Here Be Dragons

by Stefan Ekman

  Despite the declaration of the label, the map does not refer merely to its own present but also to its past; its tense is only overtly present. A closer investigation uncovers traces of history, explicit as well as implicit. To Padrón, the many place-names bear witness to the richness of the world’s past;128 but there is more to the map’s encoded history than names. Features are included to enable the reader to chart Bilbo’s adventures in The Hobbit; battlefields and mass graves of old can be found outside Mordor (Dagorlad and the Dead Marshes); and even the rule of, and war against, Morgoth is hinted at. (The icebay of Forochel is the result of the great cold of Morgoth, and the broken Blue Mountains and absent Beleriand are the outcome of the War of Wrath that finally defeated him.) The map’s duration thus not only includes the end of the Third Age; it is actually thick enough to go back to the First Age and the battle with Morgoth. This temporal thickness is not immediately apparent to a reader who comes to the map for the first time, but if the map is used as a reference tool during the reading, the encoded history becomes apparent. The land is one that has evolved over the ages, and this evolution is clearly present in the map. Although the story has been a guiding principle for the cartographer, the history of Middle-earth has been just as important. Indeed, the meeting of historical and linguistic setting with story that characterizes the novel is evident already from the general map.

  The significance of story as well as history is noticeable from spatial positions. The area where explicit historical features are densest is also where we find the beginning of the story. Unlike the Shire map, where the beginning is located near the center of the map, the story begins near the top left corner of the general map. In Western society, top left is a privileged position: it is where we start our reading on a page, and the Fellowship travels across the map rather the way our gaze scans a newspaper (or web) page, more or less diagonally from top left to bottom right. The landscape, and the characters’ journey through it, seems to be set out to make reading the map and finding the characters’ route as easy as possible, emphasizing once more how the story is a guiding principle of the map.

  A guiding principle it is, but not an unbreakable law: the location where the story ends is unclear. Certainly, Sam’s final return home and announcement that he is back is the obvious ending of the book, in terms of being the last few words of the final chapter; but there are other ways of considering where the story ends. There are at least three main contenders for what constitutes the end of The Lord of the Rings, each bringing a particular aspect of the story to a close.129 The diagonal journey across the map ends with the disposal of the Ring in Orodruin, a moment that marks the end of the hobbits’ quest and the victory over Sauron’s evil. Spatially, this ending marks the farthest point away from the Shire on the general map, in the same way as the dead and deadly land of Mordor is the total opposite of the fertile and pleasant Shire. The subsequent defeat of Saruman marks another conclusion, with the defeat of an evil that is less cosmic and more human in scale. This ending, as well as Sam’s return home in the book’s final lines, is set in the Shire. The journey has taken the protagonists full circle; the hero has returned, having traveled, as in The Hobbit, there and back again.130 A third possible ending is the departure of Frodo, Gandalf, and the elves from the Grey Havens, an event that symbolizes the departure of magic from the world, not just the defeat of evil. This ending points to the west, off the map and into the unknown. Each ending thus relates differently to the map and the journey that trails across it, allowing the story as a whole to have a threefold ending of arrival, return, and departure into the unknown.

  The Shire and the Grey Havens are located at, or very close to, the place where the story begins. The more far-reaching consequences of the story resolution—the disappearance of magic and the arrival of the Age of Men—are worldwide and have no specific location, but they are alluded to at the center of the map, another privileged position. There, the forests of Fangorn and Lothlórien are found next to each other. These forests offer a much subtler connection to the depths of Middle-earth’s history than the verbal signs that refer to Arnor’s location of old,131 but whereas the lost realm of Arnor is restored through the destruction of the Ring and the return of the king, the ancient forest realms come to an end. The end of the Third Age is the end of magic in Middle-earth, and the world changes. The juxtaposition of Lothlórien and Fangorn thus foreshadows Treebeard’s meeting with Galadriel and Celeborn near the end of The Return of the King. “[T]he world is changing,” the old ent says to the elven rulers, “I feel it in the water, I feel it in the earth, and I smell it in the air” (RK, VI, vi, 959). The change he feels is the price for defeating Sauron. “Much fantasy does not have what we could call a ‘happy ending,’” Attebery observes in Strategies of Fantasy. “Indeed, the fantasist often seems to start with the idea of such a resolution and then to qualify it, finding every hidden cost in the victory.”132 Middle-earth is losing its magic: that is what Treebeard feels, and it is on that loss, on the doom of elves and ents and all things magical, that the map is centered. The “End of the Third Age” proclaimed by the map label is, in fact, the end of magic in Middle-earth.133

  The middle of the map presents what is at stake, but the periphery warns about the enemy. Ranged around the northern, eastern, and southern borders of the map are names that signal the threats to the people of the West. The Witch-king of Angmar returns as leader of the Ringwraiths, and the peoples of Rhûn, Khand, and Harad—the Southrons and Easterlings—ally themselves to Sauron. Being marginalized also means being primitive. The Forodwaith, or Northmen, became Gondor’s allies but were still considered “lesser Men” (lesser, that is, than the Númenorean descendants in Gondor and Arnor), along with the Southrons and Easterlings. The privileged direction in Middle-earth is west: western Middle-earth is superior to other parts; the humans from Númenor (an island once situated in the sea to the west of Middle-earth) are superior to other humans; and to the west of Númenor is the Blessed Realm, where the semidivine Valar reside. Regardless of whether the periphery is teeming with the enemy or offers the only way to sail to an Elysium off the map, it is the unknown margin outside the relevant middle, beyond the reach of the story.

