Imaginary Worlds - Fantasy Maps

Episode Date: September 22, 2016

J.R.R. Tolkien not only kicked off the modern fantasy genre, he also made maps an indispensable part of any fantasy book. Tolkien spent decades mapping out Middle-earth on graph paper -- and giving everything a name -- because he was inventing a world from scratch. Many of his maps weren't even published until after he died, but today's fantasy cartographers owe a great debt to his work. They also have a post-modern understanding that to create a believable fantasy map, they have to sow doubt in the minds of readers as to whether we should trust the mapmakers. With Isaac Stewart, Priscilla Spencer, Ethan Gilsdorf and Stefan Ekman.** This is part 2 in a 6 part series on magic and fantasy.**Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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This episode is brought to you by Secret. Secret deodorant gives you 72 hours of clinically proven odor protection free of aluminum, parabens, dyes, talc, and baking soda. It's made with pH balancing minerals and crafted with skin conditioning oils. You're listening to Imaginary Worlds, a show about how we create them and why we suspend our disbelief. I'm Eric Molenski. And this is Stefan Ekman. He's a professor at the University of Gothenburg in Sweden.

My family or part of my family come from Dresden in what was then southern East Germany. When he was a kid, he'd visit his relatives in East Germany, which sounds so strange to me. As an American growing up in the Cold War, East Germany was like a forbidden realm behind the Iron Curtain. But Stefan didn't like going there because it was boring. And then he became even more bored. I ended up in an East German hospital with appendicitis. I was 10. I did not speak German. And there was nothing for me to read, which was a major disaster. But my mother had brought along Lord of the Rings, which she'd failed to read for the umpteenth time. So that's what I read. And that's how I really got into the whole fantasy thing. And by getting into the whole fantasy thing, he doesn't mean Dungeons & Dragons, although he actually does still play.

Stefan is a scholar of J.R.R. Tolkien, and his real passion and focus are maps and fantasy worlds. When you have maps, when you read map theory, there is always this idea that you want to represent the world in one way or another. But when you draw a fantasy map or any map of an imaginary world, that process is sort of turned on its head because you could just decide that, no, I need mountains over here. And you realize that, OK, suddenly there are mountains there in the world. He says maps are to the fantasy genre what science is to science fiction.

The map is the thing that grounds you in the story and makes you believe this could be real. Tolkien wasn't the first writer to map out a fantasy world. Back in the age of exploration, or as we know it now, colonization, maps were like this newfangled technology that everyone was excited about. And you can see that in many of their early fantasy novels. If you look at something like Gulliver's Travels, which also came with maps that placed very clearly the various countries, so Lilliput and Brobling Mag and the the land of the Wynnims in relation to our world, trying to make the point that these sound fantastic, but they do exist. In fact, I think if I look at Brobdingnag, it should exist somewhere around or just north of San Francisco.

Yeah, that sounds about right. Now, Gulliver's Travels anchors the story in a recognizable Europe. The Wizard of Oz, of course, starts in Kansas. But Tolkien was creating a world from scratch. So it was really important for him to not only map out the distances that the characters would need to travel, but give everything a name. You name the world, you control it by naming it, you create it, invent it by naming it. The writer Ethan Gilsdorf says if you look at the maps in L. Frank Baum's Wizard of Oz books or Dante's Inferno, they're simple, even whimsical.

Tolkien's maps are much more serious. Tolkien really, really used these maps as a creative tool and they really weren't intended originally to be in his books. I mean, they really were just scribbles and drawings. And not only did he write maps, but he was a pretty accomplished artist. And I think as his world grew, he really felt like he needed something to keep track of it. He was so precise, he would sketch out the maps and ask his son Christopher to do the final drawings, because he was the better draftsman. You can look at some of these drafts of his maps of Middle Earth, and you realize that he's plotting them on graph paper, because he needs to know exactly how far things are

down to the day, because of the different converging plot lines of all the different characters. Stefan says that these maps also reflect the psychology of Bilbo and Frodo, the hobbits that venture out beyond the safe but kind of dull shire into the scary and exciting world of Middle Earth. The roads and the road system really jumps out. This is a map about traveling and about journeys. You have little arrows pointing off the map saying there is a world out there. And we don't even have to stick with the journey that the hobbits take. All we have to do is gaze at those maps and let our minds wander.

