LEGEND - Maphead - page 82

structed. He drew upon his day job as an Oxford philology professor to create entire lan-
guages for his imaginary races, borrowing some Finnish here, some Welsh there. He de-
signed their calendars and wrote their genealogies. And of course, he drew maps.
Many earlier authors had dabbled in fantastic events and settings, but Tolkien's books
were the ones that created a whole new “Fantasy” aisle in the bookstore, one lined with
those florid painted covers of dragons and wizards that make Yes album covers look taste-
ful and restrained by comparison. Why was he so influential? Tolkien's readers were less
captivated by his plotting or his characters (which were memorable but, as Tolkien freely
admitted, largely lifted from the Anglo-Saxon myths he soloved) than with the bold stroke
of his world building, the fait accompli of Middle-earth, already there, as if it had always
existed. Other books typically followed familiar characters from “the fields we know” into
fairylands, whether through a rabbit hole, a wardrobe, or a chalk sidewalk drawing, but,
says Brandon, “ Lord of the Rings did something very different. It said, 'No, we're not go-
ing to transition you into it. We're going to start you off in a completely new world where
nothing can be taken for granted.'”
Fantasy readers like that abrupt drop into the deep end and the learning curve it takes
to keep up. They're not hurrying through the topic the way you'd power through a thriller
from an airport bookstore. They're taking time to study the rules, to pore over the odd
names and arcane histories. Just like Benjamin Salman, they enjoy the sense of being au-
thorities in a whole new realm. “By the end of a big epic fantasy novel, you'll have to be-
come an expert in this world that doesn't exist,” says Brandon. “It's challenging.”
Forthisveryreason,fantasynovelsarethekindofreadingthatcomesclosesttotheway
we look at maps. Reading text is a purely linear process. Look: you are reading this sen-
tence. Now you are reading this one. The words from the line above are gone; you are only
here, and the words from the line below don't exist yet. But maps tell a different kind of
story. In maps, our eyes are free to wander, spatially, the way they do when we study new
surroundings in life. * We can sense whole swaths of geography at once, see relationships,
linger over interesting details. Fantasies are read a word at a time too, but less propulsively
than any other genre. The author is less interested in pulling you through to an ending than
in creating a texture, showing you around a new world.
As a kid, I considered C. S. Lewis's Narnia books † to be somehow lightweight, mere
fairy tales compared to Tolkien's books, and I realize now that maps were at least partly to
blame. Elaborate maps were always to be found in front of Tolkien's books, but my Narnia
paperbacks had no maps. Mr. Tumnus's forest in The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe
was just a bunch of trees, but Bilbo's forest was Mirkwood, between the mighty Anduin
River and the wastes of Rhovanion in the east. One forest was just in a story, but the other
was in a place . ‡