Here Be Blank Spaces: Vaguely Medieval Fantasy Maps
Generally speaking, the maps that accompany secondary-world fantasy novels are anachronistic. They bear little resemblance to the real maps produced during the period that high fantasy tends to emulate: that is to say, medieval and early modern Western Europe. Stefan Ekman, in his new study of the role of place in fantasy literature, Here Be Dragons: Exploring Fantasy Maps and Settings (Wesleyan University Press, 2013), argues that secondary-world fantasy maps “follow a pseudomedieval aesthetic according to which dashes of pre-Enlightenment mapping conventions are rather routinely added to a mostly modern creation” (66).
There are clear differences between fantasy maps and real-world maps: no modern fantasy novel, as far as I’m aware, has a map that resembles the Hereford Mappa Mundi or the Fra Mauro map. But cataloguing why they’re different is a bit more of a challenge — like trying to explain, briefly, why a tapestry is not a comic book. Several new books, including Ekman’s, have helped me understand some of those differences more clearly. Apart from matters of style, content, projection, or scale, one main difference between fantasy maps and real-world maps is information density. Fantasy maps are, for the most part, empty; real-world maps were not.