Here Be Dragons

by Stefan Ekman

  All the places that the roads lead to are meticulously named. Names of regions and administrative areas, of rivers and marshes, and in particular of villages of varying sizes are liberally sprinkled over the map. This is not a map of the unknown, it is very much the known, the labeled, the familiar. It is a landscape tamed, not only by the red roads but also by the black names of settlements and topographical features alike, and it is divided into areas even more conspicuously named in red. Through this abundance of names, of labels, the map subjugates the landscape, brings it under control. The names also give “repeated implicit assurances of the existence of the things they label,” Tom Shippey argues, assurances that strengthen our secondary belief in the fantasy world.100 As most of the Shire names are taken from Tolkien’s actual-world surroundings, they do not even sound exotic but seem familiar, believable.101

  The control of the landscape is particularly apparent in the division of the land into four administrative areas: the north, east, west, and south farthings. The farthing names, printed in large red letters, are made even more prominent by facing in different directions around the center of the map: when held with north at the top of the map, “North Farthing” is printed upside down, and “West Farthing” and “East Farthing” are turned ninety degrees clockwise and counterclockwise, respectively. The farthing borders (black, dashed-dotted lines) cross the land without appearing to follow or regard any natural borders, except in the southeast, where the border between the South and East Farthing may run along the river Shirebourn (though this is unclear). Straighter than any river or road, such borders appear on actual maps too. On maps of, for instance, Africa, Australia, or North America, straight administrative borders can be found, borders drawn with a ruler without regard for the landscape the map is meant to represent.102 The map, not the physical environment, becomes primary. Secondary-world maps are, as was pointed out earlier in this chapter, often primary to the landscape they portray; but the farthing borders also emphasize the priority of the fictional map over the fictional landscape. A colonization of the land is implied; like the many names, the borders present a landscape subordinated to hobbit culture.

  Not only space but time is encoded in the map.103 A map’s tense, according to Wood, is the direction in time in which it points: whether it refers to its own past, present, or future.104 The tense is relative to the map; a map from 1858 that refers to the world of 1858 uses the present tense. A map of tomorrow’s weather will remain in the future tense when we look at it a week from now. The Shire map, at a first glance, appears to refer neither to its past nor to its future—surely, it uses the present tense? There is nothing on the Shire map that suggests any temporal direction: the map features are the same at the beginning of the story and at its end. To the extent that the Middle-earth maps (and other fantasy maps) have a tense, it is fictional, based on the time when they were created and the direction in which they point in the fictional time line. The Shire map, unlike the western Middle-earth map read shortly, lacks any signs of future or past tense, so it must indicate its own present.

  Actually, to say that the map uses the present tense is not quite true, as we see when we also take into account the map’s duration, its “temporal thickness” or the time span it embraces: a few hours, a year, a century …105 The Shire map, by including elements that refer only to that which remains unchanged during the story, spans the time of the entire story. It can be used as the hobbits leave the Shire in the beginning as well as when they return to find Saruman’s destruction near the end. Anything transient enough to be changed by story events—for instance, the hobbits’ camps or the cut-down trees—has been left out. The time pointed to is thus as much now in the beginning as in the end—the map’s tense is not just the present, but a constant present. The time referred to is not a specific now but a now that runs all through the story. This constant present is, to some extent, similar to the present tense employed in discussing a text. The map, like the text, spans all the time in the story and refers to it all simultaneously.

  Despite the constant present, however, the map also offers a historical perspective.106 To have a forest called Old Forest, for instance, automatically suggests that there is history, that some things are old while others are new or young. From the map we can tell that apparently one forest is older than the other two: Bindbole Wood and Woody End may be forests, but they are not old enough to be old forests, let alone Old Forests. (The Old Forest and its connotations of age are discussed further in relation to the other Tolkien map.) From the text, we learn that the map contains other features that are part of the Shire’s history, in that they have not been there always. The prologue refers to some villages as “older,” implying that others are younger (FR, prologue, 6; further discussion on this topic follows)—these “older villages” are distinguished on the map by their uppercase script. We are also told that the hobbit area of Buckland—plainly marked as special on the map, something I will return to shortly—is a new addition to the Shire, its development being part of Shire history (FR, I, v, 96–107; vi, 108). Indeed, the very number of hobbit communities that dot the map, and the roads that connect them, carry an implication of the passage of time: the Shire was not built in a day but required time, history, to become that which is shown on this map.

  The Shire map does not obey the cartographic conventions of any actual historical period. Instead, through its mixing of conventions and signs from different times, it presents that same pseudomedieval aesthetic that was identified from the survey. Even though there is no compass rose or similar device, the location of the North Farthing shows that the map is clearly oriented with north at the top, and this is not the only map feature that tends to the modern rather than the medieval. As was discussed in connection with the hill signs of the survey, the oblique hills that are used in the Shire map date back to pre-Enlightenment times. They are reminiscent of the “gentle rolling downs” that Edward Lynam says were fashionable with some draftsmen of the late sixteenth century, although, intriguingly, the Shire hills (as well as the hills and mountains on the map of western Middle-earth) are shadowed on the west side rather than the conventional east.107 Having the farthing names facing different ways suggests, faintly, that this map did not originally belong in a book but was a loose sheet that could be turned in the hands of the user, a convention that Harvey points out among some loose maps of the fifteenth century.108 The pre-Enlightenment bird’s-eye view is not carried through in the hobbit settlements, however, which are represented as black, angular dots, shaped as if the buildings were seen from straight above. The only exception is the Hill, Bilbo’s and Frodo’s home, which is portrayed with a small, oblique hill sign. This mix of bird’s-eye and plan views is particularly noticeable in the case of Tuckborough, where the houses seem almost glued to the hillside. Many other elements, such as script, borders, and labels, similarly follow post-Renaissance conventions.

