Tag: fantasy maps

A ‘Disgracefully Unoriginal’ Fantasy Map

Published on by Jonathan Crowe

Conservative commentator Ross Douthat has apparently written a young-adult fantasy novel, replete with the inevitable map, and Albert Burneko is here to tell us that it’s terrible. “For one thing, it is disgracefully unoriginal,” he says, pointing out all the ways it’s derivative. “Pull back and observe Douthat’s map more generally. There is no sense of place in it; its shape and features offer no suggestions about the societies they may have given rise to. There are no intriguing geographic or geological details that make you want to read on to see what goes on there. It tells no story. It is not the least bit interesting on its own. It is just a companion to a travel narrative.”

To be sure, Burneko is doing something I went into in my 2017 piece, “The Territory Is Not the Map”: he’s critiquing the fantasy geography, not the cartography. Conflating the map and the thing mapped is not new in fantasy maps. Nor, for that matter, is having a map for the sake of having a map.

Simon Ayrinhac’s Studies of Tolkien’s Maps and Geography, Plus a Middle-earth Globe

Published on by Jonathan Crowe
A globe of Tolkien’s Middle-earth.
Columbus Globes

Simon Ayrinhac is a French physicist who studies the maps and geography of Tolkien’s Middle-earth. I stumbled across his page of his talks and articles via the Tolkien Conference I posted about earlier this month. (The page also includes a couple of bibliographies that I will have to steal from in order to update my own reading list.) In French. Lots for me to go through.

Amongst Simon’s articles is one exploring how Tolkien’s Middle-earth can be displayed as a globe, occasioned by the release, by Columbus Globes, of Middle-earth globes in various sizes and levels of detail (12, 26, 30, and 40 cm, all but the smallest illuminated; €25-€399). The problem, which Simon also notices, is that the known parts of Middle-earth take up too much of the globe: it’s actually only a small part of the whole, with the rest of the world only roughly sketched out. (Also, the legendarium of Middle-earth is such that it was only round after a specific catastrophic event, and a lot of the geography did not survive it.)

Forthcoming Tolkien Conference Explores Maps and Landscapes

Published on by Jonathan Crowe

The third Tolkien Conference Switzerland, to be held in Lucerne on 13 March 2027, will have as its topic Maps and Landscapes in Tolkien’s Middle-earth.

Tolkien’s maps are never merely geographical. While they guide the traveller through the carefully drawn landscapes of Middle-earth, from mountains and forests to ancient kingdoms, they also chart moral and spiritual dimensions—from the corrupted wastes of Mordor to the timeless grace of Lothlórien. In Tolkien’s world, place is never neutral. 

In this conference, we will explore how Tolkien’s landscapes and cartographic imagination—from the vast plains of Rohan to the enclosed safety of the Shire—address deeper issues of belonging, loss and the meaning of home. How does the act of map-making reflect a longing for order, memory and possession? How should we interpret Tolkien’s geography in light of contemporary debates on ecology, mythology, and the human need to find safety in an unpredictable and perilous world?

Without reducing his world to mere allegory or escapism, the third Swiss Tolkien Conference will delve into the full imaginative depth of Tolkien’s spatial vision and examine what his Middle-earth landscapes might reveal about our own sense of belonging and the timeless question of what it means to lose it.

This conference couldn’t be more relevant to my interests, enough that I may have to work out whether I can manage to attend it myself. (One talk to be presented, Jost Schmid-Lanter’s “Fantasy Maps in the Context of Medieval and Early Modern Cartography,” even cites a couple of my articles. The other talks look just as compelling.)

Cartes imaginaires: Inventer des mondes

Published on by Jonathan Crowe

Cartes imaginaires: Inventer des mondes, an exhibition at the Bibliothèque nationale de France running from 24 March to 19 July 2026, explores maps of the imaginary, the legendary and the literary from medieval to modern times. A symposium this past April on maps and popular culture was held in conjunction with this exhibition, but I somehow missed reporting on the exhibition itself. Fortunately, Surekha Davies has attended it, and has this report: “I went around this show a couple of times with different friends. From Tolkien’s map of Middle Earth to a map of Guiana derived from Sir Walter Ralegh’s travel narrative about the region, it felt at times like the library had put this show on specially for me!”

(Though she disagrees with placing sea monsters in the same category as fantasy maps: she argues that they’re a representation of the hidden, inaccessible or strange, not the fanciful. On which she points to her 2020 essay in Aeon, which is worth reading.)

Previously: Monsters and Maps; A Paris Symposium on Maps and Popular Culture.

Now on Patreon: The Territory Is Not the Map

Published on by Jonathan Crowe

Today is The Map Room’s 23rd anniversary. As a thank-you to paid members of my Patreon, whose generous support has enabled me to remove ads from The Map Room, and as an enticement to those who might think of joining, I’m presenting the slides and text of a presentation exploring the fantasy map style and its origins I gave at Scintillation, a Montréal science-fiction convention hosted by the author Jo Walton, in October 2019.

