About a million years ago, when the internet was still pretty new, I published an ezine about fantasy literature, mostly aimed at writers. As a young person with opinions, I felt obliged to include an editorial letter with each quarterly issue in which I shared my thoughts about “critical” issues in the genre. The one I remember the most was about whether or not fantasy novels needed to have maps in them.
The internet was a much softer place back then!
The funny thing is that I came down hard on the side of “maps are extraneous” of the debate (there was no debate). My main argument was that if you need a map to understand the story, then the author hasn’t done their job, and while I still think that’s true, the op-ed was certainly an aberration in my life-long love affair with maps.
I remember the excitement I felt as a child unfolding the maps from inside a new issue National Geographic, pouring over place names and landscapes. The more unfamiliar they were the more I liked them. Even better were the atlas of imaginary places I borrowed from the library and my well-thumbed copy of Karen Wynn Fonstand’s very detailed Atlas of Pern. I recently added The Writer’s Map: An Atlas of Imaginary Lands to my bookshelf, and to this day, I remember with envy the full-color map of Narnia decoupaged to a slab of wood that I spied in the office of an auto shop I visited with a parent when I was in middle school.
Like the Tunumiit maps below, a map in a novel isn’t about showing you how to get some place — you’re going to get to the end of the story whether you look at a map or not. A map is an illustration that adds depth and context to the words on the page, highlighting details that aren’t absolutely necessary for understanding the story, but bring pleasure just from knowing them. Looking back, I can only speculate what caused my brief dis-infatuation with fantasy maps — I’m just glad it didn’t last!
Of course, the best maps tell a whole story all by themselves, and that’s where we’ll start today, with the Saint-Bélec slab and a tiny kingdom that would be lost to time if it weren’t for a broken map.
The Broken Kingdom
“It’s about 4,000 years ago, and you are the ruler of a prosperous little Bronze Age kingdom at the end of the world. To celebrate your success, you commission a map of your bountiful domain: a stone slab 2.2 by 1.53 meters (6.5 by 5 feet), representing an area of 30 by 21 kilometers (19 by 13 miles). But all good things come to an end. You, or one of your successors, is buried with the slab—broken to indicate the overthrow of your dynasty.
“You have the last laugh, though. Your name and that of your little empire have been forgotten, but that slab is now recognized as Europe’s oldest map that can be matched to a territory—even if it took the supposedly clever scientists of the distant future more than a century to figure that out.”
Read more: Europe’s Oldest Map Shows Tiny Bronze Age Kingdom
Like a Map in the Front of the Book
“A century later, the carvings have proven to be remarkable time capsules that capture the perception of the land and sea—alive and with depth—through the eyes of an East Greenlander at the moment of first contact with the Western world. The maps show how the Tunumiit cognitively organized their world, and have captured the imaginations of map enthusiasts around the world for over half a century. But as time passes the maps have acquired a new mythology that doesn’t quite suit them. Anecdotal descriptions of the maps online today compare them to some sort of archaic, ruggedized handheld GPS device: waterproof, small enough to fit inside a mitten, and naturally buoyant. It’s easy to picture a lonely seal hunter in his kayak using the map to navigate through an archipelago by the light of the moon. But this is how we use modern maps, as roadside companions, and suggesting that the Tunumiit used them the same way is nearly as Eurocentric as Hansen-Blangsted’s dismissal. There is, in fact, no ethnographic or historical evidence that carved wooden maps were ever used by any Inuit peoples for navigation in open water, and there are no other similar wooden maps like these found in any collection of Inuit material anywhere else in the world.
“But woodcarving was a common activity among the Tunumiit and Holm mentions that carving maps was not out of the ordinary. The Inuit people have used carvings in a certain way—to accompany stories and illustrate important information about people, places, and things. A wooden relief map, would have functioned as a storytelling device, like a drawing in the sand or snow, that could be discarded after the story was told. As geographer Robert Rundstum has noted, in Inuit tradition, the act of making a map was frequently much more important than the finished map itself. The real map always exists in one’s head. Though the maps themselves are unique, the sentiments and view of the world they represent were universal to the culture that made them.”
Read more: Greenland’s Hand-Sized Wooden Maps Were Used for Storytelling, Not Navigation
At the Edge of Regret
“This sense of world-historic regret, of turns not taken, lurks just at the edge of these maps. They are fantastical not just in that someone imagined them: even the most unlovely and inhospitable world represents a wish fulfillment. In fantasy settings cultures interact in ways that resemble cultural exchange before Europe began colonizing the globe — Marco Polo rather than Hernando Cortez. There’s war and conquest, often lots of it, but to be a traveller in a fantasy world is itself rarely a form of colonialism. While fantasy settings often mix in some (heavily exoticized) Arab cultures, or bring in East Asian elements, notably few of them include pre-Columbian civilizations (one exception is Aliette de Bodard’s recent novels). When AD&D attempted a pre-Columbian setting, the author suggested it answered ‘(fantastically of course) what might have happened if the native cultures had not been so totally conquered and overwhelmed by the invaders.’ Many fantasy continents are environmentally devastated, but the forces responsible are divine, cosmic, and frequently the bad guys. To travel in such a world is not to travel through a topography of your own fault.
“Traditional fantasy continents let their readers have their cake and eat it too: all the derring-do of exploration, war, and expansion, but none of the guilt. They’re encounters with ‘exotic’ culture that don’t have to take power imbalance into account. No wonder that many of today’s most interesting fantasy writers design their worlds against these conventions. At the same time, it’s worth taking seriously a part of the wish that stands behind the archetypal fantasy map and behind its enduring popularity. There’s nothing wrong with wanting to fantasize a world that may have suffered conquest and war crime, but that has a geography beyond past horrors. There’s nothing wrong with imagining a world in which crossing a border makes a real difference — makes you a different you.”