Here Be Dragons (8 page)

2.6. TYPES OF MAPS ELEMENTS

N = 92

^a
Adds up to more than 100 percent, as each map may contain several types of elements

^b
Cities, towns, villages

^c
Roads, buildings, bridges, and other artificial constructions

^d
Political borders, seats of government, historical sites

^e
Peoples or creatures inhabiting certain areas

^f
Includes a wide range of elements, generally peculiar to particular works

2.7. THE FIVE MOST COMMON TOPOGRAPHICAL ELEMENTS
^a

N = 92

^a
The number of occurrences of an element on each map is not taken into consideration.

The group Other Constructions in
Table 2.6
(found on two thirds of the maps) is dominated by roads, with only occasional buildings appearing (other than population centers: towers, fortresses, houses). There are rather fewer Ruins, Towers of Sorcery (or other centers of magic), and Dark Citadels (or other edifices of evil) than is implied by the
Tough Guide
(on eleven maps in the sample—somewhere between 6 and 20 percent of all fantasy maps), but Jones is right in pointing to the almost total absence of inns and rest stops. Not even when “camps” are included would this category be found on more than one fantasy map in seven (six maps in the sample).
⁶⁷
The roads that crawl all over the maps have two main functions. First, as possible travel routes, they tie together the distant points of the map, telling the reader that journeying through this fictional world is possible, even mandatory—the map is a traveling aid,
a tool for exploration. This function is particularly prominent in, for instance, Baum's
The Wonderful Wizard of Oz
(1900), in which the yellow brick road is Dorothy's safe way to navigate the fantasy world; and, differently, in D. M. Cornish's Monster-Blood Tattoo/The Foundling's Tale series (2006–2010), in which the protagonist is trained to become a lamplighter, one who lights the lamps along the highways of a dark, monster-infested continent. In both cases, the road is meant to offer safe conduct through a dangerous, fantastic landscape. Second, though, not all fantasy journeys follow the roads; staying away from the road is often more important. The road itself can become a dangerous, unprotected place, open and unsafe. The focus shifts to the wild landscape around the road. The dangers of the road are particularly vivid in
The Lord of the Rings
; it turns into the realm of the enemy, and capture threatens whenever Frodo sets foot on a road. On some maps, the absence or scarcity of roads implies that the world is wild and uncivilized: the few roads that exist are not enough to tame the world, to tie its places together; instead, the world's inhabitants are left exposed and vulnerable to the trackless wilderness.

The political elements mainly consist of political borders between countries or smaller administrative units (for instance, counties), and they are rather uncommon. At most, they appear on two thirds as many maps as do topographical element types. Still, they can be expected to occur on at least somewhat over a third of all fantasy maps. So, while the importance of political units to the fantasy world should not be discounted, it is clear that fantasy maps are more topographical than political.

To fantasy cartographers, it is apparently not particularly important to provide information about what people or creatures live where. In the sample, only 11 percent of the maps contained such information, meaning that as few as one in twenty and as many as one in five of all fantasy maps contain such information in some way. This is a significantly smaller proportion than any of the other map elements, apart from the miscellaneous element types in the Other category. Some of this information might actually be found in the Political category—a certain country could be inhabited by a certain people or type of creature, such as the hobbits in the Shire, or the frequent elven realms, such as Tolkien's Lothlórien and Feist's Elvandar (in
Magician
and other books set in Midkemia). Except for maps in tie-in novels to role-playing game settings (where there are races aplenty, spread over the maps), it is rare to find
information such as the “Wood Elves” mark on Tolkien's map of western Middle-earth. The lack of information about what people and creatures live where (“Here Be Elves” or “Here Be Dragons”) implies both that the variety of inhabitants found in a fantasy world should be taken as a matter of course and, simultaneously, that the world is, in fact, a terra incognita full of secrets, especially in the cases of portal–quest fantasies, in which the secondary world is explored by protagonist/s and reader together.
⁶⁸
Rather than being a paratext offering hints to the reader about what to expect once the fictional world is entered, the map in this respect is more of a doceme—a part of the world it describes—for which obvious information is not required, just as we do not often find (actual) general maps that specify “Here Be Germans” in a cursive script over Germany, or have “Here Be Reindeer” printed over northern Scandinavia.

Hill Signs

The signs for mountains offer a useful litmus test in relating the fictional map to maps of actual historical periods. Map projections deal with the transformation of the three-dimensional surface of a sphere to the two-dimensional surface of a plane, but mapmaking also requires another transformation of three-to two-dimensional surfaces. Although it is possible to imagine a world in which the surface is completely flat, most if not all settings tend to have an uneven landscape with hills and mountains as well as plains and valleys. According to geographer Norman J. W. Thrower, “[d]elineation of the continuous three-dimensional form of the land has always been one of the most challenging problems in cartography.”
⁶⁹
The sign for mountains is also among the most ubiquitous topographical elements on fantasy maps—it crops up on three quarters of the maps, which makes it as common as islands but less common than rivers, bays, and towns. (Taking the margin of error into account, it is actually not possible to say which of these five elements is the most prevalent. See
Table 2.7
.)

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 region
⁸⁶
), 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.