  Deciding what conventions to follow is only one of many choices that face a mapmaker, and the choices affect much more than the map’s aesthetic qualities. For a variety of reasons, an actual map does not—cannot—include everything; the work of the cartographer is a process of selection.109 The same is true for fictional maps. “It is the attempt to cut [the maps] down and omitting all their color (verbal and otherwise) to reduce them to black and white bareness, on a scale so small that hardly any names can appear, that has stumped me,” Tolkien complains in a letter to his publisher,110 and it is reasonable to suspect that only some elements of his fictional world were encoded in the map to begin with. The choices made mirror the map’s purpose: by including only those features that remain unchanged during the story, it is possible to make the map refer to a story-long now, as observed before. Choosing one hill sign above another means preferring a certain aesthetic over another; it also means alluding to one historical period rather than another. There are at least three selection processes at work in the construction of a fantasy map: an unconscious process that filte
rs out features that are not even considered for inclusion; a conscious selection of what features to include in the map and what to leave out; and a choice of how included features are to be presented. Interpreting a map involves examining the results of these processes: what are the effects of including some features (and excluding others)? Of portraying some elements like this and other elements like that? A number of features of the Shire map invite such attention, for instance: the central location of the Three Farthing Stone and the marginal location of a quarry; the distinct red script used for Buckland; the differences in upper-and lowercase in village names; and how different script is used for the three different forests. Such selections influence what information the map conveys about the secondary world.

  Arguably the most privileged location on a map is its center, the spot that, ceteris paribus, tends to be the first focus for the viewer’s attention.111 At the center of the Shire map, we find the Three Farthing Stone, the meeting point of the borders of the East, West, and South Farthings, which sits “as near the centre of the Shire as no matter” (RK, VI, ix, 1000). The map, in other words, makes quite clear what the text mentions almost a thousand pages later, near the very end of the story. At the map’s center are the geographical and administrative centers of the Shire, and it portrays not only “A Part of the Shire” but also the central part of the Shire—the central part of the world, at least as far as the mapmaker is concerned. At this point, it makes sense to distinguish between the implied cartographer and the fictional cartographer: the Shire map has the same implied cartographer as the map of western Middle-earth, but it also has a fictional cartographer. If the Shire map, like the text, is considered to be translated from the (fictional) Red Book of Westmarch (FR, prologue, 1), we can assume a mapmaker from the Shire, an assumption corroborated by the map’s center. This center is clearly the hobbit heartland: close by are found the villages of Tuckborough, By-water, and Hobbiton, the home of the Bagginses. It does not matter that Michel Delving off to the west is actually the “chief township”—we see from the map where the center is located, and the fact that one of the villages is called Hobbiton and that there is a separate mark for the Hill just to its north adds to this center’s importance. Any reader looking to find where the story begins will have little trouble in hitting the right spot, and what is left off the map is merely periphery.

  There is a periphery on the map as well, however: a fairly empty landscape with a number of roads leading off to the south and west (and a nameless village on the Michel Delving road), and an eastern fringe of countryside that is not even part of the Shire (although the map does not tell us that). Along the northern edge, there are a handful of communities, all with names that seem somewhat denigrating or belittling: Nobottle, Needlehole, Brockenborings, and Scary.112 Next to the last of these, we find a quarry, the inclusion of which is quite intriguing. This quarry is the only place of production of any kind on the map, even when fields and mills, coppices and breweries would seem to be more relevant to hobbit culture. Geographer J. B. Harley asserts that “maps—just as much as examples of literature or the spoken word—exert a social influence through their omissions as much as by the features they depict and emphasize,”113 and the presence of the quarry underscores the absence of the other places of production. Would it not make more sense to include mills, especially as the text presents mills as important means of production and the destruction (“modernization”) of them is described as villainy (RK, VI, viii, 990)? Quarries, on the other hand, have negative connotations: Gimli assures Legolas that the dwarves “would tend [the Caverns of Helm’s Deep], not quarry them” (TT, III, viii, 535); Saruman’s henchmen turn Bagshot Row into a “yawning sand and gravel quarry” (RK, VI, vii, 993); and the ruffians had hidden stolen goods and food in the “old quarries” at Scary (RK, VI, ix, 999). Even though the quarry is “old” (that is, disused), it is a blot on the Shire’s peaceful, bucolic nature, a warning on the map that not all is, was, or will be well. The negative connotations of the quarry are added to by its equivocal name. Scary may, as Tolkien points out in his commentary to translators, “contain E[nglish] dialectal scar ‘rocky cliff’”114 but more obviously, it means “fearsome.” Scary Quarry is clearly a place to be feared, and although it is located at the periphery, away from the road network and thus disconnected from the rest of the Shire, it prophesies the ruin of the hobbit idyll.

