Category: Maps and Literature

A Library of 17th-Century Map Elements, Useful for Fantasy and Game Maps

Published on by Jonathan Crowe

David Stark extracted elements from a 1688 map of part of Germany to create a library of tree, hill and town signs that he thought entirely appropriate for use as map assets for a role-playing game. I look at them and see fantasy map design elements. In 2019 I noted the similarities between 16th-century maps and modern fantasy map design. Also, digitally created fantasy maps often feature clone-stamped hill signs; you could do worse than clone-stamp these if you were whipping a fantasy map up. At least there’s more than one kind of hill sign to clone-stamp: there are, in fact, 159 hills and 26 mountains—more than 400 tiny images in all, and it’s interesting that David has separate categories for towns and cities, and for hills and mountains. [via]

The ‘River Sins’ of Fantasy Maps

Published on by Jonathan Crowe

Author K. M. Alexander has some thoughts about rivers on fantasy maps, and the mistakes authors make with rivers when drawing those maps.

When it comes to rivers, I’ve noticed that quite a few fantasy writers don’t understand the basics. While their intent is noble, I’ve seen plenty of examples of authors struggling with the underlying science of rivers and river systems. I sympathize. These are mistakes I have made myself. Early on, in one of my first projects, I made a mess with the waterways in my fantasy world. Mistakes like these—I like to jokingly call them “river sins”—might go unnoticed at first, but when they are noticed, they can draw a reader out of the story or setting. It wasn’t until I later learned more about the behavior of these ecosystems that I was able to hone in on my worldbuilding, and the end result was something much more interesting and complex. The cool got cooler.

Previously: ‘The Perplexing River Systems of Middle-earth’.

Middle-earth in Braille

Published on by Jonathan Crowe

A photograph of a braille/tactile map of Middle-earthAmong the tactile and braille maps sold by Adaptations, the store run by San Francisco-based LightHouse for the Blind and Visually Impaired, is this bundle of braille/tactile maps of Middle-earth. “The maps have raised lines, textures, and braille. There are 7 maps of Middle Earth, each focusing on different features (regions, settlements, mountains, forests, rivers and bodies of water). There are also two detailed maps: the Shire and Mordor.”

Limited Edition Earthsea Map Print Now Available

Published on by Jonathan Crowe

Original map of Earthsea by Ursula K. Le Guin
Ursula K. Le Guin

A limited edition print of Ursula K. Le Guin’s map of Earthsea has just been released. “Starting with a high resolution photographic image of Le Guin’s original, the team digitally cleaned or reinforced each line and letter, separating each color in the drawing as a layer, to make the maps as legible as the original and to avoid the artifacts of a typical CMYK process.” The cost is $150 for the black-and-white version and $300 for the colour version, with only 50 and 250 copies of each being printed, respectively. (I suspect you shouldn’t dither too long if you’re interested.) Proceeds go to the Pacific Northwest College of Art and the Freedom to Read Foundation. [Tor.com]

Middle-earth in 3D

Published on by Jonathan Crowe

Screenshot of Middle-earth 3D map showing an oblique view of Gondor and the Bay of Belfalas.
Screenshot

Micah Vander Lugt’s Esri-powered 3D map of Middle-earth is a departure from the usual fantasy-style map in that it uses an elevation layer. It’s a fascinating perspective, and lots of fun to play with. Though not without quibbles: for example, the labels and 3D rendering don’t always agree with each other, and I’m having a hard time imagining either Minas Tirith or Caras Galadhon as 25-30 km across. [Maps Mania]

‘Pseudo-Anachronistic’ Elements in Fantasy

Published on by Jonathan Crowe

This blog post from independent roleplaying games creator Periapt Games looks at the phenomenon of what’s called “pseudo-anachronistic elements” in fantasy fiction (and fantasy roleplaying games): technologies that have no business existing in the era being portrayed. Of course maps are mentioned, and at length—otherwise why would I mention it here? “Despite being ubiquitous in the modern day, reading a top-down map or even understanding what a map means is a learned skill, and not trivially so. Don’t expect pre-industrial people to be able to purchase a map, read one, or know what one is.” This is precisely what I was trying to say in my 2019 Tor.com article, “Fantasy Maps Don’t Belong in the Hands of Fantasy Characters”; it’s gratifying to see someone else making the same argument.

