
Wizards, Moomins and pirates: the magic and mystery of literary maps - antigizmo
https://www.theguardian.com/books/2018/sep/22/wizards-moomins-and-gold-the-magic-and-mysteries-of-maps
======
Circumnavigate
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
Yeah, there's something about a map for a kid. I remember carefully studying
the ones in J.R.R. Tolkien's books.

~~~
Ntrails
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.

------
nevster
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?!

------
KineticLensman
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.

~~~
nevster
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](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Journeys_of_Frodo)
\- highly recommended if you like this sort of thing!

------
yvdriess
Imaginary worlds podcast did an excellent episode on the subject:

[https://www.imaginaryworldspodcast.org/fantasy-
maps.html](https://www.imaginaryworldspodcast.org/fantasy-maps.html)

------
BerislavLopac
There's the Cartographers' Guild for lovers of such maps:
[https://www.cartographersguild.com](https://www.cartographersguild.com)