Normally, text tells you a story, you have a certain set of characters. With a map, you could leave the story and go outside it and explore the world. So the world wouldn't end when the story ended. It would still be there in one sense or another. it would still be there in one sense or another. But today we understand something about maps that people who collected them and made them in the past did not. When we look at those maps from the 18th or 17th century, it's obvious to us they are not pure representations of the world.

Maps carry with them the bias of the mapmaker. And that understanding has changed the way fantasy cartographers practice their craft today. How did they pull off that trick? It's just after the break. Tolkien really created a blueprint for how to approach fantasy maps. And if he has a literary air, it's probably George R.R. Martin, the author of A Song of Ice and Fire, which, of course, inspired the HBO series Game of Thrones. Martin has been accused of emulating Tolkien a little too much. They even got into a fight about it. Or at least these guys did who are playing them in the YouTube series Epic Rap Battles of History.

I got the pros of a pro. Your shit's a bar. You're a pirate. You even stole my R.O. We all know the world is full of chants and anarchy. So yes, it's true to life. We're characters that die randomly. A newsflash.

The genre's called fantasy. It's meant to be unrealistic. You may have been mad at me. Anyway, George R.R. Martin's world of Westeros does bear some resemblance to Middle Earth, but Martin never really got his into the map-making aspect. The fans of his books have actually gone way further in creating these interactive maps online that chart which families controlled which kingdoms or how the environmental landscape of Westeros has changed over thousands of years. I mean the opening credits of Game of Thrones

is a mesmerizing interlocking 3d animated map that looks like it was made out of wood and metal. looks like it was made out of wood and metal. We really are living in a golden age of fantasy maps. I did an AMA on Reddit, which is like an online Q&A, and it was for a subgroup of world builders. And I was amazed at all the maps they were creating. And someone in the group told me that if I want to connect with the master of fantasy maps today, I should talk with Isaac Stewart. In sixth grade, we read The Hobbit. Then the teacher asked us to make our own map and make our own story. And that was the coolest assignment ever. I don't remember anything else about sixth grade, but I remember making a map. But you can't draw a straight line from sixth grade Isaac reading The Hobbit to his career today. Right after high school, I went to college

thinking I was going to be a dentist. That was really my dad's dream for me. There was a dental assistant there who said, oh, you want to be a dentist, huh? And I said, well, maybe, but, you know, I was thinking about maybe going into art. And she said, oh, go into art. That's way better than this. Isaac is best known for drawing maps from the novelist Brandon Sanderson. He is the author of the Mistborn series, and he's working on a 10-part series called the Stormlight Archives. Sanderson is so prolific, he is constantly keeping Isaac on his toes.

Now, one of the things I like about Isaac's maps is that he doesn't make slight variations on land masses that we'd recognize from our world. He lets his imagination go wild in drawing islands or continents that could have been formed in really weird ways that are still totally believable. totally believable. He also has a knack for emulating old parchment, making his maps look like artifacts that someone kept folded up in a satchel when they're traveling a great distance. There's a design reason for that. Doing a map for a fantasy novelist is, I've got some limitations. It has to fit in either, you know, one or two pages on a book. I can't fill it out with hundreds and hundreds of names. You got to find this balance of the reader's going to flip here. You want them to find what they're looking for and then flip back to reading the book. I don't want my map to be a hindrance to reading the book. I became so curious about the craft of fantasy map making.

I asked if there's anyone else you'd recommend to chime in, and he said Priscilla Spencer. She does this amazing, almost Roman-esque map with little illustrations and drawings, and I think it's beautiful. Oh my God, he knows who I am! That's so cool! I am a ridiculously huge fan of his work.

Actually, Priscilla was a professional fan before she was a professional mapmaker. What that means is she was a beta for the novelist Jim Butcher. He's best known for writing the Dresden Files. And the betas are an elite group of fans that writers like Butcher can rely on while he's working on rough drafts. And the betas kept asking to see a map of his Codex Alera series. But unfortunately, he had lost his hand-drawn map in a move two years prior. And so he asked the Betas for help, like, reconstructing the map that he'd been using for the first four books and had kind of been winging for the last two. So I stepped up and volunteered.

been winging for the last two. So I stepped up and volunteered. Now Priscilla draws by hand and then plays with the maps in Photoshop. And they look like treasured artifacts from these worlds, but partially it's because she embellishes them with very specific thematic design flourishes. I feel like it's so much more fun when these maps tell you about the cultures that produce them. For the Cinder Spires series, which Copper plays, it is kind of like the lifeblood of this world. Like it has a very kind of steampunky vibe. So I wanted this map to resemble like a copper plate etching. Fantasy maps look deceptively simple because, you know, you can make up whatever you want.