Previously: Fantasy Maps Don’t Belong in the Hands of Fantasy Characters.

Edney on Sleigh’s Anciente Mappe of Fairyland

Published on by Jonathan Crowe

Bernard Sleigh, An Anciente Mappe of Fairyland (1917)
Bernard Sleigh, “An anciente mappe of Fairyland: newly discovered and set forth,” ca. 1917. Map illustration, 147 × 39 cm. Norman B. Leventhal Map Center, Boston Public Library.

Matthew Edney has a post on Bernard Sleigh’s Anciente Mappe of Fairyland, about which we have seen much already; Edney’s look is deeper and more analytical. “Of special interest to me is how, despite his overtly anti-modernist subject matter and style, Sleigh nonetheless gave structure and system to his fictive panorama by giving it the trappings of normative maps and of realistic imagery more generally.”

Previously: An Anciente Mappe of Fairyland; North of Nowhere: The Osher’s Fantasy Map Exhibition.

From Academieland to Zelda: Fictional Map Exhibition at Harvard

Published on by Jonathan Crowe

From Academieland to Zelda: Mapping the Fictional and Imaginary, an exhibition of fictional maps at Harvard University’s Pusey Library, runs until 3 November 2023. The Harvard Gazette (the university’s official press outlet) has a writeup. “Calling the exhibition ‘kind of a mishmash,’ curator Bonnie Burns, head of geospatial resources at the Harvard Map Collection, said that ‘within the exhibit you have maps that are kind of theoretical, like nursery rhymes and Fairyland maps. And then there’s a big chunk of maps of literature—Middle Earth to Narnia.’” Many familiar maps, old and new, in this exhibition, at least for those of us who’ve been studying this field.

Poems on Maps

Published on by Jonathan Crowe

The Leventhal Map Center looks at poems on maps. Not about maps, on maps. “It just so happens that many of the maps in our collection have poems inscribed on them, in legends, around borders, and hidden away in overlooked corners. We find them primarily on pictorial maps, and the poems are mainly by men from the 20th century literary canon, but the maps they are on cover a wide geographic range.”

An SF/Fantasy Map Roundup

Published on by Jonathan Crowe

In December Tor.com revealed the map for Martha Wells’s upcoming fantasy novel, Witch King, which comes out in May. The post includes both Rhys Davies’s map and Wells’s initial sketch: compare and contrast. Amazon (Canada/UK) | Bookshop

How often do Star Trek tie-in novels come with maps? John Jackson Miller’s Strange New Worlds novel, The High Country, which comes out today, includes maps of the low-technology world on which it is set; in Miller’s Twitter thread last month, he wondered whether his book was the first, but it turns out that a 2000 Deep Space Nine novel also had maps. Amazon (Canada/UK) | Bookshop

In my article about maps in science fiction I made reference to the maps in Kim Stanley Robinson’s 1993-1996 Mars trilogy. Mastodon user 65dBnoise decided those maps were “very few” and “very coarse” (he’s not wrong1) and made some higher resolution maps based on USGS topographical maps of Mars.

New Fantasy Novel: The Map and the Territory

Published on by Jonathan Crowe

Book cover: The Map and the Territory by A. M. Tuomala I’m always interested in fantasy novels in which maps play a role beyond the endpapers—where maps or mapmakers are a key element of the story. So I’m noting for future reference The Map and the Territory by A. M. Tuomala (Candlemark and Gleam, Dec. 2022), which has a wizard and a cartographer as its protagonists. Nerds of a Feather has a review.

