach to the fantasy map, I carried out a survey of two hundred randomly selected fantasy works and looked at the maps I found in them. This section is devoted to a presentation of the survey results, examining the maps’ general features as well as the types of map elements found, and discussing what these findings can tell us about specific settings and the genre as a whole. The small number of works in the sample, and the low proportion of maps among those works, resulted in fairly large margins of error, but the results still indicate some interesting features of fantasy maps. (A more thorough presentation of the survey method and the assumptions on which it is based, along with the statistical method used for calculating margins of error, can be found in appendix A; a list of works in the sample can be found in appendix B.)

  The Prevalence of Maps

  Here is the most basic question: how common is it for fantasy novels to contain at least one map? Of the two hundred novels in the sample, sixty-seven (34 percent) contained one or more maps. In terms of the entire genre, this means that no more than 40 percent and possibly as few as 27 percent of all fantasy novels actually contain any maps. In other words, maps are not the compulsory ingredients they are widely held to be. The main explanation for this apparent lack of maps has to do with setting. The sampling frame (and thus the sample) comprises the entire genre, high fantasy as well as low, but maps are much more common in fantasy set in a secondary world. In the sample, of the sixty-seven novels that have maps, only six contain maps portraying the primary world (corresponding to 3 to 18 percent of all novels with maps), and these are all set in historic or prehistoric times. While there are low-fantasy works in contemporary settings that have maps, their numbers are small enough not to crop up in the sample (constituting fewer than 5 percent of all maps and less than 2 percent of the genre). Examples include Alan Garner’s The Weirdstone of Brisingamen (1960), with a map of the area around Macclesfield in Cheshire; Neil Gaiman’s Neverwhere (1996), with a map of the London Underground; and Charlie Fletcher’s Stoneheart (2006), with a map of central London.45 As I had no data on the general distribution of high fantasy to low in the sample, I was unable to pursue this matter further (see also appendix A).

  2.1. HOW MANY MAPS DO FANTASY NOVELS CONTAIN?

  N = 67

  Related to the question of how prevalent maps are in fantasy novels is the question of how many maps a fantasy novel contains. While three quarters of the novels with maps contained only a single map (roughly between 20 and 30 percent of the genre), slightly over one fifth had two maps, and novels with three, four, and six maps also appeared (see Table 2.1). In most cases (fourteen out of eighteen), the additional maps provided one or more large-scale views of one or more areas (in four cases, this included a city map). Of the remaining four cases, two had floor plans for buildings, one had maps of two different continents, and one mapped the area’s political and physical features on two separate maps. The main reason for including more than one map, in other words, seems to be to provide a general, small-scale map and a larger-scale map of an important setting: a country, province, or city, for instance. The maps in The Lord of the Rings provide an example of this tendency. A large-scale map of the Shire, a small-scale map of the entire western Middle-earth, and a medium-scale map of the area around Gondor and Mordor are included, illustrating how the story’s quest-narrative is built around long journeys across the world, but also requires detailed maps for locales where central events are set. (Tolkien’s large-and small-scale maps are discussed in detail later in this chapter.)

  When examining the features of the fantasy map, I use as my sample the ninety-two maps found in the survey. In five cases, the same map (or similar versions of the same map, when, for instance, different artists have drawn maps for books with the same setting) appears in two or more books. Such maps have been counted as separate instances, however, partly because the efforts of different mapmakers may result in very different renditions of the same location (as can be observed from the maps in the Conan books in the sample46), but mainly because they constitute docemes in different documents.

  General Map Features:

  Subject, Orientation, Surround Elements

  Only six of the novels with maps portray a primary-world setting. These six novels contain thirteen of the ninety-two maps, and even though there are fantasy books that have maps of primary-world cities, no such maps can be found in the sample, confirming how rare such maps are (corresponding to less than 4 percent of all fantasy maps). The vast majority of maps portray a secondary world or an area in a secondary world (almost four fifths of the sample, or between 68 and 86 percent of all fantasy maps). Of the remaining maps, about 5 percent (2 to 12 percent) portray an imaginary city, either in a secondary world or set in the primary world (an example of the latter is the city of Ys, a map of which appears in Poul and Karen Anderson’s Dahut [1988]), and 2 percent (0.3 to 8 percent) are plans of buildings or building complexes.