But Priscilla says when people start out in this field, they often make the same rookie mistakes. The number one mistake is like making sure that there's a water source next to every city, like whether it's an ocean, whether it's a river, like some place where these people can kind of sustain themselves. You know, we just don't have a lot of examples of this in real life unless it's kind of artificially that way, like Las Vegas. You know, and still with Las Vegas, we're wondering where are they getting their water and it's causing all sorts of problems. Isaac feels that too many fantasy mapmakers aren't studying real geography. Sometimes you'll see these rivers that seem to go through mountain ranges. So just knowing which way, how rivers flow, they follow gravity.

They go from high places to low places. If you're going to do something that's out of the norm, you better have a good reason for it or a magical reason. And it's actually by making little mistakes like that. And then if you realize it, you might come up with some cool story ideas. And after studying the real world, you have to study real maps. One of the things that really bugs him is when fantasy mapmakers don't give a lot of thought to how their borders are drawn. it looks like puzzle pieces because you've got so many different factions and families and political entities that are vying for power that they'll push their borders here or there, and the borders just change and they look all squirrely. But nowadays, kind of since modern times, empires will go in and they'll conquer a place, they'll redraw these kind of artificial

borders in straight lines. Many of our conflicts today come from borders that were drawn as straight lines by colonial powers, from people who had no understanding of the religious, social, or political factions in the lands they were cutting up. Maps are time machines. We can look back in time and see how things have changed or not changed. And fantasy mapmakers can do the same thing. Like when Priscilla drew her maps for Jim Butcher's Codex Alera series, she had to depict an alien world that was colonized by a Roman legion that got lost in space-time.

The map, of course, was created by these intergalactic Romans. Jim and I talked about it early on, and we envisioned it as being like a document created for students' reference in the academy at Alera Imperia. So it put a little bit more emphasis on the cities and kind of like how they serve this like monolithic, beautiful icon of Alera Imperia, the capital. This culture is very xenophobic. It's kind of constantly at war or like cold war with the cultures that live to the west and to the east. What they thought of is just savage wolf men, these tribes people that have bonded with these animals. They have these

sort of totemic creatures that kind of bond with them and are with them for life. There are all these rumors that there's bestiality going on. And so in the map, I have this female Marat that's kind of reaching back and touching her terror bird totem in a way that I'm not saying that they're having some sort of illicit gross thing, but like if you want to infer that from the illustration, go ahead. Aside from the implied bestiality, that map actually reminded me of a map that I used to

stare at when I was in seventh grade. It was a rectangular map on the wall of my social studies class. The USA was smack dab in the middle. The Soviet empire, including East Germany, where Stefan Ekman used to go as a kid, was split in half. Each end of the Soviet Union jutted out of the right and left side of the map. Today, that sounds ridiculous, but in 1984, it felt right to me. And it's funny because today I think about like Google Maps, which to me is a beautifully designed, perfectly accurate representation of the world around me. But it is also full of biases that will be more and more obvious to future generations. The act of creating a map is an act of creation. It's an act of creativity. The great thing about fantasy maps is that they remind us that every map tells a story,

whether it means to or not. Well, that's it for this week. Thank you for listening. Special thanks to Stefan Ekman, Thank you for listening. Special thanks to Stefan Ekman, Ethan Gilsdorf, Priscilla Spencer, and Isaac Stewart, who has one last bit of advice for rookies. Everybody wants to create the next Middle Earth. Just don't get lost in there. It's called world builder's disease,

and that's something that a fantasy novelist really needs to take into account. And I feel that for many aspiring writers, that might be a freeing sort of feeling to realize that they don't have to map everything out, just the things that are going to make their novel really sing. But remember, Tolkien still drops the sickest beats. Imaginary Worlds is part of the Panoply Network. You can like the show on Facebook. I tweet at E. Malinsky. You can see images of Priscilla and Isaac's maps on my site, imaginaryworldspodcast.org.