Here Be Dragons (44 page)

45
. A contributing explanation to the unexpected rarity of maps is the popularity of “paranormal romance,” which I had underestimated. When the sampling frame was being set up, such works were classified as fantasy. (For more on this, see
appendix A
.) This hybrid genre is placed halfway between dark fantasy and romance by Mendlesohn and James, featuring romantic involvement between humans and fantasy creatures. They also note how it developed into its own publishing category during the 2000s; see Farah Mendlesohn and Edward James,
A Short History of Fantasy
(London: Middlesex University Press, 2009), 198, 254. For a more thorough discussion on paranormal romance, see also Lee Tobin-McClain, “Paranormal Romance: Secrets of the Female Fantastic,”
Journal of the Fantastic in the Arts
11, no. 2 (2001). While in many respects (predominantly low) fantasy, paranormal romance does not borrow fantasy's predilection for maps, thus biasing the sample toward fewer maps. Removing the thirteen books that, after the study was completed, were found to have been reclassified as “romances” has only a marginal effect, however. The sample would contain 36 percent books with maps, corresponding to between 29 and 43 percent of all fantasy books.

46
. Not only are the maps of Robert E. Howard's
Conan the Warrior
(1967; orig. short stories publ. 1935–36);
Conan the Swordsman
(1978), by L. Sprague De Camp, Lin Carter, and Björn Nyberg; and
Conan of Venarium
(2003), by Harry Turtledove,
drawn in three distinct styles, they contain different amounts of information. In addition, the pictorial elements of the two most recent maps (a galley on the
Swordsman
map and sea dragon on the
Venarium
map) bring different associations to the fictional world portrayed.

47
. For instance, in his review of Steph Swainston's
The Year of Our War
(2004), Clute refers to “the absence of any maps, in a fantasy novel with lots of names and campaigns and dynastic shifts from one armed house to another” as a “dislocation effect”; see John Clute,
Canary Fever: Reviews
(Harold Wood, UK: Beccon Publications, 2009), 108.

48
. Tolkien,
The Hobbit
, 1. For an interesting commentary on the
Hobbit
maps, see Tam, “Here Be Cartographers.”

49
. P. D. A. Harvey,
Medieval Maps
(London: The British Library, 1991), 19.

50
. Based on diagrams in David Woodward, “Medieval
Mappaemundi
,”
The History of Cartography
, eds. J. B. Harley and David Woodward, vol. 1 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987), 298. The same conclusion is drawn by Asa Simon Mittman,
Maps and Monsters in Medieval England
(New York: Routledge, 2006), 28. Of Raisz's fifteen examples of medieval charts from Europe and the Arab world, eight had east at the top, four north, and three south; see Erwin Raisz, “Timecharts of Historical Cartography,”
Imago Mundi
2 (1937): 11.

51
. Ann Swinfen,
In Defence of Fantasy: A Study of the Genre in English and American Literature since 1945
(London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1984), 77.

52
. John Noble Wilford,
The Mapmakers
(New York: Vintage Books, 1982), 10.

53
. Norman J. W. Thrower,
Maps & Civilization: Cartography in Culture and Society
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996), 42. Of course, once the world was accepted to be spherical, the ocean—while surrounding the landmasses—ceased to be a border between known and unknown space. Still, the tradition of drawing the known world within an edge of ocean seemed to persist. According to J. Lennart Berggren and Alexander Jones, Ptolemy's map was uncommon in that most of its edges consist of land; see J. Lennart Berggren et al.,
Ptolemy's Geography: An Annotated Translation of the Theoretical Chapters
(Ptolemy's text orig. second century A.D.; Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2000), 22.

54
. John Clute, “Water Margins,” in
The Encyclopedia of Fantasy
, 997.

55
. Ibid.

56
. See Terry Brooks,
Magic Kingdom for Sale/Sold!
(1986; London: Futura, 1987), 93.

57
. The map in Gardner's book clearly derives from the map published in Baum's
Tik-Tok of Oz
(1914), but with the cardinal points facing the traditional way (west to the left and east to the right) and with considerably more detail. A box on the map in Gardner acknowledges the debt to the original map. For a brief but illuminating discussion of the Oz maps, see Michael O'Neal Riley,
Oz and Beyond: The Fantasy World of L. Frank Baum
(Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1997), 186–89.