  The portrayal by at least two thirds of all fantasy maps of secondary worlds suggests a need in fantasy novels to provide a visual image of the imaginary setting, but also to provide the setting with some sort of structure. The map can help the reader understand complex spatial relationships that the text alone may fail to convey. Conversely, the absence of a map in a fantasy novel in which movements, positions, and spatial relationships in the imaginary world are central to the story may prove bewildering to the reader.47

  With maps of secondary worlds clearly dominating, the question arises to what extent these maps of alien worlds also reflect alien forms of mapmaking. In The Hobbit, Tolkien includes two maps, one of which has THROR’S MAP written in the lower left corner and includes some text in dwarvish runes. It is obviously meant to refer to a map in the story, and the bri
ef preface points out that the map has “East at the top, as usual in dwarf-maps.”48 The other Hobbit map, that of the Wilderlands, follows the convention of having north at the top. This convention is comparatively modern, however. According to historian P. D. A. Harvey, almost all world maps before the fifteenth century were either zonal (or climatic) maps or T-O (orbis terrarium) maps, circular maps with east at the top where the world is divided into three continents (Asia, Europe, Africa) by a T-shape.49 In fact, of the extant medieval maps from the eighth through the fifteenth centuries, a clear majority are basic T-O maps.50

  2.2. MAIN SUBJECT OF MAPS

  % of Maps in Sample (n) % of All Fantasy Maps

  Primary World 14.1 (13) 7.7–23.0

  Secondary World 78.3 (72) 68.4–86.2

  Imaginary City 5.4 (5) 1.8–12.2

  Building/s 2.2 (2) 0.3–7.6

  N = 92

  Despite the dominance of secondary worlds or historical settings in the sample, the maps largely follow the modern convention of placing north at the top. Ann Swinfen remarks on how (northern-hemisphere) fantasy writers maintain primary-world compass directions in their worlds.51 A majority of all fantasy maps—at least 58 percent—come with a compass rose or similar design indicating which way north is. Other maps signal their orientation in other ways; for example, Southern Ithania is located below Northern Ithania in Trudy Canavan’s Last of the Wilds (2005). For only nine maps in the sample can orientation not be determined from the map alone. Of the eighty-three maps for which orientation can be determined from the map, nine are not oriented with north at the top, but all are oriented so as to have a direction somewhere between northeast and northwest at the top. In the nine cases for which information about orientation is completely absent from the map, re-lated maps or the texts in question have been used to work out how they are facing. North is at the top of all these maps except for one, which has north-northeast at the top.

  2.3. MAP ORIENTATION

  % of Maps in Sample (n) % of All Fantasy Maps

  N 80.4(74) 70.9–88.0

  NE to NW 9.8(9) 4.6–17.8

  No Orientation Given 9.8(9) 4.6–17.8

  Compass Rose 68.5(63) 58.0–77.8

  N = 92

  So although Thror’s Map demonstrates the existence of fantasy maps that are oriented differently, such maps constitute less than 4 percent of all maps. Only very few fantasy writers or mapmakers avail themselves of the freedom to turn the map whichever way according to the conventions of imaginary societies in secondary worlds, or to create completely new directions. Instead, just as Swinfen suggests, the actual-world convention of orienting the map with north at the top dominates almost completely.

  A typical feature of the T-O maps, a feature that, according to John Noble Wilford, goes back to the earliest extant world map (a Babylonian map from the sixth century B.C.),52 is that the “whole [world] is surrounded by a circumfluent ocean.”53 The surrounding water is where the world ends, where even the possibility of knowledge ends. It frames the known world, establishing that what is on the map is all there is. Similar circumfluent oceans can be found on fantasy maps, providing the worlds with what John Clute, in The Encyclopedia of Fantasy, calls water margins. According to Clute, these margins surround the central land or reality and fade away beyond the edges of any map. He adds that secondary worlds often have maps whose edges are water margins.54

  Such “ultimately unmappable regions”55 that completely enclose the known world of a fantasy map within regions of the unknown are not, in fact, particularly common; only a small proportion of the fantasy maps are completely surrounded by water margins (9 to 24 percent; see Table 2.4). On at least three maps out of four, land stretches to the edge of the map, suggesting that the world not only continues but is accessible. The term water margin is also slightly misleading; a water margin need not consist of water, but can be a region of any “endless” or “impassable” terrain type. Of the fourteen cases in the sample, two maps have water margins that are not water. In Terry Brooks’s The Tangle Box (1994), the land of Landover is surrounded by a mountain range beyond which are “Mists and the Fairy World.” Brooks’s fairy world, it is explained in the first Landover novel, Magic Kingdom for Sale/Sold! (1986), is a numinous place that borders on all worlds. It can be traversed but only with the help of magic; it cannot be mapped, it is unknowable.56 In Martin Gardner’s Visitors from Oz (1998), one of many late additions to L. Frank Baum’s classic Oz books, the land of Oz is surrounded by an “impassable desert” (also described as “shifting sands,” “great sandy waste,” and “deadly desert”).57 While obviously meant to emphasize the futility of any attempt to leave Oz by nonmagical means, other Oz books (for instance, the third book in the sequence, Ozma of Oz [1907]) allow for such journeys and open up a world beyond the land of Oz, which illustrates how water margins can be breached, the unknowable made knowable—and known.

