Wizards, Moomins and pirates: the magic and mystery of literary maps

https://www.theguardian.com/books/2018/sep/22/wizards-moomins-and-gold-the-magic-and-mysteries-of-maps

by antigizmo • 8 years ago

45 9 8 years ago

I was obsessed with these kinds of maps when I was a kid. Sometimes 90's computer games would include intricate ones, I remember Ultima IX Ascension came with a quality cloth map I spent hours memorizing.

ValleyOfTheMtns• 8 years ago

Yeah, there's something about a map for a kid. I remember carefully studying the ones in J.R.R. Tolkien's books.

Ntrails• 8 years ago

I always breezed past them, acknowledging that they were interesting in abstract but I wouldn't retain enough for it to actually colour the story. Mostly the story conveys the things I care about (terrain/distance/etc) and knowing that cities c and f were actually quite close together wasn't important.

aplc0r• 8 years ago

Same here. I would like to see a version of the LOTR/Hobbit that has a "minimap" somewhere in the margins when locations are mentioned.

nevster2• 8 years ago

I love maps in books. What's particularly disappointing is when editions are published without maps. For example quite a few of the editions of more recent Terry Brooks Shannara series don't have maps. What the?!

yvdriess• 8 years ago

Imaginary worlds podcast did an excellent episode on the subject:

https://www.imaginaryworldspodcast.org/fantasy-maps.html

BerislavLopac• 8 years ago

There's the Cartographers' Guild for lovers of such maps: https://www.cartographersguild.com

KineticLensman• 8 years ago

The article itself doesn’t mention my favourite literary maps – those in The Lord of The Rings (although I suspect the book the article is advertising probably does).

Others (sample size currently = 2) here have said either that they studied them carefully or felt that the text itself conveyed the important information. I'm in the first camp. The maps gave a stronger sense of the world in which the story was set; the geographical counterpart to the historic and linguistic context presented in the appendices.

For me, like many other aspects of TLoTR, what is also interesting is how the maps grew along with the story itself. For Tolkien, the maps were an important part of the story’s development, for example allowing a sanity check on the distances travelled by the characters, or the direction in which the Moon might rise. Tolkien himself had a large heavily annotated working map (which still exists and is on display in the ongoing Tolkien exhibition) which was redrawn by his son to create a print-ready copy for publication.

nevster2• 8 years ago

I'm currently re-reading LOTR and I'm reading it in conjunction with Journeys of Frodo - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Journeys_of_Frodo - highly recommended if you like this sort of thing!

Wizards, Moomins and pirates: the magic and mystery of literary maps

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