(Yes, this is the talk I offered during last year’s pledge drive, which target we didn’t quite meet; this time I decided to simply give the slides and text, rather than record a video of me delivering it—a task that in hindsight would have been a bit too overwhelming for me.)

This talk summarizes most of my thoughts on fantasy maps up to that point. If you’re curious about this talk but are unable to join the Patreon at a paid membership level, a lot of what I had to say can be found elsewhere. See in particular several of my articles on Reactor, plus this eponymous post on The Map Room and my review of Stefan Ekman’s Here Be Dragons, all of which are free to read.

If, on the other hand, you’re sufficiently intrigued to sign up for a paid membership to have a peek, one, that’s kind of what I was hoping for, and two, I hope you like it (and The Map Room) well enough to stick around as a supporter. Now that I’ve taken down the ads, support via Patreon is frankly what keeps the lights on around here; more supporters will enable me to make some upgrades looming on the horizon while still keeping things in the black. I’m grateful to everyone who’s decided to back this little project.

(As for the talk itself, it’s something I’d rather not share with a wider audience, at least not until I’ve given it a proper rewrite—what’s good enough for a small sf convention audience isn’t necessarily good enough for public distribution—so for now it’s staying behind a paywall.)

Maps in Movies

Published on by Jonathan Crowe

John Nelson and Peter Attwood look at how maps are used in a bunch of different movies (and one TV show: Game of Thrones). They talk about using maps to indicate travel in the Indiana Jones movies (and spoofed by The Muppets), treasure maps and other maps used in the story, maps in titles, et cetera, with just the right amount of nitpicking (i.e., not too much, but not too little either).

Making Mountains on Maps

Published on by Jonathan Crowe

Mountains are almost ubiquitous in fantasy maps, and almost always drawn in profile, as a line of hill signs. In a Patreon post, mapmaker John Wyatt Greenlee (aka the Surprised Eel Historian) discusses a couple of ways to draw mountains and mountain ranges in the usual fantasy map style.

See also his post about the mountains in maps he draws for his academic clients, i.e., maps that appear in academic monographs. (“Some academics don’t want mountains. Some want icons. And some want topography. But some brave souls want full-on Tolkienesque mountain ranges.”)

More on Le Guin’s Maps

Published on by Jonathan Crowe

The exhibition of Ursula K. Le Guin’s maps at the Architectural Association Gallery in London (previously, previously) wrapped up last Saturday. The Library of America has an interview with Sarah Shin, who co-curated the exhibit and co-edited the accompanying book (which comes out in North America next month). A sample:

I’ve always loved how Le Guin describes writing as translating, asking “What is the other text, the original?” Similarly, I think that drawing maps, for Le Guin, was a way of making visible what already exists elsewhere in the source: “the deep sea where ideas swim, and one catches them.”

Thanks to Zvi for the tip.

The Word for World: The Maps of Ursula K. Le Guin ed. by So Mayer and Sarah Shin. Spiral House, 21 Oct 2025 (U.S. 10 Jan 2026), £23. Amazon (Canada, UK), Bookshop.

More on the Exhibition of Le Guin’s Maps

Published on by Jonathan Crowe

Mike Duggan takes a look at the exhibition of Ursula K. Le Guin’s maps currently running at the Architectural Association Gallery in London, which displays the maps as cyanotypes on fabric.

Book cover: The Word for World

In the gallery space, Le Guin’s maps are looked at in isolation rather than relating directly to a text. They demand a different kind of attention, for there is a different form of visual connection between a viewer and a gallery object than between a reader and a book. So the maps are taken out of their original context and placed in another. But this isn’t to say this new context is any less significant. […]

There will forever be a tension between the map exhibition and the ways that maps are encountered in books. By definition they are being “exhibited” and put at the centre. And there’s no doubt Le Guin’s maps look impressive here, masterfully hung, printed on deep blue cotton, bathed in warm lighting.

Draped thoughtfully in rows throughout the space is perhaps a nod to being immersed in the cartographic imagination of Le Guin. They are certainly a spectacle that encourages a closer look. But is that enough?

The exhibition runs through 6 December. The accompanying book is out now from Spiral House (and in the U.S. in January): Amazon (Canada, UK), Bookshop.

Previously: The Word for World: The Maps of Ursula K. Le Guin.

The Word for World: The Maps of Ursula K. Le Guin

Published on by Jonathan Crowe

The Word for World is both an upcoming exhibition and an upcoming book exploring the maps of Ursula K. Le Guin—i.e., the maps she herself made for worlds like Earthsea.

