Here Be Dragons

by Stefan Ekman

  The wide variety of signs used for mountains and hills—hill signs—in the sample appears confusing at first. Simple, gray triangles or jagged profiles, pyramids with shadows, even contours and shaded relief can be found. The most common type of hill sign in the sample, appearing on two fifths of the maps (between one third and one half of all fantasy maps), is an oblique (or bird’s-eye view) picture of a mountain, shaded to give it an appearance of volume.70 This kind of hill sign came into use on nonfictional maps during the Renaissance, as copper-engraved, printed maps came to displace hand-painted maps.71 At the 95 percent confidence level, however, the oblique hill sign is not significantly more common than the sign type it succeeded, the profile view of a mountain, sometimes with hints of shade, a type that can be found on at least 17 percent, and on as many as 36 percent, of all fantasy maps. On medieval maps, the profile view looked “rather like cock’s combs” or “serrated bands”72 or had, at best, basic shading on the sides.73 The fantasy map equivalents, with or without shading, tend to be simple upside-down V-shapes with no significant difference in prevalence between profiles with and without shading (although the latter is twice as common in the sample).

  Around 1680, vertical shading came to be used, an advance that “enabled the cartographers to show […] the length and breadth of a mountain and also to give some approximate idea of the gradients of its slopes.”74 During the eighteenth century, the hatches of the vertical shading sometimes resulted in mountains that looked like “hairy caterpillars”75 but also led to the development of hachures, “short lines whose thickness indicates steepness of the slope.”76 This type of hill sign is fairly rare on fantasy maps, found in only five instances (or just over 5 percent) in the sample. Given the margin of error, we can expect to find this sign on less than 12 percent of all fantasy maps, possibly on as little as 2 percent. That makes the sign at least 30 percent less common than the profile view and 60 percent less common than the oblique hill signs.

  Even less common in the sample, although not significantly so in the fantasy-map population, are the two types of hill signs that are typically used on general survey maps in the actual world today. Contours, which derive from earlier charts of isobaths (lines of equal water depth), appeared on maps as early as 1737 but did not supplant hachures until the second half of the nineteenth century.77 Expression of landform through shaded relief is related to hachuring and was developed in the 1860s.78 Only two instances each of these hill signs can be found in the sample, and one book (Kirkpatrick’s The Right Hand of God) contains one map with shaded relief and one with contours.

  Medieval and Renaissance (pre-Enlightenment) hill signs clearly dominate on the maps, however, constituting at least four fifths of all fantasy hill signs. The reason for this is not only that these signs are iconic and self-explanatory but also that they remain highly conventional, part of a cartographic language we acquire along with other cultural knowledge as we grow up.79 Wood persuasively argues that individuals learn the various types of hill signs in the same sequence that these signs developed historically;80 the earlier types of hill signs, therefore, appear obvious, self-explanatory. But the relative absence of post-Renaissance hill signs, as well as the general tendencies found in this survey, also agrees with (high) fantasy’s general proclivity for pseudomedieval settings.

  In “‘Fantastic Neomedievalism’: The Image of the Middle Ages in Popular Fantasy,” Kim Selling discusses why a “significant number of fantasy authors persistently locate their stories in environments where the characters wear medieval dress, fight with swords, and live in hierarchical, vaguely feudal, semi-pastoral societies with low levels of technology.”81 Although Selling uses Umberto Eco’s term “fantastic neomedievalism,”82 Eco as well as Kenneth J. Zahorski and Robert H. Boyer also refer to the “pseudomedieval.”83 Indeed, pseudo-rather than neo-is the more suitable prefix, as the Middle Ages are evoked rather than recreated. The “vaguely feudal” setting is, in Brian Attebery’s words, “essentially a simplified version of the Middle Ages”84—simplified in that enough contemporary ideas and sentiments replace their historical counterparts to make the story palatable and comprehensible to a reader of today. The survey indicates that the same goes for the maps.

  As the choice of hill signs suggests, the maps pursue a pre-Enlightenment aesthetic. What we generally perceive as late developments, such as map projections and legends,85 are uncommon. On the other hand, truly medieval conventions are rare. No maps in the sample use the hill signs that were prevalent on actual medieval maps: the serrated bands and cockscombs that represented mountains on many pre-Renaissance maps cannot be deciphered by today’s readers. Furthermore, the maps are oriented with north at the top unlike the actual medieval T-O maps, which had east at the top. Rather than appearing medieval, the maps only vaguely suggest the Middle Ages by mixing simplified medieval features with modern conventions.