Amazon (Canada, UK) | Bookshop

A New Map for The Wheel of Time

Published on by Jonathan Crowe

Left: Thomas Canty’s map from The World of Robert Jordan’s Wheel of Time (1997); Right, Ellisa Mitchell’s map from Origins of the Wheel of Time (2022).

While researching his forthcoming book, Origins of the Wheel of Time (Tor, Nov 2022), Michael Livingston discovered that a map published in a 1997 guide to the Wheel of Time universe—which unlike the maps in the Robert Jordan novels showed the entire world—was, in the opinion of Jordan himself, wrong: according to notes Livingston discovered in the author’s archives, one continent was misnamed and another was too small (see above left). With the permission of the estate, Livingston worked with map artist Ellisa Mitchell—who drew the original map for The Eye of the World—to create a new map of the Wheel of Time world that reflected the author’s intent (see above right). Details, and closeup looks at the maps, at Livingston’s Tor.com article.

Mapping ‘The Spear Cuts Through Water’

Published on by Jonathan Crowe

Map from Simon Jimenez's The Spear Cuts Through Water
Chris Panatier

At Tor.com, Simon Jimenez talks about the map that accompanies his upcoming epic fantasy novel, The Spear Cuts Through Water. It’s not a map that follows the default fantasy map design by any stretch. He starts with the map, drawn by Chris Panatier.

There is no compass rose for orientation, no place names, no handy scale for distance ratios so that a reader might be able to tell how far one location is from another. There are barely even locations. Even the perspective is different—not a bird’s eye view, but something closer and more intimate, for a better view of the imagery that leans away from literalism and more towards the metaphorical, and the eerie.

Because of all of these choices, it is not a particularly useful map. One would be hard-pressed to use it as a reference tool as they journeyed with the characters through the book. This is by intention.

Jimenez explains how he grappled with the idea of mapping, and of fantasy mapping, when decided whether, and how, to include a map in his book. Very insightful and worth reading (and I’m not just saying that because he name-checks me at the end).

Another Onion Riff on Fantasy Novels and Maps

Published on by Jonathan Crowe

The Onion: Fantasy map of OhioThe Onion: Underwhelming Fantasy Novel Starts With Map Of Ohio. “Feeling let down to see a straightforward rendering of the Midwestern state, local reader Kyle Nuebart reported Friday that underwhelming fantasy novel Dayton Rising featured a map of Ohio in its opening pages.” I’m impressed that they went to the trouble of creating a fantasy map of Ohio to illustrate a one-joke article (admittedly, it’s a really good joke).

Previously: The Onion on Fantasy Maps.

Review: The Cartographers

Published on by Jonathan Crowe

Book cover: The CartographersI bet you’ve been wondering what I thought about Peng Shepherd’s novel The Cartographers (William Morrow/Orion, March 2022). After all, it’s a literary fantasy about maps: is it even possible for a book to be more relevant to my interests? Well, wonder no longer, because I’ve reviewed it for Strange Horizons.

This piece is a little bit different from the usual review, in that it examines The Cartographers in the context of mysteries and fantasy that deploy similar map tropes, as well as the idées fixes our culture has about maps. As I write in the review, there’s an awful lot for me to unpack:

I have been writing about maps for nearly two decades, and in that time I have encountered many works of fiction that incorporate maps and map tropes into their storytelling, whether as paratexts or as plot elements, and I have never encountered a story, at any length, as thoroughly encompassed by maps as The Cartographers. It’s not just that almost every character in the book works with maps in some fashion, whether as a cartographer, artist, librarian, map dealer, or technician. Nor are maps just a plot point—they are the point. The Cartographers is a Stations of the Map: its pilgrimage follows a path that touches on so many aspects of maps and mapmaking, from academic cartography to fire insurance maps. It spends time on the purpose and meaning of maps: it aspires to an almost Socratic dialogue. It deploys familiar fantasy genre tropes about maps. But it’s structured as a mystery novel, and opens with a murder.

Amazon (Canada, UK) | Apple Books (UK) | Bookshop