When Ursula K. Le Guin started writing a new story, she would begin by drawing a map. The Word for World presents a selection of these images by the celebrated author, many of which have never been published before, to consider how her imaginary worlds enable us to re-envision our own.

Le Guin’s maps offer journeys of consciousness beyond conventional cartography, from the Rorschach-like archipelagos of Earthsea to the talismanic maps of Always Coming Home. Rather than remaining within known terrain, they open up paradigms of knowledge, exemplified by the map’s edges and how a map is read, made and re-made, together. The Word for World brings her maps together with poems, stories, interviews, recipes and essays by contributors from a variety of perspectives to enquire into the relationship between worlds and how they are represented and imagined. 

The exhibition runs from 10 October to 6 December at the Architectural Association Gallery in London. The book comes out from Spiral House in October. Preorder: Amazon (Canada, UK), Bookshop. Thanks to Zvi for the tip.

Previously: Limited Edition Earthsea Map Print Now Available.

Fantasy Mapmaking Tools

Published on by Jonathan Crowe

I’ve been making note of procedural fantasy map generators for a while now. These are tools that generate a map of an imaginary landscape, town or dungeon, mostly (but not necessarily exclusively) for the purposes of role-playing games like Dungeons & Dragons. The latest to come to my attention is Watabou’s Procgen Arcana, a set of free-to-use map generators by Oleg Dolya.

Meanwhile, for those who draw their fantasy maps digitally, but without a procedural map generator, there has been more than one project to extract symbols and signs from real old maps for use as stamps and brushes in, say, Illustrator or Photoshop. I mentioned David Stark’s library of map elements, taken from a 17th-century map, last year. The author K. M. Alexander (previously) has put together a number of brush sets based on old maps, allowing users to “create fantasy maps that can add a touch of historical authenticity to any project.” The latest is based on an 18th-century map of Bohemia. He also has packs of compass roses, sea monsters and other cartouches, as well as typefaces. Quite a lot of stuff, actually. Free for personal and commercial use.

I have notes on an article about fantasy maps in the digital age, in which I’d discuss the development of maps from entirely hand-drawn to digital to algorithmic. I’ve been meaning to write it since before the pandemic. I wonder if it’s all out of date by now. Possibly not.

Preserving the Maps of Karen Wynn Fonstad

Published on by Jonathan Crowe

Wisconsin Public Radio takes up the story of fantasy cartographer Karen Wynn Fonstad (1945–2005), best known for her Atlas of Middle Earth and other fantasy-world atlases. “Fonstad passed away 20 years ago. Now, her husband and her son—both geographers themselves—have embarked on a new quest: to digitize her original maps and find an archive to house them.” Her son spent his spring break week getting as many of her maps as possible scanned at the Robinson Map Library, a task he described as barely scratching the surface.

This follows her belated obituary in the New York Times earlier this year (previously): she may be, finally, having a posthumous moment.

Kathleen Jennings Shows Us How She Draws a Fantasy Map

Published on by Jonathan Crowe
A series of sketches by Kathleen Jennings of what would become her map for The Wild Huntress by Emily Lloyd-Jones.
Kathleen Jennings

In addition to being an author in her own right, Kathleen Jennings is an illustrator who draws maps for other fantasy novels. For a recent work—The Wild Huntress by Emily Lloyd-Jones—she takes us behind the scenes, going step by step through the process to create the map. I always love posts like these (for previous examples, see How to Make a Fantasy Map; Mapping An Ember in the Ashes; Mapping The Drowning Eyes; Mapping the Dreamlands). I also love that she’s still working with ink on paper.

Karen Wynn Fonstad’s Belated NYT Obituary

Published on by Jonathan Crowe

Karen Wynn Fonstad, the cartographer of fantasy worlds best known for her Atlas of Middle-earth, died in March 2005 aged 59. Nearly twenty years later, she gets a comprehensive obituary in the New York Times, replete with lots of examples of her mapmaking, as part of its Overlooked series, which gives belated obituaries to “remarkable people whose deaths […] went unreported in The Times.” Paywalled; workarounds via the usual suspects.

A Library of 17th-Century Map Elements, Useful for Fantasy and Game Maps

Published on by Jonathan Crowe

David Stark extracted elements from a 1688 map of part of Germany to create a library of tree, hill and town signs that he thought entirely appropriate for use as map assets for a role-playing game. I look at them and see fantasy map design elements. In 2019 I noted the similarities between 16th-century maps and modern fantasy map design. Also, digitally created fantasy maps often feature clone-stamped hill signs; you could do worse than clone-stamp these if you were whipping a fantasy map up. At least there’s more than one kind of hill sign to clone-stamp: there are, in fact, 159 hills and 26 mountains—more than 400 tiny images in all, and it’s interesting that David has separate categories for towns and cities, and for hills and mountains. [via]