Geography Reference
In-Depth Information
open a fantasy book and see a map filled with new places, it makes you want to go explore
them.”
On the flight home from visiting Brandon in Utah, I stare out the window at the
Columbia Basin passing slowly beneath me. As the Cascade foothills loom ahead, I see
huge trapezoidal holes in the greenery: what looks like virgin forest from the highway is,
from the sky, exposed as a patchwork of ugly clear-cuts. I think about what Brandon said
aboutfantasyreadersasexplorers.JonathanSwiftandThomasMoreincludedmapsintheir
books centuries ago, but fantastic maps didn't really catch on as fetish objects until Tolki-
en's time, less than a century ago, just as the time of global exploration was wrapping up.
TheNorthwestPassageandtheSouthPolehadfallenbythetime
The Hobbit
wasreleased,
and Hillary scaled Everest the same year Tolkien drew the maps for
The Fellowship of the
Ring
. There were, effectively, no blank spaces left on the map. Maps of the Arctic tundra
or Darkest Africa didn't cut it for young adventurers anymore; they had to look elsewhere
fornewblankspaces todreamabout.AndsotheyfoundMiddle-earth, Prydain,Cimmeria,
Earthsea, Shannara.
Ifnothingelse,talkingtomappersofimaginaryworldshastaughtmethatthere'sagreat-
er pleasure in maps than mere wayfinding. Austin Tappan Wright never needed to hike his
way across Islandia in real life, but that didn't stop him—or his readers—from developing
a fanatical devotion to maps of the place. If you never open a map until you're lost, you're
missing out on all the fun. As Robert Harbison once wrote, “
Nothing seems crasser
to a
lover of maps than being interested in them only when you travel, like saving poetry for
bus rides.”
Five or six hundred years ago, there
was
no clear distinction between fantasy maps and
“real” ones. As I learned at the antique map fair, medieval mappaemundi regularly depic-
ted fantastic places right alongside real ones: the land of Gog and Magog, from the Book
of Revelation, was over by the Caspian Sea somewhere, often surrounded by the wall that,
according to legend, Alexander the Great had built to imprison them. The Golden Fleece
was drawn near the Black Sea, Noah's ark was in Turkey, and Lot's wife was shown still
standingalongsidetheDeadSea(asapillarofsalt,ofcourse—you'dthinkshewouldhave
dissolved by now). Paradise was always off to the east somewhere, just over the horizon,
pressions of religious devotion, not navigational aids.
Havethingsreallychangedthatmuchtoday?WhenIbrowsethroughanatlas,I'mseeing
page after page of places that I've visited exactly as often as I've visited Middle-earth or
Narnia: never. Peru, Morocco, Tasmania. Even a road map of my hometown will show me
streets that I've never driven, parks I've never visited. I can imagine those places from the
map, but that's all it is: my imagination. All maps are fantasy maps, in a way.