  These modern map conventions are, in fact, only a part of a much larger cluster of social conventions that can be found in fantasy settings, something indicated by the dominance of northern-hemisphere settings. On the whole, the maps indicate a genre-wide conventionality, although some maps, such as the cartographically advanced maps of Kirkpatrick or the landscape-drawing-as-map of Larry and Robert Elmore (as close as any map in the sample gets to what Ptolemy calls chōrographica, a more artistic representation of a small region86), try to escape the pattern. Fantasy, especially high fantasy, offers a chance to break with the conventions of the actual world and invent new rules for mapmaking (or return to previous ones), but such inventiveness is actually very rare. Thror’s Map in The Hobbit, more than any map in the sample, takes advantage of the genre’s cartographic possibilities, with its alternative (medieval) orientation and use of an alien alphabet. The vast majority of the maps follow a basic mold established by the two maps in the first edition of The Fellowship of the Ring. In the close reading that follows, these two maps are examined to demonstrate what we can learn about a fantasy work and the world it creates by paying attention to its maps.

  N = 92

  a Adds up to more than 100 percent, as some maps use more than one type of hill sign.

  b One map uses white shading to represent mountains; another is a perspectival drawing of the landscape.

  READING FANTASY MAPS

  In Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, Marlow reflects on the attraction of maps:

  Now when I was a little chap I had a passion for maps. I would look for hours at South America, or Africa, or Australia, and lose myself in all the glories of exploration. At that time there were many blank spaces on the earth, and when I saw one that looked particularly inviting on a map (but they all look that) I would put my finger on it and say, When I grow up I will go there.87

  The attraction of Marlow’s map apparently lies in its blank spaces, in all the areas left to explore. It is tempting to assume that a fantasy map holds the same attraction—that it opens up an unknown world to explore. Yet, as the ensuing readings of the two Tolkien maps demonstrate, blank spaces on fantasy maps do not necessarily refer to something unknown. On the whole, the fantasy map appears to have a totally opposite function from Marlow’s blank spaces. “[T]he very presence of maps at the front of many fantasies implies,” according to Farah Mendlesohn, “that the destination and its meaning are known.”88 In other words, the map reflects an effort to make known, not to invitingly offer the unknown. The unknown is largely kept outside the map or along its edges. As was pointed out earlier, at least three quarters of all fantasy maps have land borders beyond which the unknown lurks—or entices. For the greater portion of the mapped fantasy genre, only part of the world is a stage, illuminated and clearly visible.

  A “close reading” of a fantasy map means an investigation of what the map makes known and how it makes it known. In such a reading, it must be recalled that although the map is a conspicuous part of how the fictional world is understood, it is never a stand-alone portrayal of that world. Nor should the fan
tasy map’s customary position at the front of the book be taken to mean that the map is to be read without reference to the text. Text and map go together. The map is presumably meant to be consulted during the reading of the text, and it therefore makes sense to read the map in the context of the entire text.

  In the reading of the first Fellowship map, “A Part of the Shire,” the main theoretical underpinnings of literary map readings are presented. The larger, more complex map of the western part of Middle-earth is read according to the same basic theoretical ideas. Some theoretical additions are made when warranted by differences between the two maps. The maps used for the readings come from the Houghton Mifflin Fiftieth Anniversary edition,89 where they are printed in red and black ink (like the maps in the first edition of The Lord of the Rings). In the first (and many a subsequent) hardback edition, volume one, The Fellowship of the Ring, contains two maps: the Shire map, a one-page map set just before chapter one in book I; and the general map of western Middle-earth, a foldout map pasted in at the end of the book. The one-volume Fiftieth Anniversary edition has the general map pasted in at the beginning and the larger-scale map of Gondor and Mordor pasted in at the end. For paperback editions, the foldout maps are cut up and printed in black ink only on several pages.90 Although the readings are based on the maps with black and red print, descriptions are added to make the discussion possible to follow on a map with black print only.

  Reading “A Part of the Shire”

  Every map, Wood informs his readers, has an author, a subject, and a theme;91 and while these three characteristics may seem straightforward, they are not as easily identified as one might at first believe. Although a fantasy map does not point to a location in the actual world, it has a subject, a fictional place to which it refers. The map that comes between the prologue and the first chapter in The Fellowship of the Ring appears to state its subject clearly: a label in the top right corner announces that it is a map of “A Part of the Shire.” Some knowledge of the Shire (gained, for instance, from the preceding prologue) and only the most cursory of glances suggests that this is not completely true, and that “A part of the Shire and some of the land on its eastern border” would be more accurate. Except for the small region of Buckland, carved out between the river and the Old Forest, the land to the east of the Brandywine River is, in fact, not part of the Shire (FR, prologue, 5).92 This small discrepancy might seem irrelevant, but actually emphasizes the insular mentality of the Shire hobbits. Like them, the map does not admit to the presence of anything outside; the Shire is all there is—at least all there is worth mentioning. Any outside world is ignored (this is also the case with the arrows at the map’s edges; no mention is made of whether a destination is in or outside the Shire), and everything that appears on the map is subsumed as “A Part of the Shire.” Outside or inside is all presented within what further examination will prove to be a discourse of safety and control—regardless of whether it is Woody End, Bindbole Wood,93 or the Old Forest. By restricting the map’s explicit subject, the secondary world is divided into the known, on the map, and the unknown, off it. The label makes the map reassuring, as it implies that everything on the map is described in the prologue and therefore known and safe.