  The presence of the quarry and the absence of other places of production parallel a greater omission that is brought into focus by the inclusion of its (negative) opposite. As I mentioned before, the Shire map communicates control and safety; it is a map that demonstrates how wilderness has been tamed: only occasional pockets are left, surrounded by blank space. This is not the blank spaces of Conrad’s maps, the secretive, alluring unknown. It is the white areas of certainty, of that which is so obvious that it need not be included on the map. The few forests, marshes, and hills are exceptions, just like the quarry; the (positive) norm is left out because it is so obvious. Flat, cultivated land is left blank; it has nothing worth referring to, nothing to get excited about. In particular, nothing that is of any relevance to the story.

  Another presence that draws attention to itself as well as to the omissions that it signals is Buckland, or more precisely the red capitals used to mark it. No other “folklands” (for instance, Tookland, where nearly all the Tooks live [FR, prologue, 9]) are mentioned on the map, which indicates that Buckland has a distinct status, that its position is of special interest to the reader (and mapmaker). There are actually several grounds for this distinction. First, in the prologue, Buckland is mentioned as a later addition to Shire territory. It is not, in fact, a farthing, but one of the marches, so it constitutes a separate administrative entity, whereas Tookland is part of the West Farthing. Just as the farthing borders denote hobbit control of the landscape, so does Buckland. When this land was made a part of the Shire, the hobbits had to fight for it against the trees of the Old Forest in a battle against the landscape itself. Second, because it was added comparatively recently, Buckland is not fully regarded as a part of the Shire, and the hobbits who live there are considered “peculiar, half foreigners as it were” by the other hobbits (FR, I, v, 96). Finally, whereas Tookland is only mentioned briefly and “off-stage,” Buckland is the goal for the first leg of Frodo’s journey. Except for Bridgefields to the north and the Overbourn Marshes to the south, the areas written in red (Green-Hill Country, Woody End, The Marish, Buckland, and the Old Forest) chart the hobbits’ journey across the Shire. (The Farthings, although also in red script, are written so differently in size and orientation that they obviously indicate a different category.) Any reader who tracks the journey across the map will have little difficulty even if the actual trail has no marks of its own. Again, the story plays a large part in how the map is shaped, and thus how the world is interpreted. Red draws more attention and conveys greater prominence to elements, and it is made clear to the reader that Buckland is worth paying special attention to.

  Employing different types of script for different map elements (color, style, size, and so on) helps indicate various dissimilarities in the referents. On the Shire map, differences in case (using either uppercase only or lowercase with an uppercase initial) are used to signal a relevant difference, although the difference itself is not immediately clear. In terms of the watercourses, the larger ones (rivers) have names written in all capitals whereas the brooks’ names are written with only an initial capital. This suggests that the stylistic variations in the script are what Robinson and Petchenik term “mimetic” rather than “arbitrary”: in this case, a more prominent style corresponds to a more prominent (or larger) referent.115 If this correlation is true, uppercase-only villages should be more prominent than the rest. To some extent, the text supports this assumption. Of the five settlements that are all uppercase, three are mentioned in the prologue: the older villages Hobbiton and Tuckborough, and the Shire’s chief township, Michel Delving (FR,
prologue, 6). The text’s juxtaposition of the older villages and the chief township implies that these entities have similar social status, a social status reflected as well as reinforced by the uppercase script. Regarding the status of By-water and Stock, nothing is said; the former is close to Hobbiton and is often referred to in the story, and Stock is mentioned but never visited by Frodo’s company. Since social status rather than story relevance appears to be the guiding principle behind the stylistic variation here, it may be assumed that the two villages share the social status of the other three.

  The use of upper-and lowercase letters for names, hence, suggests that differences and similarities in script are “mimetically” assigned. A difference in script prominence reflects, in the case of watercourses, a difference in size; in the case of village names, a difference in social status. Consequently, the differences in style, size, and color used to write the forest names should also reflect some difference between the forests. The Old Forest and Woody End have names written in red uppercase but different sizes, with the names placed inside the forest, whereas Bindbole Wood to the north has its name set outside the forest and written in small, black script with uppercase only for the initials. From the map in general, we find that red script is used for areas and regions (the only exception being the Yale, which, on the map, could also refer to the black dot just beneath it116), so Woody End and Old Forest may be considered names for areas or regions rather than for the forests as such. Even so, the difference in script prominence suggests an inexplicable difference in prominence. As both the Old Forest and Bindbole Wood disappear off the map, it cannot be determined whether the question is one of size. Their relative script prominence, from smallest (Bindbole Wood: small, black, lowercase) to largest (Old Forest: large, red, uppercase), corresponds to their respective relevance to the story: Bindbole Wood, while appearing on the map, does not play any part; Woody End is the central setting of most of one chapter; and the Old Forest provides the first encounter with the world outside the Shire and the setting of an entire chapter (named after the forest).