  Much of the relevant middle is conspicuously empty, however. While it is littered with names, there are only a few iconic map elements indicating terrain or buildings, roads or rivers. On the Shire map, the blank spaces correspond to a norm that does not need to be mapped. Here, the white emptiness, portrayed on the map by name only, is not a stand-in for fields too obvious to map, nor is it treeless, flat heaths, or desert, tundra, grassy plains, or any other one type of terrain. It is not even simply “wilderness.” On the general map, the fields of the Shire are just as blank as the desolate Brown Lands; the grasslands of Rohan are empty white, as is the broken wasteland of the Plateau of Gorgoroth. White is not the unknown or unmapped, nor is it a specific type of landscape: it is landscape that it is irrelevant to map. The only relevant features of this unmapped whiteness are the numerous names by which its areas are known. All those names—in English as well as Elvish, and providing translations between the two—communicate the importance of language in itself. The map shows us a world defined by names and created by language, thus confirming that Middle-earth is a creation centered on language rather than nature—on the creation of new language and the translations involved in understanding it. Given Tolkien’s love of languages and philology, it comes as no surprise that one of the principal messages delivered by the map of the western part of Middle-earth is how his fictional world is ultimately a linguistic creation.

  • • •

  At least since the 1970s, critics have observed the importance of maps to the fantasy genre, although no comprehensive studies have been published before now. Obviously, no study, quantitative or qualitative, can be all-encompassing, and my own contributions to the investigation of fantasy maps in this chapter should be seen as the first tentative mapping of an alien coun
try, not as the definitive exploration of all its blank spaces. As in many studies, time and money came to be unwanted constraints. Maps proved to be more uncommon in the genre as a whole than I originally thought (occurring in at most two fifths of the books rather than in at least half, which a cursory pilot study had led me to believe would be the figure). Their scarcity in the book sample thus led to a smaller map sample that, in turn, resulted in large margins of error. To be certain that the largest margin of error could be at least halved, however, the book sample would need to be considerably larger, requiring almost 360 maps. The advantage of such a large map sample would, of course, be the appearance of more rare features (for instance, oriented any way other than northward; showing a subway system; or portraying modern cities of the primary world); even if a certain phenomenon did not appear in my sample, it might still be found on as many as one fantasy map in twenty-five. (With 360 maps, something not found in the sample would be rare enough only to appear on one map in every hundred in the fantasy-map population.)

  My survey made plain that the vast majority of maps mapped settings in secondary worlds. A valid question that remains for a future study would thus be to what extent high-fantasy novels come with maps. Such a study would tell us the proportions of maps in high to low fantasy, but it would require either the books in the sampling frame or (probably more feasibly) those in the sample to be separated into high-and low-fantasy works (something for which there was no time in this survey). Future studies may also want to include more children’s and young adult fiction in the sampling frame. My own sampling frame is biased away from fiction for young readers because such fiction was separated from fantasy fiction in the database I used, with the result that the survey largely concerned fantasy for adult readers. Whether there are any major differences between maps in fantasy for adults and in fantasy for children and young adults remains to be investigated, for instance by using another sampling frame.

  Certain typical features of fantasy maps were indicated by the survey, features we can expect to find in at least half of all fantasy maps. In brief, a typical fantasy map portrays a secondary world, a compass rose or similar device showing its orientation with north at the top. It is not set in any given hemisphere (not necessarily in a spherical world at all), although there are reasons to believe that clues in the text would indicate north as the direction of colder climates. Apart from topographical map elements such as rivers, bays, islands, and mountains, such a map would also contain towns and other artificial constructions. The hill signs used are typically pre-Enlightenment (either profile or oblique).

  Even this brief list reveals the mixture of modern and historical map features. Like much high fantasy, the secondary-world maps follow a pseudomedieval aesthetic according to which dashes of pre-Enlightenment mapping conventions are rather routinely added to a mostly modern creation. Whether this is because of careless research, genre conformity, lack of imagination, or a desire to give the reader the easiest possible access to the map and the world it portrays is hard to say. If the map is meant as an aid for reading (and writing) the story, as a paratext on the threshold between the actual world and the unknown geography of the secondary world, maybe the map should simply challenge the reader’s map conventions as little as possible.