58
. Terry Pratchett,
The Colour of Magic
(Reading, UK: Corgi, 1985), 11n.

59
. I am grateful to Kim Selling, who first brought to my attention the scarcity of southern-hemisphere settings in fantasy.

60
. See, for instance, Wood,
Power
, and Black,
Maps and Politics
.

61
. In the actual world, the projection used is called Lambert Azimuthal Equal-Area Projection according to Kirkpatrick, who adds that projection details were included on all the maps in the book but that the publisher removed them (Russell Kirkpatrick, email message to author, April 10, 2009).

62
. Arthur Robinson et al.,
Elements of Cartography
, 5th ed. (New York: John Wiley, 1984), 159; quoted in Wood,
Power
, 97.

63
. Wood,
Power
, 101.

64
. I use
topography
in a broader sense, to include terrain, vegetation, and hydrographical features.

65
. Jones,
Tough Guide
, [x–xi].

66
. Ibid., [xi].

67
. See ibid., [xi].

68
. See Mendlesohn,
Rhetorics
, 1.

69
. Thrower,
Maps & Civilization
, 113. Wood cites Thrower and several other scholars on the subject, claiming that despite the “glib assurance” in most of their statements, little is known of the history of mapmaking (Wood,
Power
, 145).

70
. The bird's-eye view gives the impression of seeing at an angle to the horizon—Lynam suggests about 70 degrees—as opposed to a view straight ahead (e.g., a profile view), where the impression is of levelness with the horizon, or a plan view (e.g., contours, street plan, hachures), where the observer looks straight down from above. See Edward Lynam,
The Mapmaker's Art: Essays on the History of Maps
(London: Batchworth Press, 1953), 55.

71
. Lynam,
Mapmaker's Art
, 39. According to Lynam, map engraving began in Italy around 1474, and “by 1590 the draughtsmen of manuscript maps were imitating [the line engravers'] style, symbols, script and decoration in every detail.”

72
. Ibid., 38 (referring to a 1335 map); Harvey,
Medieval Maps
, 23, ill. 16 (describing the seventh century Isidore world map). Another typical example is the Cotton world map (see Harvey,
Medieval Maps
, 26).

73
. A feature on which, according to Lynam, “all representation of relief right down to 1850 has been founded” (Lynam,
Mapmaker's Art
, 38).

74
. Ibid., 41.

75
. Ibid.

76
. Thrower,
Maps & Civilization
, 113.

77
. Ibid., 101, 104–5, 114, 134; Wood,
Power
, 153–54, and Wilford,
Mapmakers
, 127.

78
. Eduard Imhof,
Cartographic Relief Presentation
(1965; Redlands: ESRI, 2007), 13. Imhof finds an isolated case of shaded relief in a 1667 map by Hans Conrad Gyger but notes that the map was kept as a military secret and had no effect on contemporary mapmaking (7).

79
. See Wood,
Power
, 98–99.

80
. Wood,
Power
, ch. 6, esp. 155–78. In a similar vein, Steve Lundin suggests that pre-Enlightenment hill signs are easier to draw and thus more prevalent (comment at the Thirty-first International Conference on the Fantastic in the Arts, 2010).

81
. Kim Selling, “‘Fantastic Neomedievalism': The Image of the Middle Ages in Popular Fantasy,”
Flashes of the Fantastic: Selected Essays from the War of the Worlds
Centennial, Nineteenth International Conference on the Fantastic in the Arts
, ed. David Ketterer (Westport, CT: Praeger, 2004), 212.

82
. Selling, “‘Fantastic Neomedievalism',” 211; she cites Umberto Eco,
Faith in Fakes
(London: Secker & Warburg, 1986), 63.

83
. Zahorski and Boyer, “Secondary Worlds,” 61; Eco,
Faith
, 62.

84
. Attebery,
Strategies of Fantasy
, 132.

85
. Legends are not much older than thematic maps (Wood,
Power
, 79), which have been around since the late seventeenth century (Wilford,
Mapmakers
, 313). Map projections are often associated with Mercator (sixteenth century) even though Ptolemy (second century), possibly building on earlier sources, had already worked with projections; see O. A. W. Dilke, “The Culmination of Greek Cartography in Ptolemy,”
The History of Cartography
, eds. J. B. Harley and David Woodward, vol. 1 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987), 179.