  The notion that a water margin must enclose the world completely is not unproblematic. On many maps from the sample, there is some land at the edge of the map, providing the possibility of larger landmasses unaccounted for by the mapped area. An example from the sample is Michelle M. Welch’s Chasing Fire (2005), where a continent surrounded by water takes up most of the map but where a small part of another landmass (Ikinda) can be found along a section of its southern edge. It is obviously the continent that is the map’s focus: it features mountains, rivers, and a lake, as well as political borders and various locations (mostly towns, presumably, but names such as Mt. Alaz, Seven Oaks, and Naniantemple suggest that other types of places may also be included). What can be seen of Ikinda, on the other hand, is completely empty. This might mean that it is featureless, unexplored, or simply irrelevant to the story. On the map, Ikinda is portrayed as unknown but knowable, not quite part of the water margin but almost. Welch’s Ikinda is hence truly marginalized—not only pushed to (and beyond) the edge of the map but also empty—whereas the map’s central continent has a variety of features. Yet setting out to explore the parts of Ikinda that lie beyond the map edges is certainly possible, and such exploration might reveal a small island or a vast continent. We cannot tell which from the map, yet we know that there is something there.

  Even when there is a circumfluent ocean, however, the world can be opened up. Expeditions into the water margin have been undertaken in numerous fantasy works. In, for instance, Stephen R. Donaldson’s Second Chronicle of Thomas Covenant series (1980–83), the Mallorean series (1987–91) by David and Leigh Eddings, and Raymond E. Feist’s The King’s Buccaneer (1992), sea voyages off the map turn up new continents. On the other hand, as the Landover and Oz maps have already demonstrated, terrains other than water can create an unmappable, unknowable region at a map’s edge. The map in Gail Dayton’s The Barbed Rose (2006) places the central land of Adara between sea to the east and west, whereas to the north and south there are mountains that give the impression of being impassable. The mountainous northern isthmus is called “The Devil’s Neck,” a name that emphasizes just how impassable it really is. While this is not a complete margin in a strict sense, the map still makes clear that Adara is where the story takes place, and the reader who ponders what can be found beyond the mountains is left with a vague suspicion that there will only be more mountains. (Mountains as map elements will be discussed further in the text that follows.)

  Even if the landmass on the map is fully surrounded by water, this does not necessarily constitute a water margin in Clute’s sense. The map of the Isles of Glory (map 2.1) in Glenda Larke’s Gilfeather (2004) may set its islands in a surrounding ocean, but comments on the map make plain that in the diegesis, there is no unknown world to discover beyond the edges of the map. Instead, the islands themselves have been discovered—and, it is implied, fairly recently at that. Not only does the map tell us that the isles were “[s]urveyed by the 2nd Explor. / Ex. Kells 1782–1784,” but it also notes by whom and when the various parts of the archipelago were discovered. Known and unknown
are turned around here, the well-known residing off the map. Wherever the political, financial, and cultural centers are to be found in this secondary world, they belong in the regions beyond the map’s margin—the Isles of Glory, in the middle of the map, are part of the world’s periphery.

  The absence of complete water margins, with at least some land reaching all the way to the map’s edge, indicates that a map does not portray an entire world. Even when the map gives the impression of portraying the whole world, such as the map of Earthsea in Le Guin’s A Wizard of Earthsea, an extremely short land border still suggests that there is more to the world than this. It also implies that the region on the map is located somewhere in the larger world.

  MAP 2.1. The Isles of Glory from Glenda Larke’s Gilfeather (2004).

  Copyright Perdita Phillips, www.perditaphillips.com.

  Of the ninety-two maps in the sample, only one third are clearly set in the northern or southern hemisphere; for the rest, this distinction could not be determined from the maps. Obviously, a secondary world does not have to be set in a hemisphere; Terry Pratchett has demonstrated with his Discworld novels that a world shaped like a disc works as a setting. The change in shape also led to his abandoning the traditional compass points. Instead, the Disc has the main directions “hubward” and “rimward,” and the lesser directions “turnwise” and “widdershins.”58 Of the thirty-one maps for which the hemisphere can be determined, twenty-five are set in the northern hemisphere, five in the southern, and one included both hemispheres.