  Whatever the reason, a mixture of cartographic conventions from various time periods is found in the reading of the two maps from The Lord of the Rings as well. The readings also demonstrate that paying close attention to fantasy maps, as maps, can reveal information about the maps beyond the elements that were used in their construction. To find that center and periphery are set up against each other on both maps is hardly surprising; to set the familiar in focus, in the center of the map, is a traditional mapmaking strategy. But whereas the Shire map privileges the familiar over the unknown and communicates as its dominant message the control of the land (and the landscape) and the safety this brings, the map of western Middle-earth defines the world it portrays by naming it. The importance of the world’s language and history is as central to this map’s message as is geography, and both maps contain a link between geography and story. Where the Shire map communicates control and safety, however, the map of western Middle-earth communicates a tension between cultural control and wilderness.

  Apart from what the readings of the Tolkien maps tell us about The Lord of the Rings, they demonstrate how much any fantasy map can say about the work it belongs to. Each map, it is clear, relates in one way or another to the text. To ignore what the map communicates and only analyze the text means omitting a significant part of the work. Furthermore, as two maps from the same book, portraying parts of the same world, display such significant differences in the messages they communicate, it seems obvious that not only one map but all maps present in a book should be considered. Although the great majority of all fantasy novels that come with maps only include one map, a not insignificant number include two, and at least some come equipped with three or more. Each of these maps is a doceme that adds something to the document as a whole, and each map is a paratext that offers a particular threshold across which the text can be entered.

  Whether the map is alone or one of several, typical or idiosyncratic, referring to a fictive map or situated firmly outside the diegesis, we should not dismiss it lightly. Instead, critics as well as readers should let the map do what is—ultimately—its job: to lead us into the fantastic world of the story.

  3 : Borders and Boundaries

  Just like the actual world, all reasonably complex secondary worlds are divided into areas of various kinds. Divisions may be geographical or administrative in nature, with areas demarcated by, for instance, rivers, mountain ranges, beaches, hedges, ditches, dykes, or simply lines on a map. Crossing from one area into another may be fraught with peril, unexciting, or barely if at all noticeable.

  In fantasy settings, whether primary or secondary worlds, other kinds of divisions and types of areas occur as well. Two areas, while side by side geographically, can have quite different rules for how—for instance—time, space, and causality work. A day in one place might be a year on the other side of the wall. In the middle of snowcapped mountains, there might be a valley of eternal summer. The magic power to change one’s environment inside the forest might simply be superstitious nonsense outside. This chapter is devoted to an investigation of how demarcations between such dissimilar areas—domains—are constructed, how they reflect the domains on either side, and what their relevance is to the worlds where they occur.

  In The Encyclopedia of Fantasy, the editors settle for threshold as the preferred term for the various dividing lines of fantasy landscapes and stories. The critic behind the “Threshold” article, John Clute, distinguishes between “physical” and “metaphorical” thresholds. The former type of threshold, the type relevant in this context, marks a “gradient between two places or states of being.”1 Although it would be possible to split hairs and wonder if a threshold is not, in fact, a line rather than a gradient, and to observe that in many cases, including the examples that follow, places and states of being are conflated, Clute’s is a succinct and to-the-point definition. Clute proceeds to list four functions of the physical thresholds. First, they “normally form the spines of borderlands, demarcating regions which borderlands join together.” A borderland, he notes elsewhere, serves as a “marker, resting place or toll-gate between two differing kinds of reality.”2 Presumably, Clute’s “normally” is not intended to imply that this is the most common function of a physical threshold in fantasy (I would find that hard to agree with) but that borderlands generally (“normally”) have a physical threshold as a defining feature around which they are situated. The function would thus be dual, both separating and joining two regions of different realities.

  The second function of the physical threshold is to “announce the presence, or intrusion, of a crosshatch,” that is, a place where “two or more worlds may simultaneously inhabit the same territory.”3 This function
is clearly connected to the first (thresholds as spines of borderlands), in that borderlands often provide a strip-like crosshatch region.4 Third, physical thresholds “constitute the perimeter of polders.” And finally, “for those of peculiar talents, they may comprise a map of the land.”5 Land in this context is taken to mean “a secondary-world venue whose nature and fate are central to the plot: a land is not a protagonist, but has an analogous role.”6 If the third function is the most clear-cut, the fourth is the most puzzling; neither Roz Kaveney’s cross-referenced entry on “Maps” nor David Langford’s on “Talents” offers much in the way of enlightenment.7

  The term threshold is undeniably versatile when taken as described in the Encyclopedia. As a word, however, threshold implies not only a dividing line but also the intended crossing of such a line. The Oxford English Dictionary gives the figurative meaning of threshold as “the line which one crosses in entering,”8 and Clute’s remark that a threshold “may not even be meant to be liminal, or passable”9 only serves to broaden an already broad blanket term. For all the usefulness of threshold as a term, the geographical focus of this discussion requires it to be complemented by two more specific terms: border and boundary. A border corresponds to the first two functions of the physical threshold. It is a line (or gradient) that separates two places or areas, and it differs from a boundary in that the latter implies a perimeter or circumference. In other words, you can be on either side of a border, but inside or outside a boundary. A polder, for example, is surrounded by its boundary, while two adjacent domains are separated by a border. It should be noted that neither word implies any intended crossing, and thus cannot be fully subsumed under threshold.