86
. See Berggren et al.,
Ptolemy's Geography
, 58.

87
. Joseph Conrad,
Heart of Darkness
(1902; London: Penguin, 2000), 21–22.

88
. Mendlesohn,
Rhetorics
, 4.

89
. J. R. R. Tolkien,
The Lord of the Rings
(1954–55; Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2004).

90
. For further information about the various map editions, see the “Note on the Maps” in Tolkien,
The Lord of the Rings
(before the maps at the back of each volume) and the chapter on the maps in Wayne G. Hammond and Christina Scull,
The Lord of the Rings: A Reader's Companion
(London: HarperCollins, 2005), esp. lv–lvi, lxvii.

91
. Wood,
Power
, 22 ff. In a later chapter (ch. 5), Wood develops his analysis.

92
. References to
The Lord of the Rings
are given parenthetically in the text. The following abbreviations are used: FR—
The Fellowship of the Ring
, TT—
The Two Towers
, RK—
The Return of the King
, Appx—appendices to
The Lord of the Rings
. Book and chapter are given in Roman numerals before the page reference. See Tolkien,
Lord of the Rings
(1993).

93
. In many editions misspelled with an “a” instead of an “o”: “Bindb
a
le Wood”; see Hammond and Scull,
Reader's Companion
, lvii.

94
. Tolkien to H. Cotton Minchin (draft), April 1956, 247.

95
. Private correspondence quoted in Hammond and Scull,
Reader's Companion
, lvi.

96
. Wayne C. Booth,
The Rhetoric of Fiction
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1983), 71 ff.; Seymour Chatman,
Story and Discourse: Narrative Structure in Fiction and Film
(1978; Ithaca, NY: Cornell Paperbacks, 1980), 147 ff.; and Shlomith Rimmon-Kenan,
Narrative Fiction: Contemporary Poetics
(1983; London: Routledge, 2002), 87 ff.

97
. Wood,
Power
, 24.

98
. About general reference map themes and map discourse, see Wood,
Power
, 113.

99
. Mendlesohn,
Rhetorics
, 2.

100
. Tom Shippey,
The Road to Middle-earth: How J. R. R. Tolkien Created a New Mythology
(Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2003), 101.

101
. Shippey,
Road
, 103, and Hammond and Scull,
Reader's Companion
, lvi–lxi. (The names may seem exotic to non-English readers, of course.)

102
. See, e.g., J. B. Harley,
The New Nature of Maps: Essays in the History of Cartography
(Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2001), 59, and Black,
Maps and Politics
, 136–38.

103
. See Alan M. MacEachren,
How Maps Work: Representation, Visualization, and Design
(New York: Guilford Press, 1995), 315–17, and Wood,
Power
, 112, 125–30.

104
. Wood,
Power
, 112, 126.

105
. Ibid., 112, 127; see generally 125–30.

106
. All maps have historical perspectives, see Wood,
Power
, 113; his analysis is broadened in MacEachren,
How Maps Work
, 312–17.

107
. See Lynam,
Mapmaker's Art
, 39.

108
. Harvey,
Medieval Maps
, 82, ill. 64.

109
. David Turnbull and Helen Watson,
Maps Are Territories: Science Is an Atlas: A Portfolio of Exhibits
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993), 3, 5, and Black,
Maps and Politics
, 11. For a more comprehensive discussion, see Wood,
Power
, ch. 5.

110
. Tolkien to Allen & Unwin, October 9, 1953, 171.

111
. See, for instance, Harley's discussion on the centering of world maps (
New Nature
, 66) and Black's account of map Eurocentrism (
Maps and Politics
, 37–39).

112
. Knowing the
origin
of the names, one finds them less belittling (see Shippey,
Road
, 103, and Hammond and Scull,
Reader's Companion
, lvii–lviii), but the impression remains.

113
. Harley,
New Nature
, 67. See also ch. 3 of the same book: “Silences and Secrecy: The Hidden Agenda of Cartography in Early Modern Europe.”