  Just like the map’s subject, its author appears to be obvious. At closer scrutiny, however, the author’s actual identity becomes uncertain, and the reader begins to wonder whether it is part of the fiction or not. These two aspects tie into each other. The Shire map is located between two sections of text (the prologue and the rest of the book), sandwiched, as it were, between two parts of the narrative. Rather than providing a paratextual threshold, it is evidently part of the narrative document. It portrays an area of the world that has already been verbally described in the prologue. There is thus a suggestion that the map is itself part of the fiction or, rather, that the map doceme refers to a fictional Shire map. The author of this fictional map is equally fictional, a cartographer in the secondary world, not an artist in the actual world, even though the prologue casts some doubt over this fictional status by claiming that an extant copy of the Red Book of Westmarch can, in fact, be found in the primary world.

  The Shire map is, in other words, not one map but two: a fictional map from the fictional Red Book, designed by a fictional cartographer; and an actual doceme in the actual The Lord of the Rings, which refers to the fictional map. This map doceme can be taken to have at least two different authors. The obvious author would be J. R. R. Tolkien, the author of the book as a whole. The map is signed with the initials “C.T.,” however, which suggests that someone else has been involved in making the map, if not in creating the secondary world. In a letter, Tolkien relates how he “had to call in the help of my son—the C.T. or C.J.R.T. of the modest initials on the maps”—to help with the maps,94 and Christopher Tolkien recalls that he is “virtually certain that my father allowed me some latitude of invention in that region of the Shire.”95 Thus, searching for a historical author complicates rather than clarifies matters, as at least two people (to father and son Tolkien could arguably be added, for instance, the editor and the engraver) have contributed to the map’s form. Using the concept of an “implied author,” an author encoded in the text, simplifies the discussion somewhat96 and would, for a map, correspond to an “implied cartographer.” Along the same lines, the text’s narrator would parallel the map’s “fictional cartographer.” The Shire map still oscillates between fictional and nonfictional authors, however, and since these two authors are difficult—often impossible—to tell apart, I have made no attempt to distinguish between them in the discussion that follows, unless such distinction is relevant to the interpretation of the map.

  What we have is thus a map that slips between authors and fudges its subject. At a first glance, the map does not have a particular theme, either. According to Wood, a map’s theme is its “focus of attention.”97 No such focus presents itself. In fact, the Shire map is more like a general reference map in that it presents numerous themes that, together, establish the map’s general argument.98 The most prominent (but not the only) themes of the Shire map are topography (including vegetation and water courses), the road system, population centers, and administrative regions. These themes, along with the multitude of names found on the map, are part of an overarching discourse of defining, situating, and familiarizing the Shire—indeed, of instilling secondary belief in the country. Through its themes, the Shire map creates the “small, safe, and understood world” that a portal–quest fantasy such as The Lord of the Rings requires for its starting point.99

  The topography of the Shire, as portrayed in the Shire map, is quite ordinary, perfectly safe, and totally understandable. Actually, topography is less important to the map than might be supposed, which is evident from the time and effort it takes to work out the terrain from what appears to be a topographical map. The landscape is one of hill country and river valleys. The west-to-east-running valleys of the Water and the Shirebourn rivers meet the north-to-south-running river Brandywine. That the land at the northeastern part of the map is higher is evident from the hills at Brockenborings and Scary, but also from how the Water tributary runs south. The Water and Brandywine valleys are both fairly densely populated, which suggests arable land (a suggestion that is also confirmed by the text). In the southern valley, separated from the valley of the Water by the Green-Hill Country and the forest at Woody End, the Shirebourn and its tributary (the Thistle Brook) have a similar, but shorter, south-then-east course to the Water. This valley is apparently less farmed, with Willowbottom south of Woody End as the only population center.

  It is not this rolling landscape that is most striking, though, especially not on the maps printed in black and red. What stands out most is actually the network of roads (although their impact is somewhat reduced in the black-print-only editions). These roads dominate the map, running over most of it and illustrating how easy it is to travel in the Shire. Every place is accessible by a bright-red road: it is a
country with infrastructure. It does not matter where you are on the map, there is always a road you can follow to any other place. To further establish the importance of the road system, more than half of the roads leave the map with a fletched arrow informing the reader that the road leads to other, named and thus known, places rather than into the unknown. Off to Bree to the east and Michel Delving in the west, north to Oatbarton and south to Longbottom—the land on the map exists somewhere, anchored by locations outside it. This display of certainty about what exists off the map makes its edges the very opposite to water margins. This land is not afloat in an uncharted sea but instead is clearly a part of something, a message emphasized by the map label: “A Part of the Shire.” It is also a place where you travel, and not necessarily to places on the map. The arrows that anchor this part of the land to the world outside also point out directions of travel. In a story that comes with a map that includes so many roads and so many places to travel off the map, journeys are inevitable. In its way, this map is as clear about what will happen in the book as is the title of The Hobbit, or, There and Back Again. (And the map’s message that the world is mappable and knowable sets readers up for a surprise once the journey takes them